Category: Science

If Rapamycin Works in Humans as in Mice, We Gain 20 Years in Good Health

KaeberleinMattWithDogDobby2016-05 -26.jpg“Dr. Matt Kaeberlein, a biology of aging researcher, with his dog Dobby in North Bend, Wash. He helped fund a drug study using his own money.” Source of caption: p. A12 of print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A12) But scientists who champion the study of aging’s basic biology — they call it “geroscience” — say their field has received short shrift from the biomedical establishment. And it was not lost on the University of Washington researchers that exposing dog lovers to the idea that aging could be delayed might generate popular support in addition to new data.
“Many of us in the biology of aging field feel like it is underfunded relative to the potential impact on human health this could have,” said Dr. Kaeberlein, who helped pay for the study with funds he received from the university for turning down a competing job offer. “If the average pet owner sees there’s a way to significantly delay aging in their pet, maybe it will begin to impact policy decisions.”
The idea that resources might be better spent trying to delay aging rather than to cure diseases flies in the face of most disease-related philanthropy and the Obama administration’s proposal to spend $1 billion on a “cancer moonshot.” And many scientists say it is still too unproven to merit more investment.
The National Institutes of Health has long been organized around particular diseases, including the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. There is the National Institute on Aging, but about a third of its budget last year was directed exclusively to research on Alzheimer’s disease, and its Division of Aging Biology represents a tiny fraction of the N.I.H.’s $30 billion annual budget. That is, in part, because the field is in its infancy, said the N.I.H. director, Dr. Francis Collins.
. . .
“The squirrels in my neighborhood have a 25-year life span, but they look like rats that live two years,” said Gary Ruvkun, a pioneer in aging biology at Harvard Medical School. “If you look at what nature has selected for and allowed, it suggests that you might be able to get your hands on the various levers that change things.”
. . .
Over 1,500 dog owners applied to participate in the trial of rapamycin, which has its roots in a series of studies in mice, the first of which was published in 2009. Made by a type of soil bacterium, rapamycin has extended the life spans of yeast, flies and worms by about 25 percent.
But in what proved a fortuitous accident, the researchers who set out to test it in mice had trouble formulating it for easy consumption. As a result, the mice were 20 months old — the equivalent of about 60 human years — when the trial began. That the longest-lived mice survived about 12 percent longer than the control groups was the first indication that the drug could be given later in life and still be effective.
Dr. Kaeberlein said he had since achieved similar benefits by giving 20-month-old mice the drug for only three months. (The National Institute on Aging rejected his request for funding to further test that treatment.) Younger mice, given higher doses, have lived about 25 percent longer than those not given the drug, and mice of varying ages and genetic backgrounds have been slower to develop some cancers, kidney disease, obesity and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. In one study, their hearts functioned better for longer.
“If you do the extrapolation for people, we’re probably talking a couple of decades, with the expectation that those years are going to be spent in relatively good health,” Dr. Kaeberlein said.
. . .
. . . what dog lovers have long considered the sad fact that their pets age about seven times as fast as they do, Dr. Kaeberlein knew, would be a boon for a study of rapamycin that would have implications for both species. An owner of two dogs himself, he was determined to scrounge up the money for the pilot phase of what he and Dr. Promislow called the Dog Aging Project.
Last month, he reported at a scientific meeting that no significant side effects had been observed in the dogs, even at the highest of three doses. And compared with the hearts of dogs in the control group, the hearts of those taking the drug pumped blood more efficiently at the end. The researchers would like to enroll 450 dogs for a more comprehensive five-year study, but do not yet have the money.
Even if the study provided positive results on all fronts, a human trial would carry risks.
Dr. Kaeberlein, for one, said they would be worth it.
“I would argue we should be willing to tolerate some level of risk if the payoff is 20 to 30 percent increase in healthy longevity,” he said. “If we don’t do anything, we know what the outcome is going to be. You’re going to get sick, and you’re going to die.”

For the full story, see:
AMY HARMON. “CHASING IMMORTALITY; Dogs Test Drug Aimed at Humans’ Biggest Killer: Age.” The New York Times (Tues., MAY 17, 2016): A1 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 16, 2016, and has the title “CHASING IMMORTALITY; Dogs Test Drug Aimed at Slowing Aging Process.”)

An academic paper that discusses the wide variability in life span of different species in the order Rodentia (which includes short-lived rats and long-lived squirrels), is:
Gorbunova, Vera, Michael J. Bozzella, and Andrei Seluanov. “Rodents for Comparative Aging Studies: From Mice to Beavers.” Age 30, no. 2-3 (June 25, 2008): 111-19.

Some “Rescue” Groups “Kidnap and Mutilate” Street Dogs

(p. D1) MONTAGUE, Mass. — Think of all the dogs out there: labradors and poodles and labradoodles; huskies and westies and dogues de Bordeaux; pit bulls and spaniels and lovable mutts that go to doggy day care.
Add them up, all the pet dogs on the planet, and you get about 250 million.
But there are about a billion dogs on Earth, according to some estimates. The other 750 million don’t have flea collars. And they certainly don’t have humans who take them for walks and pick up their feces. They are called village dogs, street dogs and free-breeding dogs, among other things, and they haunt the garbage dumps and neighborhoods of most of the world.
In their new book, “What Is a Dog?,” Raymond and Lorna Coppinger argue that if you really want to understand the nature of dogs, you need to know these other animals. The vast majority are not strays or lost pets, the Coppingers say, but rather superbly adapted scavengers — the closest living things to the dogs that first emerged thousands of years ago.
. . .
(p. D6) In 2001, their book “Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution” challenged the way scientists thought about the beginnings of dogs.
They argued against the widely held view that one day a hunter-gatherer grabbed a wolf pup from a den and started a breeding program. Instead, they argued, dogs domesticated themselves.
Some wild canines started hanging around humans for their leftovers and gradually evolved into scavengers dependent on humans. Not everyone in canine science shares that view today, but many researchers think it is the most plausible route to domestication.
. . .
Although the Coppingers recognize the social cost of animals that are unvaccinated and running free, they argue that killing the dogs, as some countries do during rabies epidemics, does not help. It’s impossible to kill them all, and because they breed rapidly, the population quickly rebounds.
Nor do the Coppingers have any sympathy for rescue groups that, as Dr. Coppinger puts it, “kidnap and mutilate” street dogs from the Caribbean and elsewhere to bring them to American shelters to live as pets, “where they are made totally dependent and entirely restricted.” This is supposed to benefit the dogs, but Dr. Coppinger argues that they are taken from a rich social environment, with many dogs, to lives of relative isolation.

For the full story, see:
JAMES GORMAN. “Don’t Call them Strays.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 19, 2016): D1 & D6.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 18, 2016, and has the title “The World Is Full of Dogs Without Collars.”)

The dog books mentioned above, are:
Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. What Is a Dog? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Coppinger, Raymond, and Lorna Coppinger. Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Scientific Knowledge Matters More than Myth Because of Its Practical Effectiveness

(p. C6) Stories matter; knowledge matters more.
“When we talk about the big bang or the fabric of space,” . . . [Carlo Rovelli] writes, “what we are doing is not a continuation of the free and fantastic stories that humans have told nightly around campfires for hundreds of thousands of years.” You might tell a great campfire story about an antelope, he comments. Knowing how to track and kill one is more relevant to survival.
“Myths nourish science, and science nourishes myth,” Mr. Rovelli says. “But the value of knowledge remains. If we can find the antelope, we can eat.”

For the full review, see:
DWIGHT GARNER. “Books of The Times; A Vast Cosmos, Made Bite-Size and Delectable.” The New York Times (Weds., MARCH 23, 2016): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MARCH 22, 2016, and has the title “Books of The Times; Review: ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ Is Long on Knowledge.”)

The book under review, is:
Rovelli, Carlo. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. New York: Riverhead Books, 2016.

Global Warming Is Producing More Pleasant Weather in United States

(p. 9) CHRISTMAS in New York was lovely this year — especially for those who prefer to spend the day working on their tans. It was the city’s warmest ever, with temperatures peaking at 66 degrees.
Record-breaking temperatures are occurring with alarming frequency in the United States, but Americans are reacting with a collective shrug. In a poll taken in January, after the country’s warmest December on record, the Pew Research Center found that climate change ranked close to last on a list of the public’s policy priorities. Why?
In a paper published on Wednesday [April 20, 2016] in the journal Nature, we provide one possible explanation: For a vast majority of Americans, the weather is simply becoming more pleasant. Over the past four decades, winter temperatures have risen substantially throughout the United States, but summers have not become markedly more uncomfortable.
Of course, people’s preferences about weather vary widely. Some want a snowfall every winter, while others would rather wear sandals year-round. So we sought to develop a measure of the average American’s weather preferences. To do this, we made use of research by economists who study local population growth in the United States. They have found that Americans have been moving to places with warm winters and cool, less humid summers. We made the inference (not true in every case, but reasonable to assume in general) that Americans prefer such conditions.
Then we evaluated the changes in weather conditions that Americans have experienced over the past four decades (i.e., roughly since climate change emerged as an issue in the public sphere). Climatologists customarily report weather changes averaged over the land surface — an approach that counts changes in sparse Montana just as heavily as shifts in populous California. But because we were interested in the typical American’s exposure to weather, we took a different tack, calculating changes over time on a county-by-county basis, weighted by population.
Our findings are striking: 80 percent of Americans now find themselves living in counties where the weather is more pleasant than it was four decades ago.

For the full commentary, see:
PATRICK J. EGAN and MEGAN MULLIN. “Gray Matter; Global Warming Feels Quite Pleasant.” The New York Times (Sun., APRIL 24, 2016): 9.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 21, 2016.)

The Nature article mentioned above, is:
Egan, Patrick J., and Megan Mullin. “Recent Improvement and Projected Worsening of Weather in the United States.” Nature 532, no. 7599 (April 21, 2016): 357-60.

Many Empirical Research Results Are False

(p. B7) Research on 100 studies in psychology found in 2015 that more than 60% couldn’t be replicated. Similar results have been found in medicine and economics. Campbell Harvey, a professor at Duke University and president of the American Finance Association, estimates that at least half of all “discoveries” in investment research, and financial products based on them, are false.
. . .
Brian Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit seeking to improve research practices, has spent much of the last decade analyzing why so many studies don’t stand up over time.
Because researchers have an incentive to come up with results that are “positive and clean and novel,” he says, they often test a plethora of ideas, throwing out those that don’t appear to work and pursuing those that confirm their own hunches.
If the researchers test enough possibilities, they may find positive results by chance alone — and may fool themselves into believing that luck didn’t determine the outcomes.

For the full commentary, see:
JASON ZWEIG. “Chasing Hot Returns in ‘Smart-Beta’ Can Be Dumb.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Feb 13, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Feb 12, 2016, and has the title “Chasing Hot Returns in ‘Smart-Beta’ Funds Can Be a Dumb Idea.”)

Indian Government Scientists Fight Global Warming by Reducing Cow Belches

(p. A10) Let no one say that India isn’t doing its bit to fight global climate change: Government scientists are working hard to reduce carbon emissions by making cows less flatulent.
Consider the numbers: India is home to more than 280 million cows, and 200 million more ruminant animals like sheep, goats, yaks and buffalo. According to an analysis of satellite data from the country’s space program, all those digestive tracts send 13 million tons of methane into the atmosphere every year — and pound for pound, methane traps 25 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does.
. . .
Scientists at the Cow Research Institute in Mathura, around 100 miles south of New Delhi, are tinkering with cattle feed, seeking a formula that will create less gas for the cows to belch out. (That is how most of it is released, by the way; scientists say much less comes from farting.)
But a team of researchers in the southern state of Kerala is working on a long-term answer.
. . .
. . . dwarf animals, which are about one-quarter the weight of crossbred cows, produce only one-seventh as much manure and one-tenth as much methane.

For the full story, see:
ELLEN BARRY. “What in the World; Cows: India’s Reply to Global Warming.” The New York Times (Thurs., MAY 5, 2016): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 3, 2016, and has the title “What in the World; India’s Answer to Global Warming; Cows That Belch Less.”)

Skepticism of Science Is Incompatible with Communist Dogma

(p. A11) On June 6, 1989, the physicist Fang Lizhi took refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the invitation of President George H.W. Bush, who told Fang, then being hunted by the Communist Party, that he could stay as long as necessary. Two days earlier, troops from the People’s Liberation Army had crushed the democracy protests in central Beijing and other cities that had riveted China–and the world. Fang did not participate directly in the Tiananmen Square protests, but his campus talks and writings on democracy during the 1980s had made him a hero to the students and an archenemy of the authorities. He and his wife, Li Shuxian, also a physicist, were No.1 and No. 2 on an arrest list after the massacre.
Fang and his wife stayed at the embassy for 13 months. During that time he wrote “The Most Wanted Man in China,” a thoughtful, funny and still relevant memoir that recalls those tense days and the years leading up to them, during which Fang openly challenged China’s Communist Party in a battle of ideas.
. . .
Fang has been called the “Chinese Sakharov” and not only because of his brilliance. “For Fang as for [Andrei] Sakharov,” as Perry Link, a scholar of Chinese language and dissent, writes in the book’s foreword, “rights were implied by science.” Its axioms of “skepticism, freedom of inquiry, respect for evidence, the equality of inquiring minds, and the universality of truth . . . led Fang toward human rights and to reject dogma of every kind, including, eventually, the dogma of the Chinese communism that he had idealistically embraced.”

For the full review, see:
ELLEN BORK. “BOOKSHELF; He Made the Great Leap; Fang Lizhi’s name is banned in China. But everyone there who continues to push for democratic rights owes a debt to the dissident.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Feb. 17, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Feb. 16, 2016,)

The book discussed in the review, is:
Fang, Lizhi. The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey from Scientist to Enemy of the State. New York: Henry Holt and Co., LLC, 2016.

Locally Sourced Chipotle’s Swift, Severe and Surprising Fall from Grace

(p. B1) Chipotle emphasizes fresh, locally sourced ingredients. It was the first major chain to reject genetically modified food. Chipotle has embodied the notion of doing well by doing good.
So it may not be too surprising that its fall from grace has been swift and severe.
Since July, when five customers became ill with the E. coli bacterium after eating at a Chipotle restaurant in Seattle — the first food-borne illness connected to the chain since 2009 — Chipotle has been confronted by a rash of outbreaks. At least six incidents have occurred over the last six months.
“I’ve been involved in every food-borne illness outbreak, small and large, since 1993,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle-based lawyer who specializes in representing victims of food-borne illnesses and has filed several recent cases against Chipotle. “I can’t think of any chain, restaurant or food manufacturer who’s ever reported that many outbreaks in just six months. Underlying that has to be a lack of controls.”

For the full story, see:
JAMES B. STEWART. “Common Sense; New Chipotle Mantra: Safe (and Fresh) Food.” The New York Times (Fri., JAN. 15, 2016): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JAN. 14, 2016, and has the title “Common Sense; Chipotle’s New Mantra: Safe Food, Not Just Fresh.”)

“Science Is Not a Body of Infallible Work, of Immutable Laws”

(p. 1) . . . , “Failure: Why Science Is So Successful” is a breath of contemplative fresh air. Stuart ­Fire­stein, a professor in the department of biological sciences at Columbia University, is best known for his work on ignorance, including inviting scientists to speak to his students about what they don’t know. In a tone reminiscent of Lewis Thomas’s “The Lives of a Cell,” the book is a collection of loosely interwoven meditations on failure and scientific method.
. . .
If we succeed by failing, then we should be freed from the monolithic road to academic tenure; science should be taught as an adventure in failure. With a delightful combination of feigned naïveté and keen eye for the messy ways that great discoveries occur, he goes so far as to suggest writing a grant proposal in which you promise to fail better. He knows this isn’t how the world works, but nevertheless argues that change will take place “when we cease, or at least reduce, our devotion to facts and collections of them, when we decide that science education is not a memorization marathon, when we — scientists and nonscientists — recognize that science is not a body of infallible work, of immutable laws of facts. . . . And that most of what there is to know is still unknown.”

For the full review, see:
ROBERT A. BURTON. “Error Messages.”The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., Jan. 3, 2016): 8.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date DEC. 29, 2015, and has the title “‘Black Box Thinking’ and ‘Failure: Why Science Is So Successful’.”)

The book under review, is:
Firestein, Stuart. Failure: Why Science Is So Successful. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Frustrating Failure to Cure Cancer

PiersonEmmaAndGrandfather2016-01-20.jpg“Emma Pierson as a child playing chess with her grandfather, whose cancer she is trying to fight.” Source of caption: print version of the NYT article quoted and cited below. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) . . . in the four years since I learned I carried a BRCA mutation, I have watched my attempts to do something about it repeatedly miss the mark. I joined a laboratory to do cancer research, but the paper we wrote had little to do with cancer; I joined a company that offered the cheapest BRCA tests on the market, and its service was shut down a month after I arrived. I am 24 years old; at 25, I will have to choose between aggressive screening and prophylactic mastectomy. I had hoped to use my brain to protect my body, but I am running out of time.

If life’s complexities confound a 20-year-old’s desperate idealism, cancer’s do as well. The more I learn, the more I worry that we may never find a singular cure for cancer: that each cancer’s unique biological filigree necessitates a brutal and byzantine combination of treatments.
I also worry that the end goal is so far away that we sometimes lose sight of its importance, and view biological research as a competitive game rather than a means of saving lives. I feared being the worst student in my first cancer class, even though a roomful of researchers better than I am is exactly what I should want. Since then, I’ve seen many indications of the competitiveness in cancer research — a teacher who made us promise not to steal other students’ final projects, scientists who snipe at one another or falsify work — that make me think I am not the only one who sometimes forgets what is at stake.
. . .
I am not going to cure cancer, not even the BRCA cancers. And I am going to watch the people I love die from diseases I cannot understand or prevent. I would be lying if I told you I have made my peace with that. It gives me hope only to fight, as my grandfather did, for futures unseen: to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

For the full commentary, see:
EMMA PIERSON. “Leaving No Move Untried.” The New York Times (Tues., Dec.. 1, 2015): D4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 30, 2015, and has the title “Seeking a Cancer-Free World.” The last words in Pierson’s commentary quote the final line of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s great poem “Ulysses.”)

“Hey You, Get Busy” Bolted in Place

(p. D8) Most scientists rely on grants from the federal government and private foundations to finance their work. Michael W. Davidson turned to neckties.
Mr. Davidson, who died on Dec. 24 [2015] at 65, used sophisticated microscopes to create stunning, psychedelic images of crystallized substances like DNA and hormones, and he contributed to Nobel Prize-honored research about the inner workings of cells. His images were on the covers of scientific journals and, as unlikely as it might seem, on neckwear.
They found their way into men’s apparel in the early 1990s, when Mr. Davidson called Irwin Sternberg, the president of the necktie company Stonehenge Ltd., proposing a series of ties using his ultramagnified, wildly colorful images of vitamins. Mr. Sternberg, though skeptical, agreed to take a look.
“When I saw Michael’s work, I started to think I couldn’t get a designer more talented,” Mr. Sternberg said in an interview.
Stonehenge released a line of “vitamin ties” in September 1993. A year later, neckties with Mr. Davidson’s images of moon rocks were released on the 25th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar mission. Ties with images of cocktails, beer and wine followed. Millions of ties were sold, and a slice of the profits — millions of dollars — went to charity. Mr. Davidson’s share went to his laboratory work at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
. . .
Mr. Davidson started college at Georgia Southern University, then attended Oglethorpe University in Georgia before earning a chemistry degree at Georgia State.
He arrived at Florida State in the early 1980s as a graduate student. He quit to start a business chrome-plating auto parts.
A few years later, Mr. Davidson returned to Florida State as a microscopy technician for a materials research laboratory. “He just came in and said, ‘I think there are things we can do,’ and he got hired,” said Kirby Kemper, a retired Florida State physics professor who was then associate chairman of the physics department.
To produce his work, Mr. Davidson hired an army of assistants. Some were undergraduates. Others were out of school with no credentials in the field. But the work helped propel many of them to successful jobs in academia and industry.
Eric Clark had been a nurse when Mr. Davidson hired him as an assistant in 1999. Now, as an application developer, he is continuing Mr. Davidson’s educational website and scientific illustration operations. (The molecular biology laboratory was disbanded.)
Mr. Davidson worked seven days a week, and he expected the same of the people who worked with him. On his door was a large metal sign that said, “Hey you, get busy.” MagLab officials told him to take it down. Mr. Davidson bolted it in place, and it is still there.

For the full obituary, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Michael W. Davidson, 65, a Scientist Who Had an Artist’s Eye for Detail.” The New York Times (Sat., JAN. 16, 2016): D8.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date JAN. 12, 2016, and has the title “Michael W. Davidson, a Success in Microscopes and Neckwear, Dies at 65.”)