Why UC Berkeley is Investigating Peter Duesberg

Seth Roberts14 Comments

In November, UC Berkeley launched an investigation of Professor Peter Duesberg for misconduct associated with a paper of his retracted from Medical Hypotheses. According to the letter sent Duesberg informing him of the investigation, there were two allegations. One was that his paper had been withdrawn by the publisher due to “issues of credibility and false claims.” The other was that “you failed to declare a relevant conflict of interest with regard to the commercial interests of your co-authors.” Duesberg tried to learn more about what he was accused of, without success. Finally the university sent him the letters of complaint that led to the investigation. Here they are.

  

The first letter is incredibly vague. The “issues of credibility and false claims” aren’t spelled out and it is unclear why the University of California should care that “Bruce Rasnick failed to declare his conflict of interest.” The idea that publishing a dissenting paper about AIDS is an “attempt to discredit the academic community” is worthy of Orwell.

The second letter has several strange features. First, it contradicts itself. It says:

[Statement 1] Until recently, he [Rasnick] worked as a researcher for a company, the Dr Rath Health Foundation Canada [owned by Mattias Rath] [Statement 2] [Rasnick’s] former (and possibly current) employer, Mattias Rath.

Statement 1 says Rasnick no longer works for Rath. Statement 2 says he might still work for Rath.

Second, its logic is outside the way conflict of interest is normally understood. Because you used to work for someone that might benefit from your paper, you now have a conflict of interest? This makes no sense.

Finally, there is the weird idea that because something is “possible” — Mattias Rath is “possibly” Rasnick’s current employer — it deserves a misconduct investigation. It’s possible that a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn tomorrow.

In spite of all this, UC Berkeley administrators allowed themselves to be used to punish dissent.

Assorted Links

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  • “Your body’s resistance to an activity isn’t an obstacle to be overcome, it’s a message that you’re being an idiot, just like when your hand hurts after you punch a wall. The right solution isn’t to start punching the wall harder, it’s to look around for a tool to help you do the job . . . With losing weight, the key is things like the Shangri-La Diet.” Aaron Swartz argues that if something needs a lot of will-power to do, it’s a mistake. I agree.
  • Reed Hundt on “Bandwidth, Jobs, and the Future of Internet Freedom”.
  • Art DeVany interviewed on Econtalk. Agrees with Aaron.
  • In China, “what censored actually means”. “One day last summer, an anonymous member posted something on a Baidu forum devoted to the online game World of Warcraft, and it became an Internet meme: Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. The cheeky, mysterious sentence received seven million hits and 300,000 comments on the first day. . . . Around the time the post originally appeared, a famous blogger named Guo Baofeng was arrested [by the Mawei police] for posting allegations of an official cover-up in the brutal rape of a 25-year-old woman named Yan Xiaoling in Mawei, a district in the city of Fuzhou. She later died of her injuries. . . . Bloggers began calling on people to send postcards to the Mawei police: Guo Baofeng, your mother wants you to go home to eat. Similar messages sprouted on bulletin-board sites. A few days later, Guo was released.”

Thanks to Evelyn Mitchell.

Animals Like Fermented Food?

Seth Roberts2 Comments

I’ve blogged a zillion times about the value of fermented food. Animals seem to agree with me:

At least twice in the past ten years [1998-2008], [elephant] herds in India have stumbled upon barrels of rice beer, drained them with their trunks, and gone on drunken rampages. (The first time, they trampled four villagers; the second time they uprooted a pylon and electrocuted themselves.) Howler monkeys, too, have a taste for things fermented. In Panama, they’ve been seen consuming overripe palm fruit at the rate of ten stiff drinks in twenty minutes. Even flies have a nose for alcohol. They home in on its scent to lay their eggs in ripening fruit, insuring their larvae a pleasant buzz.

It’s possible that the elephants were thirsty, of course, but these stories support the idea that our liking for fermented foods goes back a long way and has a genetic basis. I heard a story about horses preferring rotting apples to fresh ones, which shows how to improve the evidence: give animals a choice between fresh and older food.

Memristors

Seth Roberts4 Comments

If you’re like me, you failed to grasp the importance of this recent report in the New York Times. Much like the prediction of new elements using the periodic table, in the 1970s an engineer named Leon Chua predicted the existence of a fourth circuit element (the first three are resistors, capacitors, and inductors) that he called memristors — resistors with a memory. Their resistance varies depending on their history.

A few years ago Hewlett-Packard researchers studying titanium oxide found puzzling results that turned out to be due to memristors. Only at very small sizes, they found, does memristance become large relative to other effects. How easily you can walk through a room depends on where the furniture is. Memristors involve moving the furniture (atoms). If these new devices can be made practical (e.g., fast enough), they will provide memory much smaller and more power-efficient than current devices. But it’s hard to predict the impact of this discovery — it’s like discovering a new dimension.

Venous Multiple Sclerosis: A Website

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’ve blogged several times about Paulo Zamboni’s discovery that his wife’s multiple sclerosis was due to poor blood drainage from the brain and the wonderful implications of this discovery for many persons with MS. Here’s an excellent website about the topic. It’s of great interest to me because it suggests the power of people with (a) the subject-matter knowledge of insiders, (b) the freedom of outsiders and (c) the motivation of someone with the problem. Medical researchers, who get the billions of dollars spent on health research, don’t have the freedom of outsiders nor (almost always) the motivation of someone with the problem. My self-experimentation had those characteristics: I had the subject-matter knowledge of an insider, the freedom of an outsider, and the motivation of someone with the problem. For example, I knew a lot about sleep, I didn’t care what sleep researchers thought of me, and I had a sleep problem.

City Air Makes Free

Seth Roberts7 Comments

“City air makes free” is a medieval saying quoted by Jane Jacobs. I thought of it a few months ago when I visited an experimental private school near Shanghai. The founder of the school wanted to encourage creativity among students, in contrast to the main Chinese educational system with its overwhelming emphasis on memorization. His school was itself an example of city air makes free. There are many factories around Shanghai, filled with migrants from rural areas. These workers moved without official permission, which made their children ineligible for public school. This created a market for private schools, such as the one I visited. The school’s founder was previously a school teacher. The rural-urban migration had made him free to start his own school.

By growing up in a city instead of a village, regardless of what school she attends, regardless of overall economic growth, a Chinese student will have more access to the Internet, much bigger libraries, better teachers, far more students of different backgrounds, far more occupations in action, and a much wider range of culture. Her parents’ increased income may allow her to have a computer. Her family will suffer less from corrupt government officials. The increase in freedom — in opportunity — is profound. Her creativity and productivity will increase because she will better match her talents and her job. This is why Chinese creativity will increase enormously in the coming years whether the education system changes or not.

That such thinkers as Bill McKibben (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for saving energy) and Jeffrey Sachs (who doesn’t understand the importance of cities for economic development) fail to understand this point shows how non-obvious it is. One more reason Jane Jacobs was a great economist.

“ She and other Chinese I met on my trip had a much broader sense of what was possible, or what they were missing out on, than previous generations.”

Academic Horror Story (UC Berkeley – 2)

Seth Roberts32 Comments

Peter Duesberg, a professor at UC Berkeley, has been accused of misconduct for writing a paper espousing an unpopular idea (that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS) — and the university administration is taking this seriously! Here is the letter Duesberg received.

This is major-league harassment, similar to the human-subjects complaint against Michael Bailey. And it’s Berkeley’s second Academic Horror Story. Previously, Berkeley administrators carefully delayed an experimental subject from learning she had a big lump in her brain.

More “ You can be as nasty as you like” (John Cleese on extremism, via Marginal Revolution).
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The Man Who Would Be Queen

Seth Roberts7 Comments

The Man Who Would Be Queen by Michael Bailey, about male homosexuality, is easily the best book about psychology ever written. It is emotional, persuasive, non-obvious, important, and well-written. Few books manage three of these adjectives. One sign of its emotion, persuasiveness, importance, and non-obviousness is the vilification Bailey underwent for writing it — led by people as smart as Deirdre McCloskey and Lynn Conway. Their campaign against it risked drawing more attention to it, of course. Now you can read it for free.

Can professors say the truth?. My correspondence with Deirdre McCloskey: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6. Alice Dreger’s article about the controversy, including a short version of my correspondence with McCloskey.

Why Cory Doctorow Won’t Buy an iPad

Seth Roberts5 Comments

I loved this Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about why he won’t buy an iPad. One of his points:

Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They’re apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

Just as I believe that relying on the medical establishment to improve health care is not a good strategy. Those in power (incumbents) will resist change, especially revolutionary change. Science — connecting beliefs with reality — is surely the most revolutionary activity invented yet professional health researchers, simply because they have something to lose, now resist change.

One of Doctorow’s complaints:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue.

Likewise, I believe it’s possible to do health research where everything is understandable. Where you can understand the data. Where you can understand the connection between the data and better health. The simple situations, treatments and measurements I use in my self-experimentation I judge to be an improvement over obscure health research, whereas I suspect most professional scientists instinctively think something must be wrong with it. Real science, they think, cannot be done by amateurs.