Month: September 2009

More Schoolgirl Science

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Two New Zealand teenagers humbled GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s biggest food companies:

Their school science experiment found that [GlaxoSmithKline’s] ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.

Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.

Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more. . . .

GSK said the girls had tested the wrong product, and it was concentrated syrup which had four times the vitamin C of oranges. But when the commerce commission investigated, it found that although blackcurrants have more vitamin C than oranges, the same was not true of Ribena. It also said ready-to-drink Ribena contained no detectable level of vitamin C.

The students used iodine titration to determine Vitamin C levels. Why had the students managed to see something important that the food giant overlooked? My guess is that an unusual processing step (e.g., high storage temperature) destroyed the Vitamin C and those who knew about the anomaly didn’t want to consider the possibility that it had done damage. The possibility that someone outside the company might notice didn’t occur to them. Just as those who mislabel fish in New York restaurants and markets never realized that two students could uncover their deception. I found that the omega-3 in a Chinese brand of flaxseed oil was probably destroyed before it got to me.

Does H. Pylori Cause Stomach Ulcers?

Seth Roberts17 Comments

In a previous post I said that the Nobel Prize to Barry Marshall and Robin Warren — for supposedly showing that H. pylori causes stomach ulcers — was a mistake. Because half the world has the bug in their stomach, and only a tiny fraction of them get ulcers, the true cause of those ulcers lies elsewhere, probably with an impaired immune system. Marshall famously drank a flask full of H. pylori and didn’t get an ulcer, yet took this to support his theory. A classic example of self-deception.

Recently Lam Shiu-kum, a former dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, was convicted of a giant fraud. He siphoning millions of dollars of medical fees into his own pocket:

Dr Lam, 66, brought a 39 year association with the university, his alma mater, to an abrupt end in March 2007 when the investigation into billing irregularities began. He is a distinguished gastroenterologist who conducted pioneering research into chemoprevention of stomach cancer through the eradication of Helicobacter pylori. His team also conducted the first double blind, controlled study into curing peptic ulcers by H pylori eradication.

I suppose this supports my case. As far as I know, almost all doctors and med school professors believe H. pylori causes stomach ulcers; I have never heard dissent about this.

More. What goes unsaid, and maybe unnoticed, in the debate about health care, is that it is hard to have decent health care (that is, decent health) when those in charge don’t know what they’re doing. The stomach-ulcer-etiology problem is a small example of a big thing. In case I’m not being blunt enough, let me be even more blunt: This example illustrates that the average doctor, the average med school professor, and at least two Nobel-Prize-winning med school professors (not to mention those who award Nobel Prizes) have a lot of room for improvement in their interpretation of simple facts. My previous example of the infectious-disease expert (a med school professor) who overlooked the immune system is another example of vast room for improvement. It’s hard to get good health care from people whose understanding of health is terribly incomplete yet don’t realize this.

Med School Profs As Drug Company Lackeys

Seth Roberts2 Comments

What a cesspool. I mean the dirty work medical school professors do for drug companies. The profs make the drugs appear better than they are. Let me count the ways:

1. I blogged earlier about Duke professor Charles “Disgraced” Nemeroff taking huge amounts of money — which he then failed to disclose — to encourage doctors to give dangerous poorly-tested drugs to children. Nemeroff is (or at least was) considered a top psychiatry professor!

2. When the practice of drug companies ghostwriting articles for professors was revealed, New York University professor of obstetrics and gynecology Lila Nachtigall, the nominal author of a ghostwritten article, told a reporter (contrary to evidence supplied by Wyeth) that she had written all of her 1000 articles and 3 books. And she said this:

If they [Wyeth] came up with the idea or gave me an outline or something, I don’t remember that at all. It kind of makes me laugh that with what goes on in the Senate, the senator’s worried that something’s ghostwritten. I mean, give me a break.

It made her laugh. Yes, why should anyone care about the dishonesty of med school professors? What cave has Nachtigall been living in?

3. About half of published clinical trials were not properly registered, a new study showed (abstract here). A large fraction of these studies were drug-company-funded, I’m sure. (More than half were “industry” funded.) And the authors were often med school professors. Failure to register your study means you can distort the results to make them closer to the outcome you prefer by changing the “endpoint” (the dimension you use to measure whether the drug worked). Even among the registered studies, one-third used a different endpoint than the registration said. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that a lot of misleading results — making drugs look better than they really are — are being published. The level of cheating appears to be incredibly high — perhaps more than half of published papers.

New Yorker Slackers

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I once read a Briefly Noted review in The New Yorker that revealed that the reviewer had only read a quarter of the book. A friend told me that reviewers got about $100 for those reviews so there was a certain inevitability to this deception. This abstract, of Calvin Trillin’s best-ever article, about an American student who goes to China, blossoms, gets sick, and dies, is another example of the same thing. The abstracter clearly didn’t read the article — but you should.

What One American Thinks of Beijing

Seth Roberts6 Comments

She loves it:

1. The vibe. It reminds her of New York and London.

2. The range of Chinese food. You get food from all over China here. (At all price points, I might add.)

3. The atmosphere. The air isn’t so bad. She spent two years in another Chinese city, never saw a sunrise.

4. The bike lanes. You can walk comfortably. In the Chinese city where she lived before there were no bike lanes and no bikes. Everyone had a motor scooter, which you were constantly dodging. (The bike lanes also make it easy to bike, I might add.)

5. The balance between international and Chinese. Shanghai is basically all international, you can get around without a word of Chinese. Poorer cities are all Chinese. Beijing isn’t the only city with a balance, it’s just done especially well here.

6. The people. Strangers are friendly, if you ask for directions, they’ll make sure you get there.

7. The vast amount of culture. The 798 art district, for example.

She doesn’t like the weather; it gets really cold in the winter and the air is very dry (bad for your skin).

Art Imitating Life (Jane Jacobs Edition)

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In Episode 4 of the first season of Leverage, a priest is brutally attacked on his way to a city council meeting where he was going to beg to save his church from a developer. His attackers, it turns out, were hired by the developer: “Get rid of the activist priest.”

Pure fiction, right? That sort of thing doesn’t actually happen . . . or does it? From Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint (pp. 157-8):

One evening [Father Gerhard] La Mountain informed Jacobs that he would not be able to come a critical Board of Estimate hearing on the [Lower Manhattan Expressway] project, saying he had to visit a sick friend in Massachusetts. But in fact he had been summoned to a meeting at an archdiocese office behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral in midtown, where a church administrator informed La Mountain that he should lower his profile in the fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway. He was ordered not to breathe a word of this instruction. No one could ever prove how the silencing of the unruly priest came about, but Moses did have close ties with the archbishop of the diocese, Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman.

The Dimensionality of Tsinghua Students

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Tsinghua students vary a lot, said my friend, who has been a Tsinghua student for five years. How so? I asked. She explained:

Dimension 1. Some students spend most of their time studying, others spend most of their time on activities. It’s best to have a balance, she said.

Dimension 2. Some students are rich, some poor. Rich students have better cell phones than poor students. As freshmen, they are much more familiar with computers. (My friend, whose family is poor, hadn’t used a computer before college.) In the campus store, rich students will buy items that cost 15 or 20 yuan ($2 to $3). Rich students will sometimes eat off-campus. There are a lot of rich students at Tsinghua. Do they get in the usual way? I asked. (Doing extremely well on a national test.) Maybe not all of them, my friend said, but if they get in other ways it’s a secret. (Unlike the University of Illinois.)

Dimension 3. Students vary in how much they cultivate their own interests. Some do, some don’t. Students with wide interests are the happiest, my friend said. They are less controlled by how well they do academically. This was a mistake she had made: paying too little attention to her own interests.

How Things Begin: The Fleming Fund

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Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, the saying goes. What if there are no candles?

Ken Rousseau, a software manager in Silicon Valley, went to Caltech in the late 70s. He didn’t have a good time. He was a physics major He took a required course on electricity and magnetism where the average score on the final was 15 out of 100. As he took it, he thought, I guess I can’t be a physics major. He got a 16 — a solid B. That a professor would design such a demoralizing test revealed, he believed, that the professor didn’t care about students. At Tech, lack of caring for students was shown in big things and small. Every building on campus was air-conditioned except the student houses, and Pasadena gets really hot in the summer. The graduation rate around that time — the fraction of entering students who graduate in four years — was 59%. At MIT it was 80 or 90%. When a student drops out of Tech, it’s a lost opportunity on both sides, Rousseau felt. It was/is very difficult to get into Tech. To send 41% of admitted students away struck him as a terrible thing.

He did graduate. For many years, when Tech would ask him for money, he would say no, sometimes with a letter about why. But he kept in touch with other students who had lived in the same undergraduate house (Fleming House), one of the seven student houses. Every year, a bunch of them would have a weekend-long beach party. At one of them the idea arose: Let’s start a Fleming Fund. To help the students buy beer, that sort of thing. Tech is a tough place, let’s help them get through it.

In the 1990s, Rousseau got a letter from the president of Caltech that made him angry. Tech was #4 in the U.S. News rankings, it said, mainly because of the low fraction of alumni giving. Let’s make Tech #1 by giving more, wrote the president. Rousseau responded with a five-page letter that made one simple point: Alumni giving is so low because the people in charge cared so little about students. Their lack of concern is being reciprocated.

By 2003 or 2004 Rousseau had enough money that he got a personal visit from the development office. His visitor knew his wife’s name, the approximate ages of his children, and the high points of his professional career. Rousseau told him of his residual bitterness. “You’ve obviously benefited a lot from your Tech experience,” said the development officer. “Why have you only given $163 over the years?” He had it wrong, Rousseau said. He had given $1. His wife, who had also gone to Tech, had given $162.

He told the development officer he was interested in helping Tech students — particularly Fleming House residents. In essence, he wanted to bring the Fleming Fund into existence. Around this time, Frank Bernstein, another Caltech alum who was working as a patent attorney in Silicon Valley, was also solicited. “Frank, I’m looking for a really significant donation,” said the same development officer who had approached Rousseau. Bernstein, who’d also lived in Fleming, told Rousseau about the conversation and they again resurrected the idea of the Fleming Fund.

The development officer came back to them with ideas. Maybe you could fund a lecturer, he suggested. Or graduate student salaries. Helping undergraduates was clearly a new and difficult concept for the development office. They were looking for contributions that, in their words, “directly benefited the Institute.” Bernstein pointed out to them that this was a narrow and self-defeating view. They want alumni to contribute. They want to get them in the habit of contributing. A Fleming Fund will help with that.

Because Rousseau’s daughter, a high school student, was considering going to Tech, Rousseau visited the campus in 2006. He met with Tom Mannion, the administrator for student affairs, and came to believe that the administration cared more about students than they had in the past. A new incoming president, Jean-Lou Chameau, appeared to genuinely care about undergrads. (Later events have validated that view. Chameau has made a point of discussing student life in his public discussions and has started to push administration officials to discuss what they’re doing with regards to student life.) After that, Rousseau and Bernstein met with the development officer who had solicited them and started working on the details. The Institute set a minimum of $100,000. Once the fund reached this level, income from the fund would be given to the students to spend.

In 2008 the details were hammered out. There would be two sort of restrictions: 1. Obvious limits on what the money could be spent on (no bail, no illegal drugs, etc.). 2. An oversight committee of three people, including the past president of Fleming House. The oversight committee only gets involved when the amount of money is more than the house’s usual budget. The income, at least at first, would be about $10,000 year for a house of about 120 students.

In May 2009, the fund was announced during a Fleming House reunion dinner at Tom Mannion’s house. Many undergrads came up to Rousseau and told him it was a “really cool idea.” They were touched that someone out there cared about them. The Institute is thinking of repeating it with the other student houses.

This Blog Reduces Sinus Congestion (continued)

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Tim Beneke writes:

After 21 days of eating a lot of yogurt [more than 16 ounces/day] and then 15 days of acidophilus pearls — 2 a day for the first 5 days and then 1 a day since, it’s very clear that I can breathe substantially better through my nose. This has been obvious for at least a couple of weeks — it still seems to be improving gradually. I feel it clearly when I breathe. And, rather dramatically, my sense of smell has returned. I got a severe sinus infection in 1972; since then, my nose has been fairly stuffed and my sense of smell weak. Now I’m living in a different olfactory universe.

For a few years, I’ve cleaned up 4 or 5 times a week after a bunch of feral cats that I feed. Until the last 3 weeks or so, I only used my eyes to spot the cat poop. Now I use my sense of smell a lot and often smell it before I see it. Another unpleasant example — I don’t flush my toilet after peeing to conserve water; by the end of the day it looks pretty funky, but I could barely smell its funkiness in the past. Now I smell it quite vividly and am more prone to flush it.

Earlier post on the subject.