Life's Pleasures Quote by Serge Lang

The line has the dry, slightly incriminating calm of a lab notebook that accidentally admits panic. Lang’s “Originally, in the early eighties” pins the moment: the first wave of AIDS-era uncertainty, when medicine faced a fast-moving crisis with limited tools and enormous public pressure. By calling it “the drug hypothesis,” he’s gesturing at a then-popular explanatory shortcut: that the syndrome was primarily caused by recreational drug use (often aimed at gay men), not an infectious agent. The phrasing matters. “Among the first” sounds modest, even reasonable, yet it quietly reveals how quickly scientists reached for a theory that harmonized with existing moral narratives.

Lang’s intent, consistent with his broader public interventions, is to flag a pattern in scientific culture: hypotheses don’t emerge in a vacuum; they emerge inside a social atmosphere with its own incentives and prejudices. The subtext is an indictment of how “first thoughts” can become sticky, defended not because they’re strongest but because they’re convenient. “Occurred to scientists” is almost passive voice as critique. It makes discovery seem like happenstance, as if ideas drift in on the air, when the real story is selection: which ideas feel plausible to a community at a given time.

Coming from a mathematician, the sentence also carries an outsider’s impatience with undisciplined inference. It’s not anti-science so much as anti-complacency: a reminder that early hypotheses, especially in emergencies, can double as cultural alibis.