Month: November 2007

Self-Experimentation in Medical Discovery

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An editorial by William Bains, a biotechnologist and entrepreneur, questions the usual drug development process:

Translational Medicine [about going from research to practice] conferences are full of discussions of PET fMRI, gene arrays and proteomics, far beyond the means of the GPs that see 95% of patients, and divorced from the simple clinical observations that resulted in the discovery of drugs as diverse as aspirin and viagra.

Because this is the way that biomedical research (especially drug research) is done, it is assumed that the features of this process are features that have to be part of the biomedical research process. These include:

(i) that only professionals operating in established organizations can have the knowledge to identify new areas of medicines research;

(ii) that biomedical research can only be done using cutting edge technology, which is enormously expensive;

(iii) that only tests on huge numbers of people can validate a new approach.

None of these is true.

There is precedent for other ways of doing things:

The majority of clinical advances in the last 20 years of dermatology have been made by individuals working outside the mainstream of academic research, but possessing a keen observational eye, strong, skeptical analytical skills and constant contact with patients

Curiously Small World

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1. I meet one of Leonard Syme’s students at a party.

2. I learn about Syme’s unusual teaching methods (and later interview him about them).

3. One of Syme’s students, Michael Marmot, writes a book called The Status Syndrome (2004).

4. Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, writes an excellent review of The Status Syndrome:

You are a hot shot in a company, though not the boss. You are paid extremely well, but, again you have plenty of bosses above you (say the partners of an investment firm). Is it better than deriving a modest income being your own boss? The counterintuitive answer is NO. You will live longer in the second situation, even controlling for diet, lifestyle, and genetic predispositions.

5. I quote Taleb’s research ideas approvingly.

My Theory of Human Evolution (intricate art edition)

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Kris Kuksi is an artist who graduated in 2002 from Fort Hays (Kansas) State University. Here is an example of his work:

Very intricate. What the world calls good art is almost always intricate. Artists, driven by their own preferences and the preferences of customers, move in that direction. Intricacy is technically difficult. The desire for intricacy causes technological innovation.

More intricate art, with great soundtrack.

Jane Jacobs Roundup

Seth Roberts2 Comments

1. About her work, on YouTube (3 minutes).

2. Podcast of her first Massey lecture, about Quebec separatism (34 minutes).

3. To the extent I could figure out her intellectual likes and dislikes, I always agreed, with one glaring exception: She liked Stephen Jay Gould’s work, whereas I thought it was awful. This informative post reminded me of this disagreement; I learned that people in Gould’s field (evolutionary biology) agree with me. One reason I didn’t like Gould’s work was his dismissal of evolutionary explanations as “ just-so stories“.

Jobbook Diary

Seth Roberts4 Comments

I asked my mom, a retired librarian, if she could find some good librarian blogs to add to jobbook.org. She found four, but she wanted me to add them to the home page. She didn’t know how to edit wikis and she didn’t want to learn.

If you have trouble, I said, something is wrong. (My mom is more computer-literate than I am. She was using email before 99.9% of the rest of us — before me, for example. Her mom told her in the 1950s that computers were going to be a big thing.)

She reluctantly agreed to try. She clicked on edit on the home page, which brought up an edit box. To add her line, she erased everything in the box. You don’t want to do that, I said. Hit the delete key, I said. To demonstrate — this was over the phone — I hit the delete key on my screen. Oops, the whole page was gone!

I couldn’t figure out how to restore it. Which shows how much I know about wikis. I emailed Aaron and he fixed it. You restore a page, it turns out, by going to the history page, clicking the edit link for the version you want, and Save-ing it.

Page restored, my mom tried again. She successfully added a line for librarian with a blog link. However, she had found four blogs she liked, so it seemed like a good idea to add more links, if only to make the point that there could be more than one link per line. Since there were no pre-existing examples of multiple links per line, it wasn’t obvious how to do this. I think you do it like this, I said:

librarian: [blog] (address) [blog] (address)

Correct, it turned out. Now the issue is how to separate links. They now appear on the page separated by one space, which isn’t enough, my mom thinks. I don’t know how to increase the spacing but maybe Aaron does.

Women’s Health Initiative

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Here’s a nice essay about the Women’s Health Initiative, a nine-year mega-million-dollar experiment to measure the effect of “healthy eating” especially a low-fat diet.

48,835 postmenopausal women . . . were randomly assigned . . . to either their regular unrestricted diet or to a “healthy” diet that was low-fat (20% fat) and high fiber, with at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables, and 6 servings of grains a day. The “healthy” eaters endured an “intense behavioral modification program by specially trained and certified professionals” to keep them on their diets. While they backslide a little, they did surprisingly well in sticking to the diet — as good as dietary prescripts will ever get and money can buy — at a cost of $8,498 spent per person!

Oops, no effect. “The results of this huge study, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money spent on it, were quietly buried.”

I conclude two things: 1. People in charge of spending vast sums on nutrition research don’t know very much about what constitutes a healthy diet. 2. The same people know very little about how to do experiments. The most basic lesson is to do the smallest experiment possible.

Sandy Szwarc, the author of this essay, concludes:

When we enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups — as most everyone naturally does when they’re not trying to control their eating — and trust our bodies, we’ll get the nutrients we need to prevent deficiencies. And that is the only thing that nutritional science can credibly support.

There is some truth to this, both (a) we instinctively eat to avoid certain deficiencies and (b) nutrition science has found conclusive evidence that we need certain chemicals. But she is quite wrong in the sense that most Americans appear to suffer from huge omega-3 deficiencies (my posts about this). Many of them, probably most of them “enjoy a variety of foods from all of the food groups.”

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Google vs Yahoo: Scientific Implications

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Google vs Yahoo over several years. A fable for scientists. Yahoo is worth countless billions of dollars less than Google, in spite of a big head start. The moral: methodological complications, always seen as “improvements”, have a price. The benefit of a more complex experiment is easy to see, while the increase in cost (difficulty) usually goes unremarked.

My usual comment on proposed research is that an easier experiment — often smaller, often less “well-controlled” — would be better. I seem to be the only person who says this, yet I say it all the time.

Omega-3 and Sports Injuries

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A reader who wishes to be anonymous wrote:

I compete in MMA (mixed martial arts/ultimate fighting)–amateur of course, but I train with professionals. As you can imagine, full contact fighting leads to all kinds of sprains, strains, dislocations, etc. Ever since I started taking flaxseed oil–in caplet form, equivalent of 2 tablespoons a day–I have noticed a serious reduction in the number of small, inflammation-type injuries, and a reduction in recovery time for those injuries.

I asked what he meant by “inflammation-type injuries”.

That would be any injury where inflammation is the key component of the damage, for example:

-sprain
-strain
-bruise

This is opposed to injuries where the key component of damage is
something more significant, for example:

-break
-dislocation
-tear

Another way to put it would be that I don’t seem to get as many small injuries, and when I get them, they seem to heal quicker. I used to have to take like four Advil every day before I went to class, simply because I was so sore from the things we had done the previous days . Now, I don’t take any–and I haven’t changed anything else other than the flaxseed caplets.

Tissue inflammation is a huge part of most sports injuries. You ever watch Sportscenter, and see the post game interviews in the locker rooms? Notice how the athletes–especially pitchers–always have ice wrapped on their arms or knees or whatever? That is to reduce the tissue inflammation that occurs with high stress use. The general acronym for treating a minor sports injury is RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation). Each of those are primarily designed to reduce tissue inflammation in the damaged areas, because once that is reduced, the body can heal itself much faster (I am simplifying this, but you get the point).

If high levels of omega-3’s really do reduce this sort of sports injury inflammation, it would be a HUGE discovery in sports medicine.

It makes sense. Injuries heal faster when the body’s “natural response” is reduced? Apparently the “natural response” is excessive.

New Evidence for the Aquatic Ape Theory

Seth Roberts3 Comments

When I watched Planet Earth, I was impressed that the most successful aquatic animals were mammals (whales and dolphins). Fish had had a huge head start. Mammals such as whales and dolphins had moved back into the water after long evolution on land. Something promoted by terrestrial evolution allowed them to dominate their new world. That “something” is probably learning ability, although research on whale learning has yet to be done.

This is one reason the aquatic ape theory of human evolution makes sense. Judging from whales and dolphins, a little brain power can go a long way. Early humans had not only brains but hands. The combination made sea creatures extremely vulnerable. The threat was so flexible and different than previous threats they couldn’t tweak a few genes and escape. To take advantage of this new food source, humans had to wade into the water — the presumed initial reason (by those who believe in the aquatic ape theory) for bipedality.

Anthropologists at Arizona State recently reported evidence that early humans did indeed live on coastlines, with ready access to fish and shellfish. Other researchers had found evidence of this as early as 120,000 years ago; the new evidence pushes the date of earliest coastline habitation even earlier, to about 160,000 years ago.

“We also found what archaeologists call bladelets – little blades less than 10 millimeters in width, about the size of your little finger,” [one of the anthropologists] says. “These could be attached to the end of a stick to form a point for a spear, or lined up like barbs on a dart – which shows they were already using complex compound tools.”

If you have watched Survivor, you will remember tools much like that being used to catch fish.

Thanks to Michael Vassar.