Month: July 2010

The Economics of Medical Hypotheses and Its Successor (part 1 of 2)

Seth Roberts10 Comments

A successor to Medical Hypotheses, titled Hypotheses in the Life Sciences, will soon be published. I asked Bruce Charlton and William Bains, the founder of the new journal, about the economics of the situation.

ROBERTS Did Medical Hypotheses make money for Elsevier? How much did it cost to run per year (leaving aside time contributed by you and the editorial board)? How much of that did Elsevier pay?

BRUCE CHARLTONÂ Medical Hypotheses did for sure make money for Elsevier – but I was never allowed to see the accounts.

I was told circa April 2009 that that the journal still made a profit even after page charges were abolished in early 2009 (income from things like subscriptions, sales of reprints including paid downloads, but mainly from its share of internet access ‘bundles’ via ScienceDirect – which is purchased mainly via library subscriptions from colleges etc).

Costs were my salary plus a share of the Elsevier editorial team – the journal secretary, the person who put together the issues and the manager – i.e., three main people at Elsevier each of whom worked on a group of journals.

Before 2009, when Medical Hypotheses still had page charges, the journal will have been very profitable since it had the above sources of income plus about page charges at about 60 dollars per thousand words, for a journal of between 160-240 pages, with about 500 words per page – that’s roughly 50 thousand dollars extra income per issue – with 12 issues per year that is roughly half a million dollars p.a. in page charges alone. Over seven years as editor I must have generated a few million dollars income for Elsevier.

So – in my opinion Elsevier’s behavior with Medical Hypotheses does not make business sense, since it lost them a lot of income and risked even more. Also hounding a successful editor, and sacking him before the contract was finished and with issues for 2010 un-compiled (and with nobody lined up to replace me) did not make business sense, nor did the mass of bad publicity all this generated for Elsevier.

My inference is that an individual or group in Elsevier senior management – perhaps Senior Vice President (USA) Glen P Campbell, who began the whole business and who has remained personally active in it (including the appointment of the new editor) – I guess that Campbell took a personal interest in Medical Hypotheses and in my editorship for reasons unknown to me – and drove the whole process.

The most sinister aspect of the whole thing for me is that senior Elsevier managers are now exerting personal influence on the content of the scientific literature and the conduct of science (overseeing appointment of editors, new restrictions on editorial conduct etc) – and they are doing this not for business reasons, but presumably to pursue their own private agendas.

The strict legalistic definition of academic freedom
(for what it is worth — see writings by Louis Menand)
is that academics be autonomous in the conduct of academic work (conduct, appointments, promotions, reviewing etc). The Medical Hypotheses Affair shows Elsevier very clearly in breach of academic freedom, and every competent editor will immediately recognize this fact.

In addition, in the later stages of the journal, Elsevier managers were also involved in covertly selecting (i.e. rejecting) what they considered ‘controversial’ Medical Hypotheses papers – the papers were intercepted after I had formally accepted them and held back, some were later rejected.

Elsevier also employed the Lancet (which they own) to choose ‘peer reviewers’ for the Duesberg and Ruggiero papers and arrange to have them rejected (using criteria quite different from those of Medical Hypotheses).

So that we know for sure that the Elsevier owned Lancet (one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world – perhaps the most prestigious?) is nowadays in the pocket of Elsevier management, and willing to do dirty jobs for them.

Yet there has been no outcry against Elsevier’s breach of academic autonomy from senior journal editors (nothing from the editors of Nature, Science, Lancet (understandably, since they are Elsevier employees), NEJM, JAMA, BMJ etc.). This silence means, I take it, that these senior editors are not any longer autonomous journals, but are nowadays in the pocket of their own publishers and live in fear of their own jobs.

The Medical Hypotheses affair is therefore a straw in the wind: an indicator on a small scale of what is happening at the larger scale: i.e. the thoroughly dishonest and hypocritical state of modern science and academia, and the domination of the content and conduct of science by outside interests.

But the unusual point that is not well understood is that key aspects of these outside interests are not always operating in profit maximizing ways. My understanding is that senior managers (in the private and public sector) are ‘using’ – even exploiting – their organization’s resources in pursuing personal goals – engaging in a kind of moral grandstanding, in making large gestures which show how ‘ethical’ they are in their views – at everyone else’s expense.

This can be most clearly seen in the ‘Green’ ‘ethical’ behaviours linked to the Global Warming scam – senior managers have shown themselves willing to sacrifice efficiency in pursuit of large moralistic policy gestures of ‘caring about the planet’ with which they become personally associated (recycling schemes, fair trade, campaigns of ‘save energy’ or promote public transportation among staff etc – none of which are actually effective in terms of real world effects, but which are effective in expressing ‘concern’).

Such moral gestures are invariably designed to appeal to elite PC opinion – it is a major form of status competition among the elites. My guess is that something of this sort is behind what happened at Medical Hypotheses: a senior manager or group of managers at Elsevier probably wanted to show themselves and their peers that they were taking a strong ‘moral’ stance against people who published AIDS-denialist papers.

My Theory of Human Evolution (aniline dye)

Seth Roberts4 Comments

From The Story of Science, a great new BBC TV series, I learned that in 1856 William Perkin, a British chemist, while trying to synthesize quinine (to cure malaria), created the first aniline dye, called mauveine. It could be used to dye cloth mauve.

Mauveine was the first synthetic chemical dye. It led to the first chemical factories. Hundreds of tons were made. Other aniline dyes were developed and manufactured in large amounts.

Why does this shed light on human evolution? Because humans, unlike other animals, make art and decoration. We enjoy art and decoration, including color. To dye a dress mauve didn’t make it last longer or smell better or fit better — it just made it prettier. Our enjoyment of decoration created demand for mauveine, which began the growth of the chemistry industry. Lessons learned from the manufacture of aniline dyes helped begin the manufacture non-decorative chemicals. These included ammonia, which led to chemical fertilizers. Mauveine wasn’t useful in a simple-minded way but it was useful in a subtle way.

This is an example of art/decoration as stepping stone. Because we enjoy art and decoration, we pay for it (long ago we traded for it). The payment allows people to spend more time creating art and decoration. While doing this, they learn. What they learn later helps everyone make conventionally useful stuff. I believe this stepping-stone function is why art and decoration came to be.

An alternative view: Art evolved because it gave us “the ability to shape and thereby exert some measure of control over the untidy material of everyday life.”

The Shangri-La-Diet Effect

Seth Roberts2 Comments

A friend wrote:

Took 3 tbsp of flaxseed oil this morning and held my nose and drank the oil w/water. Â It worked! Â I had brought food for work, I didn’t eat hardly any of it. Â And I didn’t think about losing weight all day, first time in all my life….

As far as I’m concerned, it never gets old.

Alex Chernavsky: Eight months on the Shangri-La Diet.

What’s the “Natural” Pattern of Sleep?

Seth Roberts16 Comments

According to this influential article by the historian A. Roger Ekirch,

Until the close of the early modern era, Western Europeans on most evenings experienced two major intervals of sleep bridged by up to an hour or more of quiet wakefulness.

This is called segmented sleep. Supposedly this is “natural”:

In a natural state, humans do not sleep a long consecutive bout throughout the night. The natural condition is bimodal – two bouts of sleep interrupted by a short episode of waking in the middle of the night.

And if you don’t like sleeping this way you are ignorant:

The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep leads many to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance i nsomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.

An amusing therapeutic approach. Whatever the problem, simply say “your problem conforms to historically natural patterns”.

I found that if I ate more animal fat I slept better. It is entirely possible that if all those Western Europeans walking up in the middle of the night had eaten more animal fat — as their ancestors may have several hundred thousand years ago before big fat-laden game animals were hunted to extinction — they would have slept through the night.

I found several ways to improve my sleep. After my sleep got a lot better — in particular, I stopped waking up in the middle of the night — I stopped getting colds, surely because my immune system was working better. The connection between sleep and immune function is obvious. Given a choice between (a) my immune system had returned to ancient levels of efficacy or (b) my immune system was working better than ever before in the history of the species, I’d bet on (a). Those Western Europeans with segmented sleep were in poor health, I’m sure. Perhaps their sleep was one sign of this.

Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking (cont.)

Seth Roberts15 Comments

In an earlier post I described how I discovered that walking normalized my fasting blood sugar. In a comment on that post, Phil wrote:

You could also have consulted a doctor, or a diabetes website, and probably found out about the benefits of walking for controlling blood glucose a lot sooner.

My initial reaction was that this was wrong–that a search on the web would find hundreds of suggestions for managing diabetes and walking would be just one of them. Diabetes, after all, is a huge problem. A doctor would probably prescribe something. But what if Phil were right?

What would I find if I looked? I didn’t actually know. So I looked. Under “diabetes”, the Mayo Clinic website has two sections about treatment. Under “ treatment and drugs” are six suggestions, such as “healthy eating”. The suggestion called “physical exercise” recommends aerobic exercise. “Get your doctor’s OK to exercise,” it says. “Aim for at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise most days of the week,” it continues. My walking was not aerobic. Obviously one does not need a doctor’s approval to walk at a normal pace. In a second section called “ lifestyle and home remedies” were ten suggestions, such as “make a commitment to manage your diabetes”. No mention of walking.

What about the American Diabetes Association website? Their “ Treatment & Care” page says nothing about exercise. It mentions drugs and transplants (e.g., kidney transplants). There’s also a “ Food & Fitness” page. There are dozens of comments about what foods to eat. The “Fitness” section begins like this:

Exercise is part of a healthy lifestyle for everyone, and it’s especially important for people with diabetes. But exercise doesn’t necessarily mean running a marathon or bench-pressing 300 pounds. The goal is to get active and stay active by doing things you enjoy, from gardening to playing tennis to walking with friends. Here are some ideas for getting moving and making exercise part of your daily life.

The fitness section goes on and on about such topics as “What is Exercise?” and “Top 10 Benefits of Being Active”. Surely the ADA hired some hack to write it. It’s useless.

I conclude that if you already know that walking helps you can find evidence to support this. But searching the web will not lead you to try walking any time soon. You will be too busy changing your diet and trying all possible aerobic exercises. (And I did aerobic exercise several times a week and still had too-high blood sugar.) My initial reaction was wrong, it turned out: I found a large number of suggestions and my actual activity (walking 30-60 min/day) wasn’t one of them. No way could I “walk with friends” every day. (I’ve tried and failed miserably.) The next time I see my doctor I will find out what he would have recommended.

Interview for a Press Release

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A writer for UC Berkeley media relations wanted to interview me for this press release about the Tsinghua Psychology department. I said I’d blogged a lot about Tsinghua but she said she wanted “fresh quotes”. So I wrote this:

Why did you decide to take this opportunity [become a professor at Tsinghua]?

Partly because I wanted to write more books — in addition to The Shangri-La Diet — and this job would let me, because I only teach one semester per year. Partly because I thought the undergraduates would be brilliant. Partly because I thought living in Beijing would be fascinating.

What have you learned/discovered?

How talented the students are. To get into Tsinghua as an undergraduate, you have to score extremely well on a nationwide test. Oh, so they’re bookish? Not quite. A month ago I went to a talent show put on by biomedical-engineering majors. One act was five girls dancing. After a few minutes someone told me that three of the girls were boys. I hadn’t noticed. It was really hard to tell.

Influenced by Mulan, perhaps.

Fasting Blood Sugar Reduced by Walking

Seth Roberts10 Comments

Richard Bernstein, an engineer with diabetes, invented home blood glucose monitoring. To learn more about this invention, about two years ago I started doing it myself. Mostly I measured my fasting blood sugar level — the level you measure in the morning before eating anything. My numbers were okay — averaging about 90 mg/dL. Optimal is 84, readings above 100 are considered pre-diabetic. I stopped for a while. Then I resumed, and was shocked to see that the numbers were considerably worse — the average was in the high 90s.

I tried to lower them. The obvious thing to do was to eat less carbs, but I already ate few carbs. I cut my carb intake still further but the problem didn’t go away. The graph below shows a solution I found by accident: to walk 30-60 minutes/day (closer to 60 than 30).

After months of trying this and that, and nothing working, one morning the reading was good. I realized I’d done something unusual the previous evening: Taken a 30-minute walk home in the evening rather than ride my bike. After that I deliberately walked 50-60 minutes almost every day and found that my readings were much better, as the graph shows. It wasn’t always walking steadily for 60 minutes — stopping now & then was okay. However, wandering through stores for 60 minutes (or any length of time) didn’t seem to work. My walks were in the afternoon or evening.

I have not read elsewhere that non-diabetics should do this sort of monitoring, but it helped me. I have seen “exercise” recommended as a way to improve blood sugar control but what I found is much more specific. This article recommends walking about 3 miles/day, which is what I did. This research found big effects of substantial aerobic exercise. My walking was just ordinary continuous walking. But the details of my exercise aren’t the point: The point is you can find out for yourself what works.

This sort of thing looks even better when you learn that GlaxoSmithKline, the giant drug company, hid evidence that its diabetes drug caused heart attacks. The drug has generated billions in revenue for the company.