Author: Seth Roberts

The Resource Curse

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In an excellent Authors@Google talk based on his book The Birth of Plenty — about the increase in GDP growth that started around the Industrial Revolution — William Bernstein mentions what he calls “The Resource Curse”:

If all your wealth comes out of a couple of holes in the ground, the quickest way to become wealthy . . . is control of those holes and access to those holes. It breeds corruption, and it breeds poor government, and it drains the entrepreneurial spirit. The best way to get rich is to have no natural resources at all. Think Singapore, think Japan.

Could the same be true of science? Could access to resources — say, a lot of grant money or expensive equipment — breed corruption and poor government, and drain the entrepreneurial spirit? It isn’t obvious why not. Surely human nature is essentially the same in both places. This may have something to do with Gary Taubes’ complaints about poor nutritional science in Good Calories, Bad Calories.

I rarely mention in this blog my animal learning research, which in recent years has been about exactly this — with animals (rats and pigeons). The results of our experiments are easy to sum up: When animals have access to rich sources of food, it drains the entrepreneurial spirit. In psychology-speak, when the probability of reward for actions is high, there is less variation in what animals do than when the probability of reward is low. I got into this line of research by accident.

Omega-3 and Cognitive Function in the Elderly

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Two papers in the latest issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition provide more support for the idea that omega-3s improve brain function.

The first was a cross-sectional study involving about 2000 persons 70-74 years old in Norway. Their fish consumption was measured and they took a battery of cognitive tests. The more fish you ate, the better your score on every test, even after adjustment for several things.

The second used data collected as part of a 3-year experiment about something else (the effect of folic acid) with 800 persons aged 50-70. They measured the omega-3 concentrations in the blood of their subjects. Would these predict anything? Their results were more ambiguous:

Higher plasma n–3 PUFA proportions predicted less decline in sensorimotor speed . . . and complex speed . . . over 3 y. Plasma n–3 PUFA proportions did not predict 3-y changes in memory, information-processing speed, or word fluency. The cross-sectional analyses showed no association between plasma n–3 PUFA proportions and performance in any of the 5 cognitive domains.

Cross-sectional correlations between a measure of omega-3 (fish consumption) and cognitive performance are exactly what the first study did find.

How Bad is Saturated Fat?

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This Men’s Health article is a nice summing-up of the lack of evidence that saturated fat is bad.

In 2000, a respected international group of scientists called the Cochrane Collaboration conducted a “meta-analysis” of the scientific literature on cholesterol-lowering diets. After applying rigorous selection criteria (219 trials were excluded), the group examined 27 studies involving more than 18,000 participants. Although the authors concluded that cutting back on dietary fat may help reduce heart disease, their published data actually shows that diets low in saturated fats have no significant effect on mortality, or even on deaths due to heart attacks. “I was disappointed that we didn’t find something more definitive,” says Lee Hooper, Ph.D., who led the Cochrane review. If this exhaustive analysis didn’t provide evidence of the dangers of saturated fat, says Hooper, it was probably because the studies reviewed didn’t last long enough, or perhaps because the participants didn’t lower their saturated-fat intake enough. Of course, there is a third possibility, which Hooper doesn’t mention: The diet-heart hypothesis is incorrect.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Omega-3 and Veterinary Medicine

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The November 2007 issue of Acres USA, a magazine about organic/sustainable farming, has an article (not online) about using omega-3s to cure farm-animal problems. Here are the best parts:

One family reported that their dog had failed obedience training three times. Our therapy of cod liver oil (Nordic Naturals), Fasttrack probiotic, and a homeopathic prescription enabled him to pass on the next attempt. . . . Dogs experience panic attacks for a variety of reasons. One frantic German shepard dog jumped through a plate glass window to escape the house and get near his owner. The solution to his panic and anxiety attacks proved to be cod liver oil, the correct homeopathic medicine, and a whole-food diet rich in omega-3 oils and quality live probiotics.

The obedience-training story resembles my story of taking flaxseed oil capsules and the next morning being able to easily put on my shoes standing up. With the difference that I’d had trouble several hundred times in a row, not just three.

Thanks to Joshua Schrier.

How to Start a Food Demo Company

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At the Berkeley Whole Foods a few days ago, a friendly man named Hunter Austin was demoing Alvarado Street Bakery Sprouted Wheat bread. “Baked locally, sold [frozen] nationally,” he said. He was giving out little grilled cheese sandwiches. It turned out he had his own demo company — food companies hire him to demo their products. He had started the company four years ago. Before that he had owned and run a restaurant. He made lots of money but he was working seven days a week. The pay worked out to $15/hour.

Why did you choose this as your escape route? I asked. “You want to know the truth?” he said. “Because it looked really easy.” He did demos for someone else for a few months then decided to strike out on his own. He made a brochure advertising his services. Then he went up and down the aisles at a supermarket writing down the names and addresses of companies whose products he liked. He sent them his brochure. What happened? I asked. “I got business,” he said.

That’s how his business began. It turned out to be harder than it looked. “The first ten demos are fun,” he said, “the next twenty are sobering, and after that it’s a job.” Now he mostly hires people to do the actual work. This was the rare demo he did himself. His company is called Demo Demon.

My Theory of Human Evolution (Hallelujah edition)

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The latest episode of Ugly Betty ended with Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. I was entranced. I ran to YouTube to hear the whole thing:

What a great performance! Could anyone else come close? I usually like Rufus Wainwright:

Not close.

K. D. Lang?

No.

Leonard Cohen himself?

Well, the best of the rest.

I am a lot more interested in Jeff Buckley than I was an hour ago. From Wikipedia: “The night before his death [by drowning], Buckley excitedly told his girlfriend Joan Wasser that he believed he had found the cause of his dramatic moods, namely bipolar disorder.”

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)

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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.