Electricity May Be a Pellet in the “Magic Buckshot” Against Cancer

In a recent entry I claimed that the cure for many diseases may not be Paul Ehrlich’s one “magic bullet” but may instead be “magic buckshot.” A recent article in The Wall Street Journal suggests that one pellet in the magic buckshot against cancer is electricity. As proof of concept, the article claims that after surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy for a glioblastoma brain cancer, adding electrodes to the skull that deliver low-intensity electricity to the brain, will add a median of 4.9 months to the patient’s lifespan.

The Wall Street Journal article mentioned above is:

Brianna Abbott. “Next Hope in Treating Cancer: Electricity.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 20, 2025): A10.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 16, 2025, and has the title “The Next Frontier to Treat Cancer: Electricity.”)

The Wall Street Journal article links to the following article in JAMA:

Stupp, Roger, Sophie Taillibert, Andrew Kanner, William Read, David M. Steinberg, Benoit Lhermitte, Steven Toms, Ahmed Idbaih, Manmeet S. Ahluwalia, Karen Fink, Francesco Di Meco, Frank Lieberman, Jay-Jiguang Zhu, Giuseppe Stragliotto, David D. Tran, Steven Brem, Andreas F. Hottinger, Eilon D. Kirson, Gitit Lavy-Shahaf, Uri Weinberg, Chae-Yong Kim, Sun-Ha Paek, Garth Nicholas, Jordi Bruna, Hal Hirte, Michael Weller, Yoram Palti, Monika E. Hegi, and Zvi Ram. “Effect of Tumor-Treating Fields Plus Maintenance Temozolomide Vs Maintenance Temozolomide Alone on Survival in Patients with Glioblastoma: A Randomized Clinical Trial.” JAMA 318, no. 23 (Dec. 19, 2017): 2306-16.

During Covid-19 “Bureaucratic Authorities Erred in Pretending . . . Certainty”

(p. A13) Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof.

. . .

What should we do, . . ., when a mathematical proof of truth is unavailable, but we must nonetheless act?

This leads us to a discussion of probability and statistics, and of pioneers such as William Gosset, a brewer at Guinness who figured out how to quantify random errors in experiments, and Janet Lane-Claypon, an English scientist who first thought to investigate confounding factors while analyzing children’s health. Some innovations, though, have hardened into unhelpful dogma. The scientific notion of “statistical significance” relies, Mr. Kucharski explains, on a wholly arbitrary cutoff, which incentivizes researchers to massage their data. Such issues, he says, can be hard for scientists, let alone the laity, to understand.

Mr. Kucharski speaks from experience, since he was one of the experts first called upon by the British government for advice on the Covid-19 pandemic. He explains brilliantly the fragmentary and confusing nature of the data then available, and the provisional conclusions they led to. As a public face of this effort, Mr. Kucharski was bombarded daily with abusive and threatening messages from angry citizens who simply didn’t believe what they were being told.

The lesson Mr. Kucharski draws isn’t that he and his colleagues were right (though they largely were), but that bureaucratic authorities erred in pretending there was certainty when all that was possible at the time was messy and provisional. Notoriously, in March 2020 the World Health Organization tweeted “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airbone.” (As it turns out, it was, and it is.) The author regrets, too, that politicians claimed to be “following the science,” because science can never tell you what you should do.

For the full review see:

Steven Poole. “Bookshelf; Finding Truth In Numbers.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 6, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘Proof’: Finding Truth in Numbers.”)

The book under review is:

Kucharski, Adam. Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. New York: Basic Books, 2025.

Dream of the Magic Buckshot

Paul Ehrlich in the early 1900s sought a “magic bullet” for each disease (including cancer). Given the alternatives at the time, when he found Salvarsan it could be considered a magic bullet against syphilis. Today Dr. Dale Bredesen has replaced “magic” with “silver” and “bullet” with “buckshot.” In his effort to cure Alzheimer’s “Bredesen believed in firing a “silver buckshot” (a reference to the sprayed pellets that come out of shotgun shells) by modifying 36 factors simultaneously” (Gellman, p. 18).

I have not investigated Dr. Bredesen’s “cure” for Alzheimer’s and express no opinion on it. I will express the opinion that I do not like the arrogantly dismissive tone of Lindsay Gellman’sThe New York Times article, bowing to “experts,” but calling Bredesen “Mr.” instead of the “Dr.” he has earned.

And I do like the idea that sometimes what is effective against a disease (including cancer) is not a single drug or therapy, but several taken together. For example, multi-drug cocktails have been effectively used against HIV, childhood leukemia, and Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Ehrlich’s big dream was to find a magic bullet for each disease. But maybe it is mostly more promising to dream of the magic buckshot.

[N.B., the “Paul Ehrlich” I refer to is not the contemporary environmental alarmist “Paul Ehrlich” who famously lost his bet with the heroic heretic Julian Simon.]

The NYT article quoted above:

Lindsay Gellman. “Lifestyle to Reverse Alzheimer’s Carries High Costs and, Many Say, False Hope.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., May 25, 2025): 1 & 18.

(Note: the online version of the NYT article was updated May 31, 2025, and has the title “An Expensive Alzheimer’s Lifestyle Plan Offers False Hope, Experts Say.”)

How Did Ed Smylie and His Team Create the Kludge That Saved the Crew of Apollo 13?

Gary Klein in Seeing What Others Don’t analyzed cases of innovation, and sought their sources. One source he came up with was necessity. His compelling example was the firefighter Wag Dodge who, with maybe 60 seconds until he would be engulfed in flame, lit a match to the grass around him, and then laid down in the still-hot embers. The roaring fire bypassed the patch he pre-burned, and his life was saved. The story is well-told in Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire.

Pondering more cases of necessity might be useful to help us understand, and encourage, future innovation. One candidate might be the kludge that Ed Smylie and his engineers put together to save the Apollo 13 crew from suffocating after an explosion blew up their command capsule oxygen tank.

Necessity may be part of it, but cannot be the whole story. Humanity needed to fly for thousands of years, but it took Wilbur Wright to make it happen. (This point is made in Kevin Ashton’s fine and fun How to Fly a Horse.)

I have ordered the book co-authored by Lovell, and mentioned in a passage quoted below, in case it contains insight on how the Apollo 13 kludge was devised.

(p. B11) Ed Smylie, the NASA official who led a team of engineers that cobbled together an apparatus made of cardboard, plastic bags and duct tape that saved the Apollo 13 crew in 1970 after an explosion crippled the spacecraft as it sped toward the moon, died on April 21 [2025] in Crossville, Tenn. He was 95.

. . .

Soft-spoken, with an accent that revealed his Mississippi upbringing, Mr. Smylie was relaxing at home in Houston on the evening of April 13 when Mr. Lovell radioed mission control with his famous (and frequently misquoted) line: “Uh, Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

An oxygen tank had exploded, crippling the spacecraft’s command module.

Mr. Smylie, . . ., saw the news on television and called the crew systems office, according to the 1994 book “Lost Moon,” by Mr. Lovell and the journalist Jeffrey Kluger. The desk operator said the astronauts were retreating to the lunar excursion module, which was supposed to shuttle two crew members to the moon.

“I’m coming in,” Mr. Smylie said.

Mr. Smylie knew there was a problem with this plan: The lunar module was equipped to safely handle air flow for only two astronauts. Three humans would generate lethal levels of carbon dioxide.

To survive, the astronauts would somehow need to refresh the canisters of lithium hydroxide that would absorb the poisonous gases in the lunar excursion module. There were extra canisters in the command module, but they were square; the lunar module ones were round.

“You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary “XIII” (2021).

He and about 60 other engineers had less than two days to invent a solution using materials already onboard the spacecraft.

. . .

In reality, the engineers printed a supply list of the equipment that was onboard. Their ingenious solution: an adapter made of two lithium hydroxide canisters from the command module, plastic bags used for garments, cardboard from the cover of the flight plan, a spacesuit hose and a roll of gray duct tape.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

Mission control commanders provided step-by-step instructions to the astronauts for locating materials and building the adapter.

. . .

The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.

. . .

Mr. Smylie always played down his ingenuity and his role in saving the Apollo 13 crew.

“It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it and Nixon even mentioned our names,” he said in the oral history. “I said a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

For the full obituary, see:

Michael S. Rosenwald. “Ed Smylie Dies at 95; His Team of Engineers Saved Apollo 13 Crew.” The New York Times (Tuesday, May 20, 2025): B11.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 18, 2025, and has the title “Ed Smylie, Who Saved the Apollo 13 Crew With Duct Tape, Dies at 95.”)

Klein’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Klein, Gary A. Seeing What Others Don’t: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights. Philadelphia, PA: PublicAffairs, 2013.

Maclean’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Maclean, Norman. Young Men and Fire. new ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Ashton’s book that I praise in my introductory comments is:

Ashton, Kevin. How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery. New York: Doubleday, 2015.

The book co-authored by Lovell and mentioned above is:

Lovell, Jim, and Jeffrey Kluger. Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

‘Getting Old Sucks, but It’s Still Preferable to Getting Cremated’

Apparently Billy Joel was unable to attend the celebration of a new documentary on the life of Billy Joel, since he had acquired a malady of the brain called “normal pressure hydrocephalus.” But Joel sent his greetings to the crowd: ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated’ (Zuckerman, p. C3).

“The audience roared in laughter” (Zuckerman, p. C3).

NYT article quoted above:

Esther Zuckerman. “When Billy Joel Started Singing Us Songs.” The New York Times (Sat., June 7, 2025): C3.

(Note: the online version of the NYT article has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “‘And So It Goes’ Traces Billy Joel’s Dramatic Early Days: 5 Takeaways.”)

Do Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” Thrive in Innovative Dynamism?

Last week I participated in a panel on “Freedom and Abundance” with Bri Wolf at an I.H.S. Symposium on “The Future of Liberalism.” As a small part of my presentation (and also in my Openness book), I claim that innovative dynamism creates more jobs than it destroys, and that the new jobs are generally better jobs than the old jobs.

After the panel Bri asked me how I respond to David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. I vaguely remembered hearing of the book, and told her I would look into it. What follows is my brief, quick, edited response.

Graeber claimed that a large number of jobs in the for-profit sector are purposeless, demoralizing “bullshit” jobs. I do think that there are some bullshit jobs, but think that they are much more common in the government and non-profit sectors than in the for-profit sector. There are some in the for-profit sector, but I would argue that the number is diminishing, and many of them are due to labor unions and government regulations, that protect bullshit jobs from being eliminated.

Where innovative dynamism is allowed to function unbound, the trend is toward more meaningful jobs. Two of the important technological innovations of the last several decades have been computers and the internet. Erik Brynjolfsson and co-authors wrote a few papers showing that an important effect has been to flatten the hierarchy at a great many firms. This eliminates much of the middle management that Graeber identifies as one main location of bullshit jobs.

I also looked the book up on Wikipedia and noticed that a couple of empirical papers have been written that raise doubts about some of the claims in the book.

The book seems to have gotten enough attention to justify a longer more serious critique than I am giving it in this blog entry. But I humor myself that I have bigger fish to fry, namely my mission to see if I can help nudge the healthcare mess more toward being a system of innovative dynamism.

Some of Erik Brynjolfsson’s relevant co-authored articles, alluded to above, are:

Bresnahan, Timothy F., Erik Brynjolfsson, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 117, no. 1 (2002): 339-76.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Beyond Computation: Information Technology, Organizational Transformation and Business Performance.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (Fall 2000): 23-48.

Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Lorin M. Hitt. “Computing Productivity: Firm-Level Evidence.” Review of Economics and Statistics 85, no. 4 (Nov. 2003): 793-808.

David Graeber’s book is:

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

My book is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

If Universities Disbanded Would Learning and Discovery Cease?

The university is a medieval institution that in many ways in recent decades has become less efficient and less supportive of diversity of ideas. some analysts are calling for fundamental change in universities, maybe even the defunding of universities and the creation of alternative institutions to carry out the legitimate functions of universities. See Richard Vedder’s recent book Let Colleges Fail.

What are those functions? The two most important are 1) educate and 2) create new knowledge. Some, e.g., Christensen and Eyring in The Innovative University, identify a third function as providing a memorable and enjoyable early-adulthood experience of peer-camaraderie.

If universities were disbanded, could these functions be well-done by other institutions? Philip Hamburger in a passage quoted below points out that a huge store of diverse knowledge is now available on through the internet. Some of it is especially designed to help teach a variety of subjects at a variety of levels. With a basic knowledge of reading and of how to access the internet, the dedicated autodidact is not limited in what he can learn.

If universities were disbanded, could the creation of new knowledge continue? Here there is even greater uncertainty, but we have some proofs of concept of how alternative institutions and activities might fill the gap. In the early days of the Royal Society many of the members were not associated with any university. Many members pursued science in their spare time, with their own funds.

New forms of peer review could be tried that might allow anyone the chance to participate as citizen scientists. The new Journal of the Academy of Public Health will publish peer review comments along with the original article. Many scholars and citizen scientists are finding Substack a fruitful platform for publishing their ideas. Substack calls itself “a new economic engine for culture.”

Much science has been done, and can still be done, in entrepreneurial ventures and in industry. Terence Kealey documented the history and made the case. More science would be done by those seeking practical applications, and less by those seeking useless, but pretty, theory. Milton Friedman condemned NSF funding of economics, because it made economics too mathematical.

Science would be more highly valued and would produce more value.

(p. A15) Academic institutions think they have a problem and that its name is Donald Trump. But he’s only the beginning of their problems. The difficulties are systemic, not only legal or political, and that means it’s time to reconsider what higher education should look like.

. . .

. . ., although today the immediate threat comes from the Trump administration, academic institutions are fragile because knowledge is now available through the internet and artificial intelligence. For balanced inquiry, even academics increasingly look outside their universities.

For the full commentary see:

Philip Hamburger. “Don’t Just Fix Higher Education, Reconstitute It.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 3, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

The sources mentioned in my comments are:

Christensen, Clayton M., and Henry J. Eyring. The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the inside Out. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011.

Friedman, Milton. “An Open Letter on Grants” Newsweek, May 18, 1981, 99.

Kealey, Terence. The Economic Laws of Scientific Research. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Vedder, Richard. Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2025.

Kennedy Defends Patients’ Freedom to Try “Experimental Therapies”

I agree with Kennedy that people with diseases or conditions that cannot be cured by mainstream medicine have the right try experimental therapies, and should be allowed what some are calling “health freedom.” For those who want certification of safety, private labels would emerge if the government exited from its role of allowing or banning. In the unregulated supplement business, multiple such organizations exist, e.g., the United States Pharmacopeial Convention (USP).

If the public decides the Kennedy/Diamond position is too radical, a step in the right direction would be for the government to provide informational certification of therapies or providers, but not to mandate that patients use only those therapies and providers.

(p. A1) Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently declared that he wanted to expand access to experimental therapies but conceded that they could be risky or fraudulent.

In a podcast with Gary Brecka, who describes himself as a longevity expert, Mr. Kennedy vowed to end what he called the Food and Drug Administration’s war with alternative medicine. He said that would include stem cells, vitamins, peptides and chelation therapy, which involves removing heavy metals from the blood.

“If you want to take an experimental drug — you can do that, you ought to be able to do that,” Mr. Kennedy said.

“And of course you’re going to get a lot of charlatans, and you’re going to get people who have bad results,” he added. “And ultimately, you can’t prevent that either way. Leaving the whole thing in the hands of pharma is not working for us.”

Mr. Kennedy cited his own experience at a clinic in Antigua, where he said he received a stem cell treatment that “enormously” eased his neurological condition, spasmodic dysphonia, which affects his voice and has few treatment options.

. . .

(p. A11) Neither Mr. Kennedy nor the F.D.A. has released a formal plan to change agency standards for stem cell treatments, which have typically been reviewed by the agency as individual therapies to treat a specific disease.

Widening overall access could also happen informally if the agency decided to relax enforcement, an approach the F.D.A. used in the past to indicate that it wouldn’t crack down on unauthorized products. During the pandemic, for example, the agency allowed providers to retrofit infusion pumps and ventilators to treat hordes of sick patients.

. . .

Dr. Moreno and his colleagues found that the trials with funding from the red meat industry were nearly four times as likely to report favorable or neutral cardiovascular results after eating unprocessed red meat when compared with the studies with no such links.

. . .

“We don’t want to have the Wild West,” Mr. Kennedy said. “We want to make sure that information is out there. But we also want to respect the intelligence of the American people — the capacity of people who explore the outcomes that are going to benefit them the most.”

. . .

The field of stem cell treatments is so complex that the Harvard Medical School created a free course to help doctors navigate patient questions, said Insoo Hyun, the director of life sciences at the Museum of Science in Boston.

. . .

Some providers sidestep the costly, yearslong process of careful work that can lead to an F.D.A. approval. Among them is Dr. Chadwick Prodromos, a Chicago doctor who offers stem cell treatments in Antigua. Mr. Kennedy welcomed him warmly at the March meeting, Dr. Raizman recalled. Reached for comment, Dr. Prodromos’s office said that he was in Antigua doing treatments and was not available.

. . .

A website for Dr. Prodromos’s clinic says that he and colleagues offer injections in Antigua into the joints, back, neck, scalp, penis and pelvic floor for an array of conditions including autism, thinning hair and lupus. He uses AlloRX cells, which are derived from the umbilical cord, in a manner that in the United States would require an F.D.A.-cleared clinical trial.

People can seek out unregulated treatments using their own cells that are processed, purified and amplified in different ways. They can also find treatments using others’ cells that vary widely in quality and sterility.

Some low-quality clinics process cells in a back room, which is the opposite of a clinical-grade cell processing site. Dr. Hyun said he recently toured one in the Netherlands that used specialized air filtering, layers of gowns and a ban on bacteria-laden cellphones in their sterile area. “It’s kind of like you’re entering a space station,” he said.

For the full story see:

Christina Jewett. “‘Charlatans’ No Reason to Curb Untested Drugs, Kennedy Says.” The New York Times (Fri., June 6, 2025): A1 & A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 5, 2025, and has the title “Kennedy Says ‘Charlatans’ Are No Reason to Block Unproven Stem Cell Treatments.”)

Computer Chip Industrial Policy Subsidies Are an Unfair Waste of Taxpayer Funds

An “industrial policy” occurs when the federal government attempts to pick a technology that will be important in the future, and then subsidize it. T.J. Rodgers is an insider in the computer chip industry and has written a credible op-ed analyzing two attempts at industrial policy in his industry, the Sematech consortium in 1987, and the Chips and Science Act in 2022.

He makes a compelling case that Sematech did not work and that the Chips and Science Act is not working either.

Rodgers gives us more evidence that Secretary of the Treasury and Harvard President Larry Summers was right when he wrote “the government is a crappy venture capitalist.”

If the feds’ industrial policy on computer chips has failed, why do we think its industrial policy on cancer cures will succeed? (Nixon and Biden’s cancer “moonshots” amounted to picking, and then subsidizing, what they hoped would be cancer cures.)

By the way, when Rodgers stood up against welfare to his industry, he appears to have been an exemplar of Robert Nozick’s ideal CEO: maximizing profits subject to ethical side-constraints.

(p. A15) My mother was a fifth-grade teacher in Oshkosh, Wis. She earned $25,000 a year. Why should chip companies, some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, take money from her and other ordinary citizens? Today’s massive $280 billion Chips and Science Act of 2022, the latest semiconductor welfare program, is even less justified than Sematech was.

. . .

To my knowledge, Sematech contributed nothing of note to U.S. semiconductor technology. Its Final Report in 1997 served up platitudes about “catching up with Japan” and fostering “industry cooperation.”

Decades later, the Semiconductor Industry Association—now a group of lobbyists in Washington—began “saving” the chip industry again. This time the target is China, despite the fact that its best wafer foundry is SMIC, an also-ran in the foundry business. China is less a competitive threat today than Japan was in 1987.

. . .

Today, 100 high-performance computers can be put on one chip. The companies that know how to design 100-billion-transistor chips for a critical function such as artificial intelligence are much more valuable than the companies that carve commodity chips out of silicon wafers, like those in China. While the biggest chip-manufacturing company in China is worth $54 billion, a single U.S. chip company, Nvidia, is worth $3.4 trillion—58 times as much—and it doesn’t even make its own chips. Why are we doing this again?

For the full commentary see:

T.J. Rodgers. “Semiconductor Subsidies? Tried and Failed.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., June 4, 2025): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 3, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

Robert Nozick discusses ethical side constraints in:

Nozick, Robert. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1974.

The Chicago School of Economics Was Once Uniquely Focused on Real World Problems

The Chicago School of Economics, most associated with Milton Friedman and George Stigler, saw itself as different from all the other top graduate programs in economics. At Chicago, the priority was solving applied problems, and only as much mathematics and theory should be used as was necessary to solve them. The other schools prioritized mathematical puzzle-solving and mathematical rigor and sophistication.

For those who might suspect Chicago was full of itself, the non-Chicago economists Arjo Klamar and David Colander dispelled the suspicion in their The Making of an Economist. After thorough interviewing and surveying of graduate students at the five or six top graduate programs, they concluded that graduate students at all but Chicago were cynically discouraged to realize that they were being trained to solve mathematical puzzles, while only those at Chicago still felt that they were being trained to matter in the real world.

I noticed that a recent obituary for the economist Stanley Fischer quotes Fischer as stating some diplomatic confirmation of the Klamar and Colander conclusion:

After earning his Ph.D. at M.I.T. in 1969, Mr. Fischer moved to the University of Chicago as a postdoctoral researcher and assistant professor. “At M.I.T. you did the mathematical work,” he told The New York Times in 1998, “and at Chicago you asked the question of how this applies to the real world” (Hagerty 2025, p. A17).

Alas, I fear that what was once true, is true no longer. I fear that if Klamar and Colander were to repeat their study today, they would find that Chicago has joined the other top programs in prioritizing mathematical puzzle-solving and mathematical rigor and sophistication.

The obituary of Stanley Fischer, quoted above, is:

James R. Hagerty. “Stanley Fischer, 81, Economist Who Helped Defuse Crises, Dies.” The New York Times (Mon., June 2, 2025): A17.

(Note: the online version of the Steve Lohr article was updated June 10, 2025, and has the title “Stanley Fischer, Who Helped Defuse Financial Crises, Dies at 81.”)

The Klamar and Colander book mentioned above is:

Klamer, Arjo, and David Colander. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.

“Gold Standard” RCT Studies Do Not Always Agree on Broad Issues

Randomized double-blind clinical trials (RCTs) are usually labeled the “gold standard” of medical evidence. But any given clinical trial can be done in an infinite number of ways. The length and duration of the RCT can vary. The eligibility requirements can vary. The definition of the placebo or comparison treatment can vary.

So on the broad issue of whether red meat is good for the heart, an RCT that compares the heart effects of red meat versus the heart effects of chicken, can yield different results than an RCT that compares the heart effects of red meat versus the heart effects of a plant-based diet.

Both RCTs might be competently done, involving no dishonesty or fraud.

We tend to overgeneralize the results of an RCT, for instance saying “red meat is heart healthy,” or “red meat is not heart healthy.” Whereas all we are justified in saying is “red meat is equally heart healthy as chicken” and “read meat is less heart healthy than a plant-based diet.”

Since RCTs are expensive and time-consuming, physicians and patients will often have to choose between treatments where no RCT has been done where the researchers made the choices that are most relevant to the patient’s situation.

And in an environment where RCT costs are high and funding is scarce, are researchers to be condemned if among the myriad varying ways of setting up the RCT, they choose the ways most likely to yield the results that will be appealing to their funder?

The article quoted below, in passages I did not quote, assumes this is only an issue with industry-funded research. But government funding review panels also have preferred outcomes. For example, Charles Piller in Doctored has recently documented that government funders have been more likely to fund RCTs that support the amyloid hypothesis of the cause of Alzheimer’s.

So is there hope for those who want to take effective action against dire disease? Yes, we can recognize that not all sound actionable evidence comes from RCTs. We can stop mandating Phase 3 trials, so that a more diverse assortment of plausible therapies can be explored. We can encourage diverse, decentralized funding sources.

(p. D6) In a review published last week in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, scientists came to a concerning conclusion. Red meat appeared healthier in studies that were funded by the red meat industry.

. . .

Past research funded by the sugar industry, for instance, has downplayed the relationship between sugar and health conditions like obesity and heart disease. And studies funded by the alcohol industry have suggested that moderate drinking could be part of a healthy diet.

Miguel López Moreno, a researcher at Francisco de Vitoria University in Spain who led the new analysis, said in an email that he wanted to know if similar issues were happening with the research on unprocessed red meat.

. . .

Dr. Moreno and his colleagues found that the trials with funding from the red meat industry were nearly four times as likely to report favorable or neutral cardiovascular results after eating unprocessed red meat when compared with the studies with no such links.

. . .

These differing results may have stemmed from how the studies were set up in the first place, Dr. Tobias wrote in an editorial for the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that accompanied the new study.

Individual nutrition studies can be good at showing how the health effects of certain foods compare with those of other specific foods. But to demonstrate whether a particular food, or food group like red meat, is good or bad for health in general, scientists must look at the results from many different studies that compare it to all possible food groups and diets.

The new review showed that, on the whole, the industry-funded red meat studies neglected to compare red meat to the full range of foods people might eat — including food we know to be good for the heart like whole grains or plant-based protein sources such as tofu, nuts or legumes. Instead, many of the studies compared unprocessed red meat to other types of animal protein like chicken or fish, or to carbohydrates like bagels, pasta or rice.

The independently funded studies, on the other hand, compared red meat to “the full spectrum” of different diets — including other types of meat, whole grains and heart-healthy plant foods like soy products, nuts and beans — Dr. Tobias said. This more comprehensive look offers a fuller picture of red meat’s risks or benefits, she said.

. . .

A spokeswoman for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association said in an email that “beef farmers and ranchers support gold standard scientific research,” and that both animal and plant sources of protein can be part of a heart-healthy diet.

For the full story see:

Caroline Hopkins Legaspi. “Eyes on the Outcomes Of Red Meat Research.” The New York Times (Tues., May 27, 2025): D6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 20, 2025, and has the title “Is Red Meat Bad for Your Heart? It May Depend on Who Funded the Study.”)

The academic article co-authored by Moreno and mentioned above is:

López-Moreno, Miguel, Ujué Fresán, Carlos Marchena-Giráldez, Gabriele Bertotti, and Alberto Roldán-Ruiz. “Industry Study Sponsorship and Conflicts of Interest on the Effect of Unprocessed Red Meat on Cardiovascular Disease Risk: A Systematic Review of Clinical Trials.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 121, no. 6 (June 2025): 1246-57.

Some other articles discussing cases where industry funding is alleged to have funded biased research are:

Anahad O’Connor. “Sugar Backers Paid to Shift Blame to Fat.” The New York Times (Tues., Sept. 13, 2016): A1 & ?.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 12, 2016, and has the title “How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat.”)

Alice Callahan. “Is Fake Meat Superior to the Real Thing?” The New York Times (Tues., Feb. 18, 2025): D7.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 17, 2025, and has the title “Is Fake Meat Better for You Than Real Meat?”)

Roni Caryn Rabin. “U.S. Wooed Alcohol Industry for a Drinking Study.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., March 18, 2018): 1 & ??.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 17, 2018, and has the title “Federal Agency Courted Alcohol Industry to Fund Study on Benefits of Moderate Drinking.”)