Science – Page 41 – artdiamondblog.com

Obstacles to Curing Scurvy: A Deadly Experiment and Putting Theory Before Evidence

(p. 165) What was needed was some kind of distilled essence – an antiscorbutic, as the medical men termed it – that would be effective against scurvy but portable too. In the 1760s, a Scottish doctor named William Stark, evidently encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, conducted a series of patently foolhardy experiments in which he tried (p. 166) to identify the active agent by, somewhat bizarrely, depriving himself of it. For weeks he lived on only the most basic of foods – bread and water chiefly – to see what would happen. What happened was that in just over six months he killed himself, from scurvy, without coming to any helpful conclusions at all.
In roughly the same period, James Lind, a naval surgeon, conducted a more scientifically rigorous (and personally less risky) experiment by finding twelve sailors who had scurvy already, dividing them into pairs, and giving each pair a different putative elixir – vinegar to one, garlic and mustard to another, oranges and lemons to a third, and so on. Five of the groups showed no improvement, but the pair given oranges and lemons made a swift and total recovery. Amazingly, Lind decided to ignore the significance of the result and doggedly stuck with his personal belief that scurvy was caused by incompletely digested food building up toxins within the body.

Source:
Bryson, Bill. At Home: A Short History of Private Life. New York: Doubleday, 2010.

Drug from David Sinclair’s Sirtris Start-Up Lengthens Life of Obese Mice

“An obese mouse given the drug SRT-1720, center, and one not given the drug, right.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) Sustaining the flickering hope that human aging might somehow be decelerated, researchers have found they can substantially extend the average life span of obese mice with a specially designed drug.

The drug, SRT-1720, protects the mice from the usual diseases of obesity by reducing the amount of fat in the liver and increasing sensitivity to insulin. These and other positive health effects enable the obese mice to live 44 percent longer, on average, than obese mice that did not receive the drug, according to a team of researchers led by Rafael de Cabo, a gerontologist at the National Institute on Aging.
Drugs closely related to SRT-1720 are now undergoing clinical trials in humans.
The findings “demonstrate for the first time the feasibility of designing novel molecules that are safe and effective in promoting longevity and preventing multiple age-related diseases in mammals,” Dr. de Cabo and colleagues write in Thursday’s issue of the new journal Scientific Reports. Their conclusion supports claims that had been thrown in doubt by an earlier study that was critical of SRT-1720.
A drug that makes it cost-free to be obese may seem more a moral hazard than an incentive to good health. But the rationale behind the research is somewhat different: the researchers are trying to capture the benefits that allow mice on very low-calorie diets to live longer. It just so happens that such benefits are much easier to demonstrate in mice under physiological stress like obesity than in normal mice.
. . .
. . . , a small pharmaceutical concern in Cambridge, Mass., designed SRT-1720 and a set of similar drugs to mimic resveratrol — the trace ingredient of red wine that is thought to activate protective proteins called sirtuins.
The sirtuins help bring about the 30 percent extension of life span enjoyed by mice and rats that are kept on very low-calorie diets.

For the full story, see:
NICHOLAS WADE. “Longer Lives for Obese Mice, With Hope for Humans of All Sizes.” The New York Times (Fri., August 19, 2011): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was dated August 18, 2011.)

“A Brilliant and Exhilarating and Profoundly Eccentric Book”

“David Deutsch.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited below.

(p. 16) David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” is a brilliant and exhilarating and profoundly eccentric book. It’s about everything: art, science, philosophy, history, politics, evil, death, the future, infinity, bugs, thumbs, what have you. And the business of giving it anything like the attention it deserves, in the small space allotted here, is out of the question. But I will do what I can.
. . .
The thought to which Deutsch’s conversation most often returns is that the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, or something like it, may turn out to have been the pivotal event not merely of the history of the West, or of human beings, or of the earth, but (literally, physically) of the universe as a whole.
. . .
(p. 17) Deutsch’s enthusiasm for the scientific and technological transformation of the totality of existence naturally brings with it a radical impatience with the pieties of environmentalism, and cultural relativism, and even procedural democracy — and this is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes creepy. He attacks these pieties, with spectacular clarity and intelligence, as small-minded and cowardly and boring. The metaphor of the earth as a spaceship or life-support system, he writes, “is quite perverse. . . . To the extent that we are on a ‘spaceship,’ we have never merely been its passengers, nor (as is often said) its stewards, nor even its maintenance crew: we are its designers and builders. Before the designs created by humans, it was not a vehicle, but only a heap of dangerous raw materials.” But it’s hard to get to the end of this book without feeling that Deutsch is too little moved by actual contemporary human suffering. What moves him is the grand Darwinian competition among ideas. What he adores, what he is convinced contains the salvation of the world, is, in every sense of the word, The Market.

For the full review, see:
DAVID ALBERT. “Explaining it All: David Deutsch Offers Views on Everything from Subatomic Particles to the Shaping of the Universe Itself.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., August 14, 2011): 16-17.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs added; ellipsis in Deutsch quote in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review is dated August 12, 2011 and has the title “Explaining it All: How We Became the Center of the Universe.”)

Book under review:
Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

A Case for Epistemic and Technological Optimism

Source of book image: http://us.penguingroup.com/static/covers/all/5/5/9780670022755H.jpg

Horgan is well-known for writing a pessimistic book about the future of science. For him to write such a positive review of a book that reaches the opposite conclusion, is impressive (both about him and the book he is reviewing).
From Horgan’s review and the reviews on Amazon as of 8/7/11, I view the Deutsch book as potentially important and profound. (I will write more when I have read it.)

(p. 17) . . . Mr. Deutsch knocks my 1996 book, “The End of Science,” for proposing that the glory days of science–especially pure science, the effort to map out and understand reality–may be over. Mr. Deutsch equates my thesis with “dogmatism, stagnation and tyranny,” all of which, for the record, I oppose. But he makes the case for infinite progress with such passion, imagination and quirky brilliance that I couldn’t help enjoying his argument. More often than not I found myself agreeing with him–or at least hoping that he is right.
. . .
If we acknowledge our imperfections, Mr. Deutsch observes, then, paradoxically, there is no problem that we cannot tackle. Death, for instance. Or the apparent incompatibility between the two pillars of modern physics, quantum theory and general relativity. Or global warming, which Mr. Deutsch believes we can overcome through innovation rather than drastic cutbacks in consumption. He gores the sacred cow of “sustainability”: Societies are healthiest, he declares, not when they achieve equilibrium but when they are rapidly evolving.

For the full review, see:
JOHN HORGAN. “BOOKSHELF; To Err Is Progress; How to foster the growth of scientific knowledge: accept that it is limited no matter how definitive it may seem.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., JULY 20, 2011): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Source information on book under review:
Deutsch, David. The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World. New York: Viking Adult, 2011.

Cow Burps and Farts Cause 28% of Methane Release “Due to Human Activity”

(p. 6A) LOS ANGELES — Scientists have isolated a bacterium from the gut of Australian Tammar wallabies that allows the animals to consume and digest grasses, leaves and other plant material without producing copious amounts of methane, as cattle do.
The microbe was discovered through a process described in a report published online recently by the journal Science.
Ultimately, the microbe might be put to use to reduce the carbon footprint of cows and other ruminants, said report co-author Mark Morrison, a microbial biologist in St. Lucia, Queensland.
. . .
The methane-rich burps and flatulence of cattle have been blamed for 28 percent of that greenhouse gas’s global emissions due to human activity. Like other cud-chewing mammals, they produce methane as their systems work to break down and ferment the plant matter they eat.

For the full story, see:
THE LOS ANGELES TIMES. “Wallaby microbe may one day help cut cows’ methane footprint.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, July 4, 2011): 6A.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Progress Depended on the Empirical Habit of Thought”

In the passage below from 1984 Orwell presents an underground rebel’s account of why the authoritarian socialist dystopia cannot advance in science and technology.

(p. 155) The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward. In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient–a glittering (p. 156) antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete–was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

Source:
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: The New American Library, 1961 [1949].

By Canadian law, 1984 is no longer under copyright. The text has been posted on the following Canadian web site: http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

“When There Is a Massive Release of Methane, the Ocean Can Compensate”

“Dr. John Kessler, lead author of the study, examining a water sample.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) Bacteria made quick work of the tons of methane that billowed into the Gulf of Mexico along with oil from the Deepwater Horizon blowout, clearing the natural gas from the waterway within months of its release, researchers reported Friday.

The federally funded field study, published online in the journal Science, offers peer-reviewed evidence that naturally occurring microbes in the Gulf devoured significant amounts of toxic chemicals in natural gas and oil spewing from the seafloor, which researchers had thought would persist in the region’s water chemistry for years.
“Within a matter of months, the bacteria completely removed that methane,”said microbiologist David Valentine at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “The bacteria kicked on more effectively than we expected,” he said.
. . .
“We were shocked,” said chemical oceanographer John Kessler at Texas A&M, who was the lead author of the Science study. “We thought the methane would be around for years.”
. . .
“They showed that, even when there is a massive release of methane, the ocean can compensate,” said federal microbiologist Terry Hazen at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who has long championed the use of methane-oxidizing microbes to biodegrade oil spills.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Microbes Mopped Up After Spill; Bacteria Swiftly Devoured Methane Unleashed Into the Gulf of Mexico, Study Says.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., January 7, 2011): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Science article mentioned above, is:
Kessler, John D., David L. Valentine, Molly C. Redmond, Mengran Du, Eric W. Chan, Stephanie D. Mendes, Erik W. Quiroz, Christie J. Villanueva, Stephani S. Shusta, Lindsay M. Werra, Shari A. Yvon-Lewis, and Thomas C. Weber. “A Persistent Oxygen Anomaly Reveals the Fate of Spilled Methane in the Deep Gulf of Mexico.” Science (Jan. 6, 2011).

Source of graph: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

Kilimanjaro Snow Has “Come and Gone Over Centuries”

“Mount Kilimanjaro’s top, shown in June, has lost 26 percent of its ice since 2000, a study says.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A6) The ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has continued to retreat rapidly, declining 26 percent since 2000, scientists say in a new report.

Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate.
Eighty-five percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, the scientists said.
To measure the recent pace of the retreat, researchers relied on data from aerial photographs taken of Kilimanjaro over time and from stakes and instruments installed on the mountaintop in 2000, said Douglas R. Hardy, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts and one of the study’s authors.
. . .
. . . Georg Kaser, a glaciologist at the Institute for Geography of the University of Innsbruck in Austria, said that the ice measured was only a few hundred years old and that it had come and gone over centuries.
What is more, he suggested that the recent melting had more to do with a decline in moisture levels than with a warming atmosphere.
“Our understanding is that it is due to the slow drying out of ice,” Dr. Kaser said. “It’s about moisture fluctuation.”

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “Mt. Kilimanjaro’s Ice Cap Continues Its Rapid Retreat, but the Cause Is Debated.” The New York Times (Tues., November 3, 2009): A6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated November 2, 2009 and has the title “Mt. Kilimanjaro Ice Cap Continues Rapid Retreat.”)

“The Information in a Message Is Inversely Proportional to Its Probability”

Source of book image: http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/

(p. A13) What, exactly, is information? Prior to Shannon, Mr. Gleick notes, the term seemed as hopelessly subjective as “beauty” or “truth.” But in 1948 Shannon, then working for Bell Laboratories, gave information an almost magically precise, quantitative definition: The information in a message is inversely proportional to its probability. Random “noise” is quite uniform; the more surprising a message, the more information it contains. Shannon reduced information to a basic unit called a “bit,” short for binary digit. A bit is a message that represents one of two choices: yes or no, heads or tails, one or zero.

For the full review, see:

JOHN HORGAN. “Little Bits Go a Long Way; The more surprising a message, the more information it contains.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., March 1, 2011): A13.

Book being reviewed:
Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books, 2011.

The Dangers from Disease Are Much Greater than the Dangers from Vaccines

Source of book image:
http://blogs.plos.org/takeasdirected/files/2011/02/Offit-Deadly-Choices1.jpg

Sometime during the weekend of Feb. 26-27, 2011, I saw several minutes of a C-Span book TV presentation by Paul Offit on his Deadly Choices book. He made a strong case that based on casual and unsound evidence, many parents are putting their children at risk by delaying or even foregoing having their children vaccinated.
As a result children are dying from diseases that they easily could have been protected against.

Book discussed:
Offit, Paul A. Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

“Powerful Pressure for Scientists to Conform”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) In “Hyping Health Risks,” Geoffrey Kabat, an epidemiologist himself, shows how activists, regulators and scientists distort or magnify minuscule environmental risks. He duly notes the accomplishments of epidemiology, such as uncovering the risks of tobacco smoking and the dangers of exposure to vinyl chloride and asbestos. And he acknowledges that industry has attempted to manipulate science. But he is concerned about a less reported problem: “The highly charged climate surrounding environmental health risks can create powerful pressure for scientists to conform and to fall into line with a particular position.”

Mr. Kabat looks at four claims — those trying to link cancer to man-made chemicals, electromagnetic fields and radon and to link cancer and heart disease to passive smoking. In each, he finds more bias than biology — until further research, years later, corrects exaggeration or error.
. . .
I know whereof Mr. Kabat speaks. In 1992, as the producer of a PBS program, I interviewed an epidemiologist who was on the EPA’s passive-smoking scientific advisory board. He admitted to me that the EPA had put its thumb on the evidentiary scales to come to its conclusion. He had lent his name to this process because, he said, he wanted “to remain relevant to the policy process.” Naturally, he didn’t want to appear on TV contradicting the EPA.

For the full review, see:
RONALD BAILEY. “Bookshelf; Scared Senseless.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., AUGUST 11, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the first paragraph quoted above has slightly different wording in the online version than the print version; the second paragraph quoted is the same in both.)

The book under review is:
Kabat, Geoffrey C. Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.