After a Century an Important Serendipitous Health Hunch Is Pursued

All of us (you, me, dogs, and physicians) observe patterns all the time. Some of the patterns, if pursued, could make the world much better. When a physician observes a pattern, even one they cannot articulately describe or justify, they could change their practices, curing more patients, saving more lives. But they are constrained from deviating from mainstream protocols by government regulations, insurance company rules, hospital administrators, and potential lawsuits. How many serendipitous discoveries that would help us flourish are delayed a century, or even totally snuffed out?

(p. C2) . . . my eye was drawn to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine finding that hysterosalpingography cured some cases of infertility. Hystero refers to the uterus. Salpingo, I knew, relates to the fallopian tubes that funnel eggs to the uterus. Ography relates to imaging—but how could taking a picture of reproductive organs cure anything?

Doctors use hysterosalpingography to see if there are blockages that could be causing fertility problems.

. . .

To look at blockages, technicians have to introduce a teaspoon or two of a dye that’s opaque to X-rays. How that material is introduced, it turns out, is the key to the procedure’s effect on childlessness.

. . .

Smaller studies had given the scientists an idea of what to do next. They randomly chose half of the women to get the X-ray-opaque dye dissolved in oil, while the other half got the dye in water.

. . .

In an average of three months, whether treated or not, about 40% of the women receiving the oil-based dye material became pregnant, while only 29% of the women who got the water-based dye material conceived.

Hysterosalpingography is exactly a century old this year. Luckily, some astute doctors guessed that the method of taking a picture was having an unintended fertility effect, and now research has backed this up. Such serendipity in medical progress is neatly captured by a saying of the great French biologist Louis Pasteur about the need to be ready to see the unexpected: “In the fields of observation, chance only favors the prepared mind.”

The realization that supposedly inert oil could help to fulfill some couples’ dreams has built slowly. No one knows exactly how it works.

For the full commentary see:

Melvin Konner. “Mind & Matter; Can Just Taking a Picture Help to Treat Infertility?” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 29, 2017 [sic]): C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 26, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version. The Latin words in the first quoted sentence appear in italics in the original version.)

The New England Journal of Medicine article discussed in the passages above is:

Dreyer, Kim, Joukje van Rijswijk, Velja Mijatovic, Mariëtte Goddijn, Harold R. Verhoeve, Ilse A.J. van Rooij, Annemieke Hoek, Petra Bourdrez, Annemiek W. Nap, Henrike G.M. Rijnsaardt-Lukassen, Catharina C.M. Timmerman, Mesrure Kaplan, Angelo B. Hooker, Anna P. Gijsen, Ron van Golde, Cathelijne F. van Heteren, Alexander V. Sluijmer, Jan-Peter de Bruin, Jesper M.J. Smeenk, Jacoba A.M. de Boer, Eduard Scheenjes, Annette E.J. Duijn, Alexander Mozes, Marie J. Pelinck, Maaike A.F. Traas, Machiel H.A. van Hooff, Gijsbertus A. van Unnik, Cornelia H. de Koning, Nan van Geloven, Jos W.R. Twisk, Peter G.A. Hompes, and Ben W.J. Mol. “Oil-Based or Water-Based Contrast for Hysterosalpingography in Infertile Women.” New England Journal of Medicine 376, no. 21 (May 25, 2017): 2043-52.

Loners Live Longer (At Least if You Are a Marmot)

(p. D2) For many mammals, a busy social life can be an important contributor to a long life. But some animals need more alone time than others, and failure to get it could be lethal, according to new research.

Consider the marmot. After spending 13 years tracking their interactions and life spans in Colorado, Daniel T. Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues found in a study published Wednesday [Jan. 17, 2018] in Proceedings of the Royal Society B that yellow-bellied marmots with more active social lives tended to die younger than those that avoided interactions.

For the full story see:

Douglas Quenqua. “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots at Least.” The New York Times (Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018 [sic]): D2.

(Note: bracketed date added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 17, 2018 [sic], and has the same title “Being Antisocial Leads to a Longer Life. For Marmots.” The Latin words in the first quoted sentence appear in italics in the original version.)

The academic study of Marmots discussed in the passages above is:

Blumstein, Daniel T., Dana M. Williams, Alexandra N. Lim, Svenja Kroeger, and Julien G. A. Martin. “Strong Social Relationships Are Associated with Decreased Longevity in a Facultatively Social Mammal.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 285, no. 1871 (Jan. 2018): 20171934.

“Common Practice of Excluding Former Cancer Patients From Clinical Trials”

Phase 3 randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) are very expensive and often fail. When they do the drug company loses their investment in the new drug. As a result they have a big incentive to design the RCT to maximize the chances of success. One way is to exclude weak patients who are less likely to survive the new drug, for example in the passages quoted below, by excluding patients who have a past history of cancer. But the result is that the RCT does not provide evidence about the efficacy of the new drug in helping one of the groups we would like to help.

(p. D5) In a recent report in JAMA Oncology by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, approximately 25 percent of Americans 65 and older and 11 percent of younger adults who were previously treated for cancer were subsequently found to have one or more new cancers in a different site. Depending on the type of original cancer and the person’s age, the risk of developing a second unrelated cancer ranged from 3.5 percent to 36.9 percent. The study covered 765,843 new cancer diagnoses made between 2009 and 2013 and recorded in a population-based national registry, the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) program.

. . .

The Texas researchers, led by Caitlin C. Murphy, an epidemiologist, undertook the study of new cancers in cancer survivors in hopes of changing the common practice of excluding former cancer patients from clinical trials when they develop another cancer.

“This exclusion is not evidence-based,” Dr. Murphy said in an interview. “Patients with a prior cancer do not necessarily have a worse prognosis than those without a cancer history. They should be allowed to participate in clinical trials, which may be one of their only treatment options. If they’re excluded, a lot of patients are left out from what may be the best available treatment.”

For the full story see:

Jane E. Brody. “When Cancer Strikes Twice.” The New York Times (Tuesday, December 26, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 25, 2017 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The academic report mentioned above is:

Murphy, Caitlin C., David E. Gerber, and Sandi L. Pruitt. “Prevalence of Prior Cancer among Persons Newly Diagnosed with Cancer: An Initial Report from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program.” JAMA Oncology 4, no. 6 (June 2018): 832-36.ds

“I’m Sick of It, I’m Leaving” Are First Words of Children in Primitive Village Routinely Eating Grubs and Starch Tasting Like “Gummy Mucous”

(p. C9) As she tended soldiers during the Crimean War, a British nurse found herself appalled by the wretched, vermin-infested conditions at the army’s hospital in Istanbul. She began collecting figures showing the devastating effects of the filth and the dramatic benefits of the sanitary improvements she implemented. Her presentation on the need for cleaner care facilities, published in 1858, led to reforms that ultimately saved millions of lives and increased life expectancy in the U.K. Florence Nightingale, it turns out, was a pioneering data scientist.

Data, when used to reveal the value of hospital hygiene or the harm of tobacco smoke, can be a vital force for good, as Tim Harford reminds us in “The Data Detective.”

. . .

Imprecise and inconsistent definitions are one source of confusion.  . . .  . . . “infant mortality,” a key data point for public health, varies depending on the specific time in fetal development when the line is drawn between a miscarriage and a tragically premature birth.

. . .

To learn from data, it’s essential to present it well. For her analysis after the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale created one of the first infographics, using shrewdly designed diagrams to tell a memorable story. From the outset, she regarded visually compelling data displays as indispensable to making her arguments.

. . .

An authentically open mind can make a difference, Mr. Harford says, noting that the top forecasters tend to be not experts but earnest learners who constantly take in new data while challenging and refining their hypotheses. Data, Mr. Harford concludes, can illuminate and inform as well as distract and deceive. It’s often maddeningly hard to know the difference, but it would be unforgivable not to try.

For the full review see:

Wade Davis. “To Hear a Dying Tongue.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019 [sic]): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 9, 2019 [sic], and has the title “‘A Death in the Rainforest’ Review: To Hear a Dying Tongue.”)

The book under review is:

Kulick, Don. A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2019.

Formal and Tacit Knowledge Are Located in Different Parts of the Brain

Brenda Milner turned 106 on July 15, 2024.

(p. D5) At 98, Dr. Milner is not letting up in a nearly 70-year career to clarify the function of many brain regions — frontal lobes, and temporal; vision centers and tactile; the left hemisphere and the right — usually by painstakingly testing people with brain lesions, often from surgery. Her prominence long ago transcended gender, and she is impatient with those who expect her to be a social activist. It’s science first with Dr. Milner, say close colleagues, in her lab and her life.

Perched recently on a chair in her small office, resplendent in a black satin dress and gold floral pin and banked by moldering towers of old files, she volleyed questions rather than answering them. “People think because I’m 98 years old I must be emerita,” she said. “Well, not at all. I’m still nosy, you know, curious.”

. . .

Dr. Milner changed the course of brain science for good as a newly minted Ph.D. in the 1950s by identifying the specific brain organ that is crucial to memory formation.

She did so by observing the behavior of a 29-year-old Connecticut man who had recently undergone an operation to relieve severe epileptic seizures. The operation was an experiment: On a hunch, the surgeon suctioned out two trenches of tissue from the man’s brain, one from each of his medial temporal lobes, located deep below the skull about level with the ears. The seizures subsided.

But the patient, an assembly line worker named Henry Molaison, was forever altered. He could no longer form new memories.

. . .

In a landmark 1957 paper Dr. Milner wrote with Mr. Molaison’s surgeon, she concluded that the medial temporal areas — including, importantly, an organ called the hippocampus — must be critical to memory formation. That finding, though slow to sink in, would upend the accepted teaching at the time, which held that no single area was critical to supporting memory.

Dr. Milner continued to work with Mr. Molaison and later showed that his motor memory was intact: He remembered how to perform certain physical drawing tests, even if he had no memory of learning them.

The finding, reported in 1962, demonstrated that there are at least two systems in the brain for processing memory: one that is explicit and handles names, faces and experiences; and another that is implicit and incorporates skills, like riding a bike or playing a guitar.

“I clearly remember to this day my excitement, sitting there with H. M. and watching this beautiful learning curve develop right there in front of me,” Dr. Milner said. “I knew very well I was witnessing something important.”

. . .

For Dr. Milner, after a lifetime exploring the brain, the motive for the work is personal as well as professional. “I live very close; it’s a 10-minute walk up the hill,” she said. “So it gives me a good reason to come in regularly.”

For the full story see:

Benedict Carey. “At 98, ‘Still Nosy’ About the Brain.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 16, 2017 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “Brenda Milner, Eminent Brain Scientist, Is ‘Still Nosy’ at 98.”)

The “landmark 1957 paper” mentioned above is:

Scoville, William Beecher, and Brenda Milner. “Loss of Recent Memory after Bilateral Hippocampal Lesions.” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 20, no. 1 (Feb. 1957): 11-21.

Allowing Entrepreneurial Physicians to Improvise Can Save Patient Lives, Especially for Rare Conditions

The article quoted below makes the case, by example, that drugs that would be rejected based on early randomized double-blind clinical trials, can be revived by clever trial-and-error adjustments. Such improvisations saved the life of Magglio Boscarino, whose body began to develop antibodies that attacked the medicine that had been successfully treating his rare Pompe disease. Emil Freireich used trial-and-error adjustments to develop the chemo cocktail that cured many of childhood leukemia. He mentored Vincent DeVita who used trial-and-error adjustments to develop the chemo cocktails that cured many of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Another approach, advocated by Dr. Ridker in a passage below, is to learn which patients will be able to take the drug with developing resistance to it–a form of personalized medicine that does not seem easily compatible with the oft-claimed “gold standard” of randomized double blind clinical trials.

(p. D1) The miracle treatment that should have saved Becka Boscarino’s baby boy almost killed him.

Doctors diagnosed her newborn son, Magglio, with Pompe disease, a rare and deadly genetic disorder that leads to a buildup of glycogen in the body. Left untreated, the baby would probably die before his first birthday.

There is just one treatment: a series of infusions. But after the boy received his fifth dose, he turned blue, stopped breathing and slipped into anaphylactic shock.

The problem? Eventually doctors discovered that Magglio’s body was producing antibodies to the very drug saving his life.

. . .

In a paper published in March [2017] by The New England Journal of Medicine, Pfizer reported that in the final phase of testing a new drug to lower cholesterol, many of the 30,000 patients taking it had stopped re-(p. D6)sponding to it.

Their cholesterol levels, which had plunged when they began taking the drug, were rising again. As it turned out, the subjects had begun making antibodies to the drug.

Pfizer was forced to stop the trial and pull the drug after investing billions of dollars.

. . .

By the time Magglio was 6 months old, he was weak and lacked muscle tone. Then came the diagnosis of Pompe disease and the beginning of his treatments, infusions with an enzyme his body was failing to make.

At first, Magglio improved. Within a few months, he was learning to sit up and to use his arms. His enlarged heart was shrinking. But his fifth treatment was a disaster.

He fell into anaphylactic shock and stopped breathing.

. . .

Magglio was hardly alone: Most babies with Pompe disease who received the only available treatment soon produced antibodies that rendered it useless.

“We tried everything, but these babies did not make it,” said Dr. Priya Kishnani, a professor of pediatrics at Duke University.

Dr. Kishnani realized she had to find a way to trick the immune system so it would leave the infused protein alone. Her idea was to give the babies a chemotherapy drug, rituximab, that wipes out cells that develop into antibody producers.

Along with it, she tried giving the children methotrexate, which destroys many of the body’s white blood cells, and infusions of antibodies from pooled donors’ serum so the children would have a way to fight off infections.

And for babies like Magglio, who already were making antibodies that blocked the drug they need, she added another drug — bortezomib — to eliminate those antibody-producing cells.

As the children’s immune systems were brought under control, the treatments began to work again. “It was breathtaking,” Dr. Kishnani said. “We were able to rescue these babies.”

. . .

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, cardiologist Dr. Paul Ridker, who directed the Pfizer study, is taking a different tack.

He wants to do a large genetic study to see if he can predict which patients will develop antibodies to the Pfizer drug and perhaps to other drugs that the immune system might see as foreign.

“We probably have the best opportunity ever afforded to understand the cause of these antibodies,” Dr. Ridker said. “That would be very valuable for the development of future drugs if you could say, ‘This one patient out of 20 should not take this drug.’”

It would mean, too, that drugs that might have been abandoned could be developed for the patients who can tolerate them.

For the full story see:

Gina Kolata. “When the Body Rejects the Treatment.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 16, 2017 [sic]): D1 & D6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “When the Immune System Thwarts Lifesaving Drugs.”)

The 2017 paper reporting the failed Pfizer clinical trial and mentioned above is:

Ridker, Paul M, Jean-Claude Tardif, Pierre Amarenco, William Duggan, Robert J. Glynn, J. Wouter Jukema, John J.P. Kastelein, Albert M. Kim, Wolfgang Koenig, Steven Nissen, James Revkin, Lynda M. Rose, Raul D. Santos, Pamela F. Schwartz, Charles L. Shear, and Carla Yunis. “Lipid-Reduction Variability and Antidrug-Antibody Formation with Bococizumab.” New England Journal of Medicine 376, no. 16 (April 20, 2017): 1517-26.

Noncredentialled Intense Outsider Duggan Brings Two Blockbuster Cancer Drugs to Market

(p. B11) There is a myth that making money in biotechnology stocks requires an advanced degree. But Bob Duggan, an avid surfer who never graduated from college, has proven that notion wrong. Twice.

Duggan’s latest investment, Summit Therapeutics SMMT 9.25%increase; green up pointing triangle, has become one of the industry’s greatest bets in recent years. The stock is up more than 1,000% in the past 12 months thanks to data from a late-stage trial that showed that its drug, Ivonescimab, beat Merck’s blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda in patients with a form of lung cancer. Duggan, who was already a billionaire before the Summit investment, is now worth about $16 billion, according to Forbes data.

There is much still to be worked out with the drug, which Summit licensed from Chinese biotech Akeso in 2022. For starters, investors are eager to see how it performs in global trials outside of China. What is remarkable about Summit’s success so far, though, is that this isn’t even Duggan’s first time making billions in biotech.

About 20 years ago, Duggan, a member of the Church of Scientology, began acquiring shares in a little-known biotech company called Pharmacyclics. He was drawn to the company’s cancer drug Xcytrin because of a personal loss: his son’s death from brain cancer. Pharmacyclics ultimately dropped the development of Xcytrin after multiple setbacks but went on to develop leukemia blockbuster Imbruvica. In 2015, AbbVie paid $21 billion for the company.

. . .

Nathan Vardi, author of “For Blood and Money,” which chronicles the development of Imbruvica and a competitor molecule, says that during his research he noticed that many people in biotech circles thought Duggan simply got lucky. While luck certainly plays a big role in the binary world of drug development, few would stick to that argument now.

So what is his secret? One thing Vardi points to is the ability to know when to retreat and when to go all in on an investment. “Duggan has a lifetime of experience making big bets with his own money on the line and figuring out when to hold or fold,” he wrote in an email. “Nobody gets these things completely right, but I think we have to admit he’s doing really well.”

Duggan, who built successful businesses in baking and robotics before jumping into biotechnology, suggests that the naivete of an outsider, combined with the intensity he brings to whatever he does, allowed him to try unconventional things. Nathan Vardi, author of “For Blood and Money,” which chronicles the development of Imbruvica and a competitor molecule, says that during his research he noticed that many people in biotech circles thought Duggan simply got lucky. While luck certainly plays a big role in the binary world of drug development, few would stick to that argument now.

So what is his secret? One thing Vardi points to is the ability to know when to retreat and when to go all in on an investment. “Duggan has a lifetime of experience making big bets with his own money on the line and figuring out when to hold or fold,” he wrote in an email. “Nobody gets these things completely right, but I think we have to admit he’s doing really well.”

Duggan, who built successful businesses in baking and robotics before jumping into biotechnology, suggests that the naivete of an outsider, combined with the intensity he brings to whatever he does, allowed him to try unconventional things.

For the full commentary see:

David Wainer. “Heard on the Street; An Outsider Crashes the Biotech Party.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 24, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 23, 2024, and has the title “Heard on the Street; How a Surfer Who Never Finished College Became a Biotech Billionaire.” The sentence starting with “Léon Bottou” appears in the online, but not the print, version. Where there are small differences between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The book by Vardi mentioned above is:

Vardi, Nathan. For Blood and Money: Billionaires, Biotech, and the Quest for a Blockbuster Drug. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.

Covid Loan Programs Passed by Congress Were “Comically Easy to Scam”

In a WSJ op-ed, I tell how a fraudster received a $42,200 Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan in my name for an alleged “Arthur M.D. Potato Farm.” As discussed in the NYT passages quoted below, there was also massive fraud in other related Congress-funded Small Business Administration Covid boondoggle programs. The NYT article blames the Trump Administration, but in my struggle to clear up the potato farm fraud case, a S.B.A. official told me that the Congress in 2020 put enormous pressure on the S.B.A. to get the money out the door as quickly as possible. The House of Representatives, which takes the lead in spending legislation, was controlled by the Democratic Party.

In the passages quoted below, “P.P.P.” means “Paycheck Protection Program” and “E.I.D.L.” means “Economic Injury Disaster Loan.”

(p. B4) An emergency relief program hastily rolled out in the early days of the pandemic had such poor fraud protections that it improperly doled out nearly $4.5 billion to self-employed people who said they had additional workers — even those who made wildly implausible claims, like having one million employees.

The $20 billion program, called the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Advance, offered small businesses immediate grants of up to $10,000 in the months after the pandemic shuttered much of the economy. But hundreds of thousands of the grants it made were inflated because there was no system to catch applications with “flawed or illogical information,” Hannibal Ware, the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, wrote in a report released on Thursday [Oct. 7, 2021].

. . .

. . . the S.B.A. skipped an obvious safeguard: It did not require sole proprietors claiming to have employees to enter their Employer Identification Number, instead allowing them to use their Social Security numbers.

. . .

Some of the claims were outright absurd. Hundreds of applicants received the maximum grants after saying that they employed more than 500 workers, a number that would generally make them ineligible for the small business program. Fifteen said they had one million employees — a figure that would put them in league with Amazon and Walmart.

The Small Business Administration “never requested additional information from these sole proprietors to verify the number of employees cited on their grant applications before approving and disbursing the grants,” Mr. Ware said in his report.

. . .

. . . a Bloomberg article last year described how almost comically easy it was to scam the system. It cited how-to videos that circulated on YouTube with titles like “$10k SBA Loans & GRANTS Got The STREETS Going CRAZY!”

. . .

The Justice Department has already prosecuted hundreds of cases involving fraudulent claims across the government’s $1 trillion small business pandemic relief programs, reclaiming more than $600 million.

But that is only a sliver of the amount lost to bogus claims. A March memo by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis identified an estimated $84 billion in suspected fraud in the P.P.P. and E.I.D.L. programs after the Trump administration “refused to implement basic controls.”

Mr. Ware told a House committee in April [2021] that his office had opened more than 400 cases involving the agency’s assorted relief programs.

“Fraud investigations will be a decades-long effort,” he said.

For the full story see:

Stacy Cowley. “S.B.A. Paid $4.5 Billion on Bogus Grant Claims.” The New York Times (Friday, October 8, 2021 [sic]): B4.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed date, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 7, 2021 [sic], and has the title “S.B.A. Overpaid $4.5 Billion on ‘Illogical’ Small Business Grant Claims.”)

Dogs Pass a Smell Test–Locating Ancient Buried Human Remains

(p. D1) On a sunny summer day in Croatia several years ago, an archaeologist and two dog handlers watched as two dogs, one after another, slowly worked their way across the rocky top of a wind-scoured ridge overlooking the Adriatic Sea.

. . .

Panda, a Belgian Malinois with a “sensitive nose,” according to her handler, Andrea Pintar, had begun exploring the circular leftovers of a tomb when she suddenly froze, her nose pointed toward a stone burial chest. This was her signal that she had located the scent of human remains.

Ms. Pintar said the hair on her arms rose. “I was skeptical, and I was like, ‘She is kidding me,’” she recalled thinking about her dog that day.

Archaeologists had found fragments of human bone and teeth in the chest, but these had been removed months earlier for analysis and radiocarbon dating. All that was left was a bit of dirt, the stone slabs of the tomb and the cracked limestone of the ridge.

. . .

(p. D6) . . . the experiment in Croatia marked the start of one of the most careful inquiries yet carried out of an unusual archaeological method. If such dogs could successfully locate the burial sites of mass executions, dating from World War II through the conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s, might they be effective in helping archaeologists find truly ancient burials?

. . .

That “test run” was the beginning of a careful study on whether human-remains detection dogs could be an asset to archaeologists. Setting up a controlled study was difficult. Dr. Glavaš had to learn the scientific literature, such as scent theory, far outside the standard confines of archaeology; the same was true for Ms. Pintar and the field of archaeology.

. . .

“I think dogs are really capable of this, but I think it’s a logistical challenge,” said Adee Schoon, a scent-detection-animal expert from the Netherlands who was not involved in the study. “It’s not something you can replicate again and again. It’s hard to train.”

And, as Dr. Schoon noted, dogs are “great anomaly detectors.” Something as subtle as recently disturbed soil can elicit a false alert from a dog that is not rigorously trained.

Nonetheless, the team returned to the necropolis for the first controlled tests in September 2015, and again a full year later. Both times, they used all four of Ms. Pintar and Mr. Nikolić’s cadaver dogs: Panda, Mali, a third Belgian Malinois and a German shepherd. They worked them on both known and double-blind searches, in areas where nobody knew if tombs were located.

The dogs located four tombs new to the archaeologists. Dr. Glavaš had suspected that a fifth site might hold a burial chest, and the dogs’ alerts, combined with excavation, proved her suspicion correct.

In September 2019, the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory published the results of their study: “This research has demonstrated that HRD dogs are able to detect very small amounts of specific human decomposition odor as well as to indicate to considerably older burials than previously assumed,” Dr. Glavaš and Ms. Pintar wrote.

Dr. Schoon, who researches and helps create protocols to train scent-detection animals worldwide, said the Iron Age necropolis study was nicely designed and “really controlled.”

. . .

Cadaver dogs are also helping archaeologists at some especially challenging sites. Mike Russo and Jeff Shanks, archaeologists with the National Park Service’s Southeast Archeological Center, had created at least 14 test holes near a promising site in northwest Florida that had been flattened during an earlier era of less diligent archaeology. They found nothing.

“We knew where it should be, but when we went there, there was absolutely no mound,” Mr. Russo said.

They then asked Suzi Goodhope, a longtime cadaver-dog handler in Florida, to bring her experienced detection dog, Shiraz, a Belgian Malinois, to the site in 2013. Shiraz and Ms. Goodhope worked the flat, brushy area for a long time. Then, Shiraz sat. Once.

“I was pretty skeptical,” Mr. Shanks said.

Nonetheless, the archaeologists dug. And dug. They went down nearly three feet — and there they found a human toe bone more than 1,300 years old.

Passing sniff tests

What is the future of using human-remains detection dogs as a noninvasive tool in archaeology?

Some archaeologists, forensic anthropologists, geologists, scientists — and even H.R.D. dog handlers who know how challenging the work is — say they have great potential. But challenges abound.

Although researchers are learning ever more about the canine olfactory system, they are still trying to pinpoint what volatile organic compounds in human remains are significant to trained dogs.

. . .

Detection dogs also must be trained for archaeology with more consistency. Often humans are the limiting factor. Sometimes, Dr. Schoon said, she can almost see a dog thinking, “Is that all you want me to do? I can do much more!”

For the full story see:

Cat Warren. “Sniffing Out New (Old) Digs.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 19, 2020 [sic]): D1 & D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated May 25, 2020 [sic], and has the title “When Cadaver Dogs Pick Up a Scent, Archaeologists Find Where to Dig.”)

The academic article documenting that dogs are able use their hypercapable noses to smell ancient human remains is:

Glavaš, Vedrana, and Andrea Pintar. “Human Remains Detection Dogs as a New Prospecting Method in Archaeology.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 26, no. 3 (Sept. 2019): 1106-24.

Rationality-Defender Stigler Saw Voting as Irrational, but Did It Anyway

Nobel Prize winner George Stigler contributed to the Public Choice literature and was a staunch defender of rationality. One example would be his paper with Gary Becker, “De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.” One popular, much discussed conclusion of some public choice theorists is that it is irrational to vote. The argument goes that the marginal effect of one vote is almost always miniscule, so the expected benefit to the voter is equally miniscule. On the other hand, the time and effort it takes to vote are always more than miniscule. So the expected costs of voting exceed the expected benefits. Ergo it is irrational to vote. When I was a graduate student, taking courses in philosophy and economics, and for a couple of years as a post-doctoral fellow, I frequently stopped by the office of the Journal of Political Economy where Stigler was an editor. I believe it was there that I heard Stigler, definitely on an election day, say “Here I go to do something irrational.”

Stigler is well-known for his humorous biting comments. These could be tough on others. But this story shows that they also could be directed at himself.

I do not know if anyone has fully solved the paradox of the irrationality of voting. I guess you would have to say something about how the effects of all good people ceasing to vote would be far from marginal and far from good.

I once mentioned to distinguished Public Choice theorist Dwight Lee that a positive result of the personal benefits of voting being miniscule to a voter, is that the voter was freed from voting their personal narrow self-interest, and could vote their conscience about what served the general good. (Maybe something like what Rawls hoped for behind his “veil of ignorance” in A Theory of Justice.) I believe that Dwight told me that he already published a paper that expressed this positive result, but I never took the time to look for that paper.