Month: August 2025

“One Man’s Poison Is Another Man’s Cure”*

*The title “One Man’s Poison Is Another Man’s Cure” is a proverb that is widely attributed to the poet Lucretius. (I have not found a documented source.)

My commentary was posted on the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) web site on Mon., Aug. 18, 2025.

Below are notes on sources supporting claims I make in the commentary.

https://www.1daysooner.org/ [website of group defending human challenge trials]

Attia, Peter. Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity. New York: Harmony, 2023, pp. 78 & 84-86. [source of Attia’s views of rapamycin]

Bailey, Clifford J., and Caroline Day. “Metformin: Its Botanical Background.” Practical Diabetes International 21, no. 3 (April 2004): 115-17. [source on metformin]

Freeberg, Ernest. The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America, Penguin History American Life. New York: The Penguin Press, 2013, pp. 87 & 200-201. [source on electrification of New York faster than London]

Glanville, Jacob, Mark Bellin, Sergei Pletnev, Baoshan Zhang, Joel Christian Andrade, Sangil Kim, David Tsao, Raffaello Verardi, Rishi Bedi, Sindy Liao, Raymond Newland, Nicholas L. Bayless, Sawsan Youssef, Ena S. Tully, Tatsiana Bylund, Sujeong Kim, Hannah Hirou, Tracy Liu, and Peter D. Kwong. “Snake Venom Protection by a Cocktail of Varespladib and Broadly Neutralizing Human Antibodies.” Cell 188 (2025): 1-18. https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00402-7

Harrison, David E., Randy Strong, Zelton Dave Sharp, James F. Nelson, Clinton M. Astle, Kevin Flurkey, Nancy L. Nadon, J. Erby Wilkinson, Krystyna Frenkel, Christy S. Carter, Marco Pahor, Martin A. Javors, Elizabeth Fernandez, and Richard A. Miller. “Rapamycin Fed Late in Life Extends Lifespan in Genetically Heterogeneous Mice.” Nature 460, no. 7253 (July 16, 2009): 392-95. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature08221

Ineichen, Benjamin V., Eva Furrer, Servan L. Grüninger, Wolfgang E. Zürrer, and Malcolm R. Macleod. “Analysis of Animal-to-Human Translation Shows That Only 5% of Animal-Tested Therapeutic Interventions Obtain Regulatory Approval for Human Applications.” PLOS Biology 22, no. 6 (2024): e3002667. [The title is misleading because the main message of the article is that “Notably, our meta-analysis showed an 86% concordance between positive results in animal and clinical studies.” The authors further explain: “We conclude that, contrary to widespread assertions, the rate of successful animal-to-human translation may be higher than previously reported. Nonetheless, the low rate of final approval indicates potential deficiencies in the design of both animal studies and early clinical trials.” (The quotations are both from the Abstract on p. 1) (See also: “How can we make sense of the fact that animal studies and early clinical trials seem to show promise, yet there is very limited official approval for these therapies? There are 2 possible explanations: One scenario is that the strict requirements of RCTs and regulatory approval are causing many potentially valuable treatments to be left behind. The other scenario is that both animal studies and early clinical trials may have limitations in their design, such as a lack of proper randomization and blinding, which affects their internal validity [45].” p. 12 https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002667)]

Jewett, Christina. “Charlatans’ No Reason to Curb Untested Drugs, Kennedy Says.” The New York Times (Fri., June 6, 2025): A1 & A11. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/health/kennedy-stem-cells-experimental-treatments.html?searchResultPosition=1

Kinch, Michael. Between Hope and Fear: A History of Vaccines and Human Immunity. New York: Pegasus Books, 2018, pp. 33-34. [one source on Jesty]

Mandavilli, Apoorva. “Man of 200 Snake Bites May Be the Antivenom.” The New York Times (Sat., May 3, 2025): A1 & A19. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/health/snakes-universal-antivenom-tim-friede.html?searchResultPosition=1

Mannick, Joan B., Giuseppe Del Giudice, Maria Lattanzi, Nicholas M. Valiante, Jens Praestgaard, Baisong Huang, Michael A. Lonetto, Holden T. Maecker, John Kovarik, Simon Carson, David J. Glass, and Lloyd B. Klickstein. “mTOR Inhibition Improves Immune Function in the Elderly.” Science Translational Medicine 6, no. 268 (2014): doi:10.1126/scitranslmed.3009892. https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/scitranslmed.3009892?__hsfp=1773666937&__hstc=12316075.81f04695664b9dc054b5f524eb53b5a4.1525132803174.1525132803175.1525132803176.1&__hssc=12316075.1.1525132803177

Morgan, Kate. “Vaccine Protesters Find Winning Slogan: ‘Health Freedom.” The New York Times (Weds., Jan. 1, 2025): A11. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/28/well/health-freedom-medical-freedom-covid.html?searchResultPosition=1

Smith, Dana G. “Is the Secret to a Longer Life Hidden in a Transplant Drug?” The New York Times (Weds., Sept. 25, 2024): A1 & ?. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/well/live/rapamycin-aging-longevity-benefits-risks.html

Subbaraman, Nidhi. “A Universal Antivenom, from a Man Bitten by Snakes 200 Times.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 14, 2025): C5. https://www.wsj.com/science/biology/snake-bite-blood-universal-antivenom-6de30fda?mod=Searchresults_pos1&page=1

Whiteman, Noah. Online notes to accompany Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins―from Spices to Vices. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023. [source of claim that 40% of drugs come from traditional medicine]

Zuckerman, Gregory. A Shot to Save the World: The inside Story of the Life-or-Death Race for a Covid-19 Vaccine. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021, pp. 5-6. [one source on Jesty]

Brigham and Epstein Have the Guts to Nudge the Overton Window

The Overton Window is the range of “officially acceptable” or “politically correct” policy views. The left has been successful at shifting the window in their direction, for instance, in cancelling those who question any aspect of the global warming ideology for being outside polite discourse. In the face of cancel culture it takes courage to challenge the current Overton Window. Brigham and Epstein (see below) have that courage. Their views should be considered.

(p. B12) Exxon Mobil, Occidental Petroleum and other oil giants are expected to receive billions of dollars of incentives to collect and bury carbon emissions. Texas oil billionaire Ben “Bud” Brigham and pro-fossil-fuels activist Alex Epstein want to turn off the tap.

Brigham, a serial entrepreneur and libertarian from Austin, is urging President Trump and the Republicans who are considering slashing a host of energy incentives to go further and nix tax credits for carbon capture.

. . .

Brigham says he doubts carbon capture can be profitable without public funding and that it is a distraction from firms’ core mission of finding oil and gas. He says that the subsidies distort markets and encourage cronyism.

A geophysicist by training, Brigham made his fortune building and selling two oil companies for a total of about $7 billion. He is an Ayn Rand fan who has produced two movies based on the philosopher’s work. He was also a major backer of what is now the Civitas Institute, a conservative center that launched in 2022 at the University of Texas at Austin.

Brigham first met Epstein, another Rand fan, about a decade ago. The two men bonded over a common belief in the importance of free markets and fossil fuels. Epstein is the author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” a book saying that the imperative to fuel societies flourishing with oil and gas outweighs climate-change risks. It has given Republicans ammunition to counter the left’s climate push, oil lobbyists say.

For the full story, see:

Benoît Morenne. “Oil Tycoon, Philosopher Fight Carbon-Capture Goals.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., July 1, 2025): B12.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 28, 2025, and has the title “The Oil Tycoon and the Philosopher Threatening Big Oil’s Bet on Carbon Capture.”)

Epstein’s book, mentioned above, is:

Epstein, Alex. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. New York: Portfolio, 2014.

Lucian L. Leape Was Willing to Take the Ill-Will

In an earlier entry I presented Charlie Munger’s story where a hospital administrator had to be willing to absorb the ill-will, if he was to take the actions necessary to fix a badly malfunctioning department of the hospital. Another person willing to absorb the ill-will in order to reform medicine was Lucian L. Leape whose story is sketched in the passages quoted below.

(p. B21) Lucian L. Leape, a surgeon whose insights into medical mistakes in the 1990s gave rise to the field of patient safety, rankling much of the health care establishment in the process, died on Monday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 94.

. . .

In 1986, at age 56, Dr. Leape grew interested in health policy and spent a year at the RAND Corporation on a midcareer fellowship studying epidemiology, statistics and health policy.

Following his stint at RAND, he joined the team at Harvard conducting the Medical Practice Study. When Dr. Howard Hiatt, then the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), offered Dr. Leape the opportunity to work on the study, “I accepted,” Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, “Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement,” “not suspecting it would change my life.”

The most significant finding, Dr. Leape said in the 2015 interview, was that two-thirds of the injuries to patients were caused by errors that appeared to be preventable. “The implications were profound,” he said.

In 1994, Dr. Leape submitted a paper to The New England Journal of Medicine, laying out the extent to which preventable medical injury occurred and arguing for a shift of focus away from individuals and toward systems. But the paper was rejected. “I was told it didn’t meet their standards,” he recalled.

Dr. Leape sent the paper out again, this time to The Journal of the American Medical Association. Dr. George Lundberg, then the editor of JAMA, immediately recognized the importance of the topic, Dr. Leape said. “But he also knew it could offend many doctors. We didn’t talk about mistakes.”

Dr. Donald M. Berwick, president emeritus at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston and a longtime colleague of Dr. Leape’s, agreed. “To talk about error in medicine back then was considered rude,” he said in an interview in 2020. “Errors were what we call normalized. Bad things happen, and that’s just the way it is.”

“But then you had Lucian,” he added, “this quite different voice in the room saying, ‘No, this isn’t normal. And we can do something about it.’”

Dr. Leape’s paper, “Error in Medicine,” was the first major article on the topic in the general medical literature. The timing of publication, just before Christmas in 1994, Dr. Leape wrote in his 2021 book, was intentional. Dr. Lundberg knew it would receive little attention and therefore wouldn’t upset colleagues.

On Dec. 3, 1994, however, three weeks before the JAMA piece appeared, Betsy Lehman, a 39-year-old health care reporter for The Boston Globe, died after mistakenly receiving a fatal overdose of chemotherapy at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

“Betsy’s death was a watershed event,” Dr. Leape said in a 2020 interview for a short documentary about Ms. Lehman.

The case drew national attention. An investigation into the death revealed that it wasn’t caused by one individual clinician, but by a series of errors involving multiple physicians and nurses who had misinterpreted a four-day regimen as a single dose, administering quadruple the prescribed amount.

The case made Dr. Leape’s point with tragic clarity: Ms. Lehman’s death, like so many others, resulted from a system that lacked sufficient safeguards to prevent the error.

. . .

Dr. Gawande said he believed it was the confidence Dr. Leape had acquired as a surgeon that girded him in the face of strong resistance from medical colleagues.

“He had enough arrogance to believe in himself and in what he was saying,” Dr. Gawande said. “He knew he was onto something important, and that he could bring the profession along, partly by goading the profession as much as anything.”

For the full obituary, see:

Katie Hafner. “Lucian L. Leape, 94, Who Put Patient Safety at Forefront, Is Dead.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 3, 2025): B21.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 1, 2025, and has the title “Lucian Leape, Whose Work Spurred Patient Safety in Medicine, Dies at 94.”)

Dr. Leape’s history of his efforts to increase healthcare safety can be found in:

Leape, Lucian L. Making Healthcare Safe: The Story of the Patient Safety Movement. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2021.

Was Schumpeter Mean to Hayek?

I have sometimes been surprised by the level of hostility of some Austrian economists toward Joseph Schumpeter. I once asked a distinguished Austrian economist why so much hostility? His answer was: ‘Schumpeter was mean to Hayek.’ Of course, Schumpeter and F.A. Hayek disagreed on some issues of method and theory, but so did other Austrians, such as Murray Rothbard and Hayek. I have read a few biographies of Schumpeter and have never read that Schumpeter was ever personally mean to Hayek. To the contrary, when I spent a day in the Schumpeter archives at Harvard, I ran across a carbon-copy of a letter that Schumpeter wrote to Stephen P. Duggan, co-founder and president of the Institute of International Education. Schumpeter wrote that Hayek wanted to give a lecture tour of the United States in March and April and asked if Duggan “would undertake the management of the trip.” Schumpeter wrote that “very many economists in this country would like an exchange of ideas with so outstanding a man.” (The letter was dated “January 16,” with a typo in the year, but with a jotted correction indicating, I think, “1940”—Hayek did visit the United States in 1940.)

Skimming Schumpeter’s letters in the archive leaves the impression that Schumpeter was almost always gracious to everybody almost all of the time, Hayek included.