Thumbs up: Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion. Hedges writes about how Americans are delusional in their beliefs about how wonderful their country is and how rich and powerful they are. One of his targets is academia, which he says turns out graduates who are far too respectful of authority. (He doesn’t mention molecular biologists, but they’re another example.)
Thumbs down: His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard Cutler, The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. Two words: runaway serfs.
At first I thought the title of this article was “Taking Back The Nobel Prizes”. My eyes widened. Someone at the New York Times has a radical thought, it appeared. I was wrong. The title is “Taking Back Nobel Prizes”; the article is about the less-than-radical idea that Henry Kissinger did not deserve a Peace Prize. Then I thought it was too bad that Richard Feynman isn’t alive. If he were, I would ask him if modern biology — the sort that wins Nobel Prizes — is an example of what he called cargo-cult science in a famous graduation speech. I would be a good person to ask that question, I thought, because he considered rat psychology cargo-cult science. Yet I used rat psychology to come up with the Shangri-La Diet, which has helped many people lose weight in counter-intuitive ways.
Cargo-cult science, according to Feynman, was activities that have the superficial trappings of science but don’t actually accomplish anything. You do all the right things, or so you think, but the planes don’t land. The sort of biology that wins Nobel Prizes has a long history of this. This year’s prize went to research that found that telomeres shorten with age. The press release, forced to say how this is useful (the Nobel Prize is supposed to be for research that benefits mankind), says
These discoveries had a major impact within the scientific community. Many scientists speculated that telomere shortening could be the reason for ageing, not only in the individual cells but also in the organism as a whole. But the ageing process has turned out to be complex [shocking!] . . . Research in this area remains intense.
. . . It was therefore proposed that cancer might be treated by eradicating telomerase. Several studies are underway in this area, including clinical trials evaluating vaccines directed against cells with elevated telomerase activity.
Some inherited diseases are now known to be caused by telomerase defects, including certain forms of congenital aplastic anemia, in which insufficient cell divisions in the stem cells of the bone marrow lead to severe anemia. Certain inherited diseases of the skin and the lungs are also caused by telomerase defects.
In conclusion, the discoveries by Blackburn, Greider and Szostak have added a new dimension to our understanding of the cell, shed light on disease mechanisms, and stimulated the development of potential new therapies.
Shameless. Note the utter absence of even one disease in one person cured or prevented. Not one. And this is supposed to be the most beneficial discovery in medicine. It’s the top prize in medicine and biology! Last year the prize was given for HIV. Do we have an HIV vaccine? No. The year before that, HPV. Do we have an HPV vaccine? No. A few years before that, the discovery that a certain bug “causes” stomach ulcers — the award that showed that the medical community and the Nobel Prize committee have a weak grasp of the concept of causality. The biologists think they do everything right — but the planes don’t land. The biologists who do this research aren’t able to solve actual problems. (Some people do — those who discovered that smoking causes cancer, for example — but they don’t get Nobel Prizes.) Could something important be missing from their view of the world? I think so.
Cargo-cult activities aren’t worthless, so long as you learn from your mistakes. The cargo cultists could see that the planes didn’t land and eventually figure out that something was missing. That’s actual knowledge, humble but useful. Feynman’s criticisms of rat psychology were reasonable. Those doing rat psychology learned from their mistakes, I think, and eventually the field improved and produced the research behind the Shangri-La Diet. Modern biology isn’t worthless, just as cargo cults aren’t worthless. Obviously “useless” knowledge can eventually become useful, as has happened many times. But these overblown claims for the value of modern biology truly cost the rest of us — a great deal, I believe. Because the first step in getting somewhere, as Feynman liked to say, is to confront reality. At least in their public statements about the value of their research, modern biologists are living in a dream world. It’s always “potential” this and “future” that and “insight into disease mechanisms” — without ever curing or preventing a disease.
Thanks to Eric Meltzer.
This comment on a previous post deserves emphasis:
For the past 3 years or so, a co-worker and I would suffer spring allergies together. We seemed to be allergic to the same thing, because we’d start and stop at the same times. This year, we both got whacked hard late April. Desperate, I started eating yogurt (Breyers mostly, some Danactive and Stonyfield) every day, sometimes twice, after reading your blog and doing some research. About 8 – 10 days later, I noticed I had no symptoms. My friend had light symptoms, so I thought maybe it was just a lull. Then about 2 weeks later, my friend got pummeled by allergies again, very badly; he could hardly work. I had NO symptoms. I didn’t even realize it was a bad day for allergies until he showed up to work. I haven’t had any allergies since.
From a review of The Shangri-La Diet:
Seth Roberts, the diet founder and book author, attempts to explain the science behind how this works, but I won’t even begin to try to explain it here. I will admit that it is both counterintuitive and at times seems contradictory, but since there was little risk involved I was willing to give it a try.
I was nervous to add the calories into my diet (approximately 120 per tablespoon of olive oil), when all my life experience told me that I should be cutting fat and calories. However, I have only been following the plan for about a week and am amazed at the results. After just one day it was like having instant willpower.
I’ve been steadily using my new yogurt maker. It’s like a microscope: I can see things I never saw before. I started with the recommended fermentation time: 12 hours. Then I did batches at 16, 20, 24, and 28 hours. The yogurt grew steadily more sour. The increase was remarkably clear. I am unable to find this crucial info anywhere on the web — that 28 hours produces more sour yogurt than 24 hours, etc. By making my yogurt much more sour than commercial yogurt I’m getting a lot more of the crucial ingredient (bacteria).
The results are so clear, I think, because I’m starting with a hyper-pasteurized product (which can be stored at room temperature) and the yogurt maker holds the fermentation temperature very constant. Constancy of temperature means constancy of selection means greater population. (The theory behind the Shangri-La Diet says the main reason for the obesity epidemic is that we’re eating food with exactly the same flavor from one instance to the next — from one can of Coke to the next, for example.) If the temperature is 120 there is selection for bacteria that grow best at 120; if the temperature goes down to 110 many of those bacteria die and are replaced by bacteria that grow best at 110. If the temperature goes back up to 120, those bacteria die . . . and so on. More temperature variation means more diversity of bacteria but less number of bacteria. I’ll get my diversity of bacteria elsewhere — from kombucha, say.
I suspect that commercial yogurt makers are time-limited. If they fermented twice as long they could only make half as much. The average yogurt buyer has no idea that more sour = more healthy, so they couldn’t charge more.
Although the yogurt maker’s box shows the machine set to 32 hours, the actual maximum time is 24 hours. To get 28 hours I reset it during the process.
The official website of the National Yogurt Association, aboutyogurt.com, contains nothing about how to make yogurt.
The Salton Yogurt Maker might be the best yogurt maker available in America. I can’t tell if you have to preheat the milk — the worst part.
More Does more sour = more healthy? I agree with the two commenters who suggest that the number of live bacteria probably goes down after a certain point as the mixture becomes more acidic. The number of live+dead bacteria, however, probably continues to increase. My guess is that the total live+dead is maximized when the yogurt is most sour; the number of live bacteria is maximum around the tme that the acidity is most quickly increasing, somewhere in the middle. I think the digestive benefits come only from live bacteria but that the immunostimulatory benefits come from both live and dead bacteria. I find it hard to believe that the immune system can tell whether bacteria it encounters are alive or dead.
From BBC News:
General health claims for “probiotic” drinks and yogurts have been dismissed by a team of experts from the European Union.
Their opinions will now be voted on by an EU Committee which is drawing up a list of permitted health claims.
Scientists at the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA) looked at 180 health claims for the supplements.
They rejected 10 claims and said a further 170 had not provided enough evidence of their effects.
The manufacturers of best-selling yogurt drinks Actimel and Yakult have submitted claims that will be considered at a later stage.
The difference between “rejecting” a claim and saying “not enough evidence” isn’t clear.
A famous short story by Tama Janowitz, called “ The Slaves in New York” (a short-story collection called “Slaves of New York” was made into a movie), was about New York City renters who couldn’t afford to move because rents were so high. Whatever their relationship with their roommate, they were stuck.
[Eleanor] lives with her boyfriend Stash in the Village. Stash is a graffiti artist who complains a lot, while Eleanor makes him elaborate meals. One night she goes to a party and meets Mikell, a handsome South African writer. They make a date and meet at the White Horse Tavern. It turns out that Mikell lives with a woman named Millie, who owns a co-op. Millie and Mikell fight as much as Eleanor and Stash do but, because neither can afford their own apartment, they are trapped.
Now, due to the huge decline in house prices, many Californians face a similar slavery. As a friend of mine put it,
Anyone like my parents, who paid cash for their houses, are kinda stuck living where they are, or they’ll take a giant financial hit.
In my experience, most Americans know little about Tibet but that doesn’t prevent some of them from having strong opinions about the Chinese takeover. (A crime against humanity, they say.) At a dinner in Berkeley, I made this point to some friends. One of them asked politely, “What is the other side?” She had no idea what it was.
Yes, Chinese students are brainwashed about this. (When I googled “Tibet slavery” and tried to follow the links, all of sudden nothing worked.) But the smartest among them know more about it than smart American students who have been brainwashed the other way. Here’s what one of them told me about the Chinese side of the argument:
1. Before China took over, Tibet was ruled by a religious elite. It is this elite, personified by the Dalai Lama, that now has influential Americans (e.g., Richard Gere, Robert Thurman) on their side. While the elite are incredibly pissed off by the Chinese takeover — just as rich Cubans were by Castro — the rest of the country, having been oppressed by this elite, doesn’t agree.
2. Before China took over, there was widespread slavery in Tibet. You could incur a debt that basically made you a slave, it took so long to pay off. Of course this makes a mockery of the Dalai Lama’s books. Here are some details:
Until 1959, when the Dalai Lama last presided over Tibet, most of the arable land was still organized into manorial estates worked by serfs. These estates were owned by two social groups: the rich secular landlords and the rich theocratic lamas. Even a writer sympathetic to the old order allows that “a great deal of real estate belonged to the monasteries, and most of them amassed great riches.” Much of the wealth was accumulated “through active participation in trade, commerce, and money lending.”
Drepung monastery was one of the biggest landowners in the world, with its 185 manors, 25,000 serfs, 300 great pastures, and 16,000 herdsmen. The wealth of the monasteries rested in the hands of small numbers of high-ranking lamas. Most ordinary monks lived modestly and had no direct access to great wealth. The Dalai Lama himself “lived richly in the 1000-room, 14-story Potala Palace.”
Secular leaders also did well. A notable example was the commander-in-chief of the Tibetan army, a member of the Dalai Lama’s lay Cabinet, who owned 4,000 square kilometers of land and 3,500 serfs. Old Tibet has been misrepresented by some Western admirers as “a nation that required no police force because its people voluntarily observed the laws of karma.” In fact. it had a professional army, albeit a small one, that served mainly as a gendarmerie for the landlords to keep order, protect their property, and hunt down runaway serfs.
Runaway serfs. I find these paragraphs vastly more believable than anything I’ve heard Richard Gere or the Dalai Lama say about the situation. Here’s how one Free-Tibeter answers these facts:
The old Tibet was backward in its technological and social systems. Nobody denies this. If, however, you look at the faces of those Tibetans who were born and grew up in that society, you can easily notice their genuine smile. When compared with other communities, the Tibetans were generally quite peaceful and warm-hearted. If they were really as cruel as the Chinese claim, then I think the people who were born and grew up under those circumstances would be different. The people living at the time were happier and calmer than the people in this new generation. At that time, unfortunately, there were people who were used by the landlords. Now the whole nation has become a slave.
3. Tsinghua students sometimes volunteer to work in Tibet as teachers for a year. They teach primary school. The education system in Tibet is very poor; there is a shortage of good teachers.
I don’t have an opinion about this. It is the invisibility of gaps in knowledge that interests me here, the way smart Americans don’t realize they’ve been brainwashed.
To see faces early in the morning, I have a one-hour Chinese lesson every day at 6 a.m. Today my teacher said, “I feel very happy.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s because you see my face every morning,” I said.
“No, it isn’t that,” she said.
The Department of Energy has a prize, called the L Prize, for a new light bulb that gives off same light as a 60-watt incandescent bulb but uses much less energy. Philips has submitted what it believes will be the winning entry. For the last decade, I’ve tried to avoid fluorescent lights at night. Ordinary fluorescent lamps emit light with far more blue than incandescent lamps and mess up my circadian-timing system. That systems appears insensitive to incandescent light. Squirrels are like me, a study suggests.
Fluorescent lights are close enough to sunlight to affect our circadian system; incandescent lights, being much cooler than the sun, are invisible to it. The timing of exposure matters if it varies from day to day; exposure to fluorescent lights at varying times is like travelling back and forth across time zones. Everybody grasps that travelling across time zones makes it hard to sleep at the right time; what is less understood is that time-zone-crossing travel affects the depth of sleep because it reduces the amplitude of the circadian oscillation. If you are exposed to fluorescent lights at night now and then, you will sleep less deeply. So I try hard to avoid fluorescent lights at night. I avoid supermarkets and subways, for example.
I discovered all this when I discovered the effects of morning faces on my mood. After I travelled back and forth across time zones, the effect took three weeks to fully return. Nothing else had changed. I conclude that it took three weeks in the same place for my circadian oscillator to return to maximum amplitude. And one evening in which I was exposed to an hour of fluorescent light was enough to get rid of the faces effect for a few weeks. The ubiquity of fluorescent lighting has made it hard to study this effect in other people.