Month: January 2008

More Blog Power

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From the London Telegraph a few days ago:

Peter Hain has made history: his is the first British ministerial scalp to have been claimed by a blogger. Kudos, as the Americans say, to Guido Fawkes [a blogger], who first sighted his tomahawk at the Hain campaign 12 months ago when he posted Hain’s campaign strategy.

Hain’s crime was failure to declare campaign donations. A downfall timeline. “Guido sees himself as a journalist, a campaigning journalist who publishes via a blog. He campaigns against political sleaze and hypocrisy,” says Guido. His comparison of food allowances.

Academic Horror Story (UC Berkeley)

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Two years ago, a University of California Berkeley undergraduate was a subject in an MRI experiment at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center on the UC Berkeley campus. She did it for the money: It paid $200 for two two-hour sessions, during which you lie motionless inside a large loud machine. During the first session, the persons monitoring the experiment could see that something was seriously wrong: The subject had a large mass in her brain. Clearly her life was at risk. But they didn’t tell her immediately what they had seen. (Later they claimed they “couldn’t” have told her, for legal reasons. A friend of hers who was present at the experiment was threatened with serious legal action if he told her.) Instead, they sought outside opinion about what the mass was and what to do about it. A few weeks later, they told her about it. “Sometimes unusual things show up on these scans” she was told. This was incorrect: Nothing like this had happened before at UC Berkeley.

In a way, the story has a happy ending. The large mass turned out to be benign (but at the time of the experiment they had no way of knowing that). It was removed. A year and a half after the operation, there are no signs of reoccurrence.

The experimenters not only (a) withheld what might have been life-saving information, (b) they persisted in this behavior after having time to think about it; and (c) they threatened someone who wanted to do the right thing. This is no momentary lapse in judgment. The experimenters — including the professor in charge and who knows what other powerful people at UC Berkeley — actively did the wrong thing. They carefully decided not to tell her info that might have saved her life.

More. After I wrote this post, I learned that the person in charge of the Wheeler Brain Imaging Center at the time was Professor Mark D’Esposito. By email I asked him if he disputed any of the facts in this post and if the Center had done anything to keep such a thing from happening again. He didn’t reply.

The Mystery of Bibloquet (continued)

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Bibloquet appears impossibly difficult, I posted recently. Yet people become very good at it, no doubt through huge amounts of practice. Why?

Now and then I hear about somebody getting very good at a physical skill: A basketball player is very good at free-throw shooting, for example. No doubt the reason is lots of practice. I’m not surprised because explanation is easy: He played a lot of basketball (social, fun to move around), he wanted to be a pro (aspiration). Professional musicians have practiced a lot — sure, music sounds good, it’s their job. Most cases of extreme practice that I know of have plausible common-sense explanations.

Bibloquet skill does not. It leads nowhere, is completely useless (I suspect), isn’t social, and isn’t promoted by the environment (there are no bilboquet rooms, for example). Some people spend a huge amount of time playing video games (also useless, etc.), but video games are complicated. Bibloquet is simple. You can see this in the price. A video game might cost $40, not counting the price of the computer it runs on. My bibloquet probably cost about $1. No computer needed. For that $1 I am going to get a huge amount of enjoyment. Hard to think of something else for $1 that would provide so much pleasure.

As Michel Cabanac has argued many times, our brains use pleasure to guide our actions: What we should do is more pleasant than what we shouldn’t do. Sometimes this system misfires because something man-made resembles what we should be seeking. If your iron level is very low you may suffer from pagophagia — too much ice chewing. Ice chewing brings persons with pagophagia great pleasure. I’m sure that the evolutionary reason is that ice chewing is producing the same sensations as bone crunching. Bone crunching would be a good source of iron because bone marrow is iron-rich. The mechanism that causes pagophagia evolved because it promoted bone crunching. Chewing ice resembles bone crunching. What biologically-useful activity does playing bibloquet resemble?

My guess is that bilboquet is addictive because:

1. Success is sharply defined. You catch the ball (success) or not (failure). Other addictive games have this feature. Tetris: you fit the falling shape into the pile at the bottom. Sudoku: You fill in all the squares correctly.

2. Success is not easy. We like a challenge. Most video games, such as Tetris, get harder and harder.

3. Hand-eye coordination is involved.

At the core of human evolution is occupational specialization and diversification. It started with hobbies. To get diversity of hobbies you need diversity of reward; a wide range of skilled activities must be rewarding. Rather than evolve a separate mechanism for each hobby, this was accomplished with a mechanism that is quite flexible and can operate with lots of different activities. Thus the reward system can be transferred to something completely useless, such as bibloquet. The not-too-easy feature caused hobbyists to become more and more skilled because only by continually challenging themselves could they keep enjoying it. Hand-eye coordination was required because the goal was to get people to make things. Why success had to be sharply defined I’m not so sure. (In art, a similar human activity, success is not sharply defined.) Maybe it serves to focus effort.

The lesson for me is that if I want to produce a task that will measure how well my brain is working and be so much fun it’s addictive, it should involve hand-eye coordination. (It will be easier to make the many measurements my omega-3 research requires if I have such a task.) This is consistent with what I’ve observed so far: None of the tasks I’ve used have been addictively fun. The balance task had a fairly sharp and difficult measure of success (staying balanced for more than a few seconds) and was physical but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. The digit-span task had a sharp measure of success (perfect recall) and could be made more and more difficult but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. Three other tasks I’ve used had less sharply-defined success and didn’t involve hand-eye coordination.

Addendum. A Japanese website. In Japan bilboquet is kendama. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

Interview with Susan Allport

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Susan Allport is the author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them, which for me was the best source of introductory information on the subject. Chapter 1 is here. A video.

What have been the main reactions to your book?

The best reaction has been from scientists and the American Oil Chemists Society (AOCS), whose members were happy to have the history of this important research laid out for the public and for themselves. The book hasn’t yet caught on with general readers — in part because the material is somewhat difficult and in part because most people think that the problems with fats are with trans fats or saturated fats or cholesterol: three long detours on the road to dietary understanding, in my opinion.

Learned anything since you wrote it that you would include in a revised/expanded edition?

I would certainly include a key piece of evidence that has been available for some time but not brought to light. It has to do with the argument that we don’t elongate and desaturate the parent essential fatty acids very well (the omega-3 fat: alpha linolenic acid and omega-6 fat: linoleic acid). Therefore, the argument goes, it doesn’t matter about the quantities of these parent fats in the diet. What matters is the amount of long chain fats (in fish, etc.)

But here’s the rub and the lie to this argument.

According to the Nationwide Food Consumption Survey and other data, Americans consume more long chain omega-3 fatty acids than they do long chain omega-6 fatty acids (See “Polyunsaturated fatty acids in the food chain in the US”, Am J Clin Nutr 2000;71 S 179s-88s.) Yet their tissues are full of these highly inflammatory omega-6 fats.

How did this happen? There is only one way. The large amount of linoleic acid in the diet (about 7% of energy) overwhelms and outcompetes the much smaller amount of alpha linolenic acid (about .7% of energy). So it does matter how much linoleic acid we consume. Linoleic acid is the elephant in the living room and the reason we are experiencing the many chronic illnesses that are associated with an insufficiency of omega-3s.

I like to think that anyone who has read my flaxseed oil results (flaxseed is high in alpha linolenic acid, the short-chain omega-3 fat) would agree. Next question: My impression is that the optimal amount of omega-3 is highly unclear. Do you agree?

The optimal amount of omega-3s in one’s tissues does seem to vary, somewhat, according to where one lives. In the cold Artic, humans benefited from a very high proportion of omega-3s in their tissues, and there they weren’t penalized for having a lower proportion of omega-6s b/c there are few infectious microorganisms in the Artic. (Omega-6s, remember, are important in mounting a good immune response.) In more temperate and tropical regions, we need a more balanced amount of 3s and 6s in our tissues. We’ll be learning a lot more about these optimal amounts in the future.

What’s most critical to understand, though, is that omega-3s and omega-6s compete for enzymes and for positions in our cell membranes. So the amount of omega-3s you need to eat in order to achieve a given (optimal) amount in your tissues depends entirely on the amount of omega-6s you’re eating. If you’re eating small amounts of omega-6s, you need to eat only small amounts of fish and greens. If you’re eating, as most Americans are, large amount of omega-6s, you’ll need to eat large amounts of fish and greens — more fish than there are in the ocean!

Which widely-listened-to nutrition expert or group of experts has best appreciated the importance of omega-3s? Which has worst appreciated them?

I’ve had very good conversations with Dr. Mehmet Oz, and I know that Andrew Weil has a very good understanding of the issues. Epidemiologists seem to have the least appreciation because they have little knowledge and appreciation of biochemistry, in general.

In that last question I was thinking of Walter Willett, whose book Eat Drink and Be Healthy fails to clearly distinguish omega-3 and omega-6 fats. Since he’s an epidemiologist, that agrees with what you say. Can you say more about the reaction of epidemiologists?

For Willett to observe the difference between the two families of fats in his type of research, he would need subjects with very different proportions of these fats in their tissues. He doesn’t have that since all of his subjects eat a similar American diet. He also doesn’t see it because he doesn’t control for the two families and their competitive interactions. What we need to do to achieve a good understanding of the role of the two families of essential fats in health and disease is to take experimental work (which clearly shows important differences b/n the two families) and use it to frame our prospective studies. (And because of the competitive interactions, we can’t use fish intake as an indication of omega-3 status; we must use tissue levels of the two families!)

Blog Power

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Philip Weiss:

It’s not just that the Times is spot-on about Giuliani’s character. It’s great to see a big newspaper take the gloves off and really let someone have it and not worry about sinking the guy’s campaign. The editorial wasn’t fair or balanced, but it for-damn-sure knew what it was talking about. I feel that the Times was influenced by the blogosphere in those rhetorical liberties, and I hope the trend continues. Can you imagine someone saying what they really think about the Israel lobby on the Op-Ed page, instead of saying what they’re supposed to be saying? Now that would be progress.


New Yorker abstract:

On September 8th, two million people in two hundred and twenty cities across Italy celebrated V-Day, an unofficial new national holiday, the “V” signifying victory, vendetta, and, especially, “Vaffanculo” (“Fuck off”). The event had been organized by Beppe Grillo, Italy’s most popular comedian, to protest endemic corruption in the national government. . . . Grillo has galvanized Italians by talking about corruption with irreverence and humor”indeed, by talking about it at all. The country’s mainstream press is controlled, or owned outright, by political parties and corporations. Since 2005, Grillo has addressed the public primarily through his blog. . . .V-Day grew out of Clean Parliament, which Grillo launched in 2005, when he posted on his blog the names of the convicted criminals serving in parliament.

Does Mercury Cause Autism?

Seth Roberts17 Comments

A 2003 paper in the International Journal of Toxicology suggests the answer is yes. A Baton Rouge doctor named Amy Holmes, who herself had an autistic child, wondered if mercury was involved. She tested the hair of a series of autistic children from her practice and found, to her surprise, that they had less mercury in their hair than other children. Then she and two other scientists did a well-controlled comparison of normal and autistic children that confirmed her original observation. These are the data in the 2003 paper. Here is its abstract:

Reported rates of autism have increased sharply in the United States and the United Kingdom. One possible factor underlying these increases is increased exposure to mercury through thimerosal-containing vaccines, but vaccine exposures need to be evaluated in the context of cumulative exposures during gestation and early infancy. Differential rates of postnatal mercury elimination may explain why similar gestational and infant exposures produce variable neurological effects. First baby haircut samples were obtained from 94 children diagnosed with autism using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition (DSM IV) criteria and 45 age- and gender-matched controls. Information on diet, dental amalgam fillings, vaccine history, Rho D immunoglobulin administration, and autism symptom severity was collected through a maternal survey questionnaire and clinical observation. Hair mercury levels in the autistic group were 0.47 ppm versus 3.63 ppm in controls, a significant difference. The mothers in the autistic group had significantly higher levels of mercury exposure through Rho D immunoglobulin injections and amalgam fillings than control mothers. Within the autistic group, hair mercury levels varied significantly across mildly, moderately, and severely autistic children, with mean group levels of 0.79, 0.46, and 0.21 ppm, respectively. Hair mercury levels among controls were significantly correlated with the number of the mothers’ amalgam fillings and their fish consumption as well as exposure to mercury through childhood vaccines, correlations that were absent in the autistic group. Hair excretion patterns among autistic infants were significantly reduced relative to control. These data cast doubt on the efficacy of traditional hair analysis as a measure of total mercury exposure in a subset of the population. In light of the biological plausibility of mercury’s role in neurodevelopmental disorders, the present study provides further insight into one possible mechanism by which early mercury exposures could increase the risk of autism.

The abstract omits the most important piece of information: There was little or no overlap between the hair mercury of the control and autistic groups. (It is hard to tell exactly, the data are badly plotted.) Given the size of the two groups, this is highly persuasive. The abstract also omits the basic conclusion: In autistic children, a mechanism that gets rid of mercury is broken. As a result, they get poisoned by levels of environmental mercury that would otherwise be safe.

Holmes started treating autistic children by (a) giving them a compound that tends to bind to mercury and form a compound that is excreted and (b) reducing their mercury exposure. The results of this treatment have been very impressive. As children get older, it becomes less effective. Here are details:

We currently have over 500 autistic patients under treatment with DMSA ranging in age from 1 to 24 years old. In general, we do not expect to see any behavioral, language, or social improvements until at least some of the CNS mercury has been removed. As of 1/15/01, we had 85 patients who had finished DMSA alone and had completed at least 4 months of DMSA + lipoic acid. The results of treatment in these patients are presented below:

n = 85 Improvement (%)
Age Number Marked Moderate Slight None
1-5 40 35 39 15 11
6-12 25 4 28 52 16
13-17 16 0 6 68 26
18+ 4 0 0 25 75

Once lipoic acid is added, we usually track mercury excretion via tests of fecal mercury. We have noticed a large dependence of excretion on age of patient with the younger patients excreting much more mercury than the older patients. We think this difference in rapidity of excretion may explain the differences in response between the various age groups.

We have 6 patients, all 1 to 2 years of age who are finished with treatment by measurements of urinary and fecal mercury excretion. These 6 patients are “normal” by parent reports and repeat psychological testing. We have no children over the age of 2 who are finished with treatment. The rapidity of excretion seems to decrease markedly with each additional year of age. There are several children, mostly in the younger age groups, who have made remarkable progress to the point of being able to be mainstreamed in school, but who are still have some “oddities” of behavior — none of these children have completed treatment yet.

Unfortunately I cannot find later results. An undated announcement says “due to health reasons, Dr. Amy Holmes is no longer able to continue in her practice.” Miscellaneous comments by Holmes. SafeMinds, a Cambridge, MA nonprofit devoted to this issue.

Addendum. A new TV series (Eli Stone, rated B+ by Entertainment Weekly) will consider this issue. According to the NY Times TV reporter, “Reams of scientific studies by the leading American health authorities have failed to establish a causal link between the [mercury-containing] preservative and autism.”

Clavell’s Law

Seth Roberts3 Comments

Andrew Clavell writes a blog called Financial Crookery. A recent post about bonuses included this:

Due to the apparent ease of this management game [“managing upward” = convincing your superiors you are doing a good job without actually doing so] compared to the grisly business of finding actual customers and making them want to do profitable business with you, it is no wonder foot soldiers vie to join management ranks.

What is the scientific equivalent, I wonder?

The Mystery of Bilboquet

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A bilboquet is a toy: a ball and stick. The ball has a hole and is attached by a cord to the stick. You toss the ball and impale it with the stick. A friend gave me a Japanese version:

bilboquet

It seemed impossible to reliably catch the ball on the stick but here is someone who can do it:

Even better:

How do people get so good at this? I have part of the answer: it is a lot of fun to practice. I have been tracking my progress and I have to restrain myself from doing it more often. Why is it so much fun to practice?

To be continued.

Jane Jacobs and the Drug Industry

Seth Roberts14 Comments

At the Freakonomics blog there is a fascinating “quorum” (four people answer the same question) about the drug industry. “What can you tell us — good or bad — that we don’t know about drug companies?” was the question. Three of the answers were bad things, one was a good thing — pretty predictable given who was asked. What interested me was how bad were the bad things (very bad) and how good was the good thing (barely good). The answers make the drug industry look very bad, in other words.

You are reading this because of my fear and dislike of pharmaceutical drugs. Long ago, I had trouble sleeping through the night. If I went to a doctor, I knew I would be given a prescription for a drug that would be ineffective (long-term) and dangerous (due to biases in the way drugs are tested). So I struck out on my own and via self-experimentation eventually found several solutions that did not involve drugs. (The first was to stop eating breakfast.) This is how I realized the power of self-experimentation to find unusual solutions to everyday problems.

Why does an industry entrusted with something so precious — our health — come across so badly? In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs pointed out two moral “syndromes” (sets of values): the commercial syndrome and the guardian syndrome. The commercial syndrome (e.g., be honest) was appropriate for businesses; the guardian syndrome (e.g., be loyal) was appropriate for governments. Why just two? Because there were two fundamental ways of making a living, Jacobs said: trading (business) or taking (government). She pointed out the trouble that arises when governments act like businesses or businesses act like governments. It is bad news, for example, when policemen are given ticket quotas. Quotas are a business tool.

I recently experienced the problem Jacobs pointed out when my scooter was towed by Avenue Tow Service (Berkeley, CA) — using power given them by the city government. They broke the windshield. No surprise they lied about it. Why should they bother telling the truth? Unlimited power is a government tool.

The drug industry is a much larger example of the same thing. What is trading? You trade voluntarily. The two parties are roughly equal in strength. What is taking? The powerful take from the weak. Although drug companies are businesses, they deal with people who are weak (sick) and have no other choice. So in essence, they take rather than trade. One of the Freakonomics examples of bad behavior was price gouging.

The federal government has given drug companies this power, just as the Berkeley city government gave Avenue Tow Service the power to tow my scooter. The federal government has done so because it has failed to effectively support research into non-drug solutions. (Norman Temple and I wrote about how almost all research money goes in the wrong direction.) This leaves the drug industry, like the company that towed my scooter, with a monopoly. Unlike a conventional monopoly (a single company) it is industry-wide. But the effects are the same — a business starts to take rather than trade. And they do things that, when exposed, make them look very bad.