tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29083384625114829432024-03-08T12:34:42.954-08:00The Heidi HypothesisAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-82002416505299819332012-11-07T22:46:00.002-08:002012-11-08T07:46:13.387-08:00This blog has movedIts new home is <a href="http://www.nathanaeljohnson.org/">www.NathanaelJohnson.org</a> - there you will find this blog, as well as more information about the book and what I'm up to, all in a much more elegant form.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-17490200549100575802012-09-07T12:33:00.001-07:002012-09-07T12:34:31.442-07:00The Organic Food Study: Why so angry?<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglAkxXJCKapWLl5GP8agIJz32XTEWT0prVGF_uc7mmQMuBHb3M8iH4ZLWdA8RRHbvwy7ZSmBAZI7u4n6lZO9peFBT1Yq46NVn_ti_53taVxJMTGRthU4Oj4FMNcATuljlxRos2MMoZY5I/s1600/DSCF0024.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglAkxXJCKapWLl5GP8agIJz32XTEWT0prVGF_uc7mmQMuBHb3M8iH4ZLWdA8RRHbvwy7ZSmBAZI7u4n6lZO9peFBT1Yq46NVn_ti_53taVxJMTGRthU4Oj4FMNcATuljlxRos2MMoZY5I/s1600/DSCF0024.JPG" height="300" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beautiful produce shops like this one (at the base of the building we lived in) are scattered every few blocks throughout Buenos Aires. It's probably not organic produce, but it's delicious and cheap.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
A couple people have asked for my opinion about <a href="http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685" target="_blank">this study</a> that came out a couple days ago on the nutritional value of organic food. <a href="http://grist.org/food/organic-food-may-not-have-a-big-nutritional-edge-but-how-much-does-that-matter/#.UEjTASaBhS4.twitter" target="_blank">To summarize</a>: The findings made for great internet - you could get the gist by reading just the headline (which made for easy tweeting and facebooking), and it was counter intuitive (which made it worth tweeting and facebooking): Organic no more nutritious!<br />
<br />
Was this really news? I'd seen several studies with similar findings. And this new study turned out to be nothing more than a reanalysis of that past work. There have been a <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/five-ways-stanford-study-underestimates-organic-food" target="_blank">few</a> <a href="http://organicfarms.wsu.edu/blog/devil-in-the-details/" target="_blank">critiques</a> the study, but if you want my opinion (as someone that tries to sort substance from superstition about all things "natural") it's basically right. There's very little evidence that one person eating organic food is going to be getting superior nutrition. Yes, non-organic food has trace levels of pesticides (after reviewing the science, those don't worry me), and yes, non-organic meat is more likely to have antibiotic-resistant bacteria (this does worry me but it's primarily a public health problem, not a problem for individuals). But all the science really doesn't support the idea that organic food is a wonder drug that will keep you young.<br />
<br />
At the same time, I think it's indisputably true that organic food is healthier. That is - if you are narrowly focused on how it will benefit you, about how the known molecules will interact with your metabolism for good for for ill, then organic and industrial food are pretty much the same (as far as we know with the current science). But if you take a broader view, things look different:<br />
<a name='more'></a> <br /><br />
Buying from farms that make
the world cleaner and more beautiful rather than uglier and more polluted is
healthier. Buying from farms that support a broad middle class rather than
tycoons and destitute laborers is healthier. Buying from farms that don't
torture animals is healthier. Buying food that you can take pride in is healthier. Buying delicious food, and taking pleasure in every bite is healthier.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/07/opinion/roger-cohen-the-organic-fable.html?emc=eta1" target="_blank">Roger Cohn made essentially the same points</a> yesterday, but unlike me he "can no longer stomach" organics. "Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet," he wrote.<br />
<br />
Affluent narcissism? Perhaps in some cases. But besides being annoyed by some picky Yuppie in Whole Foods, what's the harm? It's not as if these people are against feeding the world, or are taking food out of the mouths of the poor. And on the other side, the people who are actually figuring out how to meet the challenge of feeding the world aren't against organics. They recognize that sustainable agriculture will be a vital part of our food future, and that the next set of farming innovations will have increase yields while also improving the environment: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Doubly-Green-Revolution-Twenty-First/dp/0801486106" target="_blank">A Doubly Green Revolution</a>.<br />
<br />
At worst, these affluent narcissists are confused. They've conflated the fact that organics tend to be healthier in the holistic view, with the idea that they are healthier in the reductive, selfish sense. This, it seems to me, is a wholly virtuous confusion: I wish that everyone treated the good of the commonwealth as if it were the same as what's best for them as individuals.<br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-66940691405590069732012-08-08T17:56:00.001-07:002012-08-08T17:56:27.227-07:00Don't screw this upI've been getting a little flustered thinking about how to promote my book. Asking people their opinion of my work, makes me feel a little sick, let alone asking people I don't know at all to praise it, so the idea of soliciting blurbs is a little frightening. I've been thinking about a talk to give, about preparing for interviews, contacting editors about running excerpts, getting a little tour together... and I keep telling myself not to screw things up, which, paradoxically, makes me a little more likely to screw them up.<br />
Then I tell myself not to get upset. My life is great. I'm in love with my wife. My daughter is delightful. My extended family is healthy and more sane than any of the families in the books.<br />
Yes, but, I rejoinder, this is a big chance, I've got to make the most of it.<br />
This conversation in my head took place as I was walking from the grocery store home, with my daughter in the carrier. It was the day before her first birthday. That year had just flown by. She closed her eyes and nestled her cheek against my chest. And I thought, I could say the same of this particular moment: This is a big chance, I've got to make the most of it. I wrapped a hand around the back of her head to keep it from bouncing. It's covered in cornsilk hair that sticks out in all directions. Don't screw this up, I thought, and that time, it didn't make me anxious.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-83891203379068924352012-08-04T11:27:00.001-07:002012-08-04T11:28:52.135-07:00How I changed my mind about vaccines<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8H_jOqtS5kZWOjPPQRppVQrX0oZRV0WLrCLa7oPHazfKjYuQHtQE1cT9G4p87LeNP8osSwNna4lrFslpbYFLkaB-Brj4Y9N6DzHM6mERqRni_AQPC10LGTSS9q3hSdrYv4rgQsNbOC_c/s1600/Vaccine+Books.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8H_jOqtS5kZWOjPPQRppVQrX0oZRV0WLrCLa7oPHazfKjYuQHtQE1cT9G4p87LeNP8osSwNna4lrFslpbYFLkaB-Brj4Y9N6DzHM6mERqRni_AQPC10LGTSS9q3hSdrYv4rgQsNbOC_c/s320/Vaccine+Books.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
This is a follow up post to <a href="http://theheidihypothesis.blogspot.com/2012/08/good-reads.html" target="_blank">this one</a>, about the books I've especially enjoyed in my research. There were four books I wanted to include about vaccines, but it's such a touchy subject that I found myself writing long on this section, and so I've broken it out as it's own post. It contains, just fyi, a bit of a spoiler for the fourth chapter of my book.<br />
In researching the
evidence about vaccines<span style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal;"> I started with David Kirby's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=w2PwVMgCK1UC&dq=evidence+of+harm&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Evidence of Harm</a>.
I should admit that going into this I was pretty sure that there was at
least some kernel of truth in the suspicion of vaccines, and that the
mainstream scientists were overlooking something. I wanted to start with
this minority opinion in the hopes that it would contain some solid, overlooked, facts, or at least a legitimate hypothesis that I could flesh out by talking to scientists. </span>It’s a
riveting and well-reported<br />
<a name='more'></a> book and, to his credit, Kirby acknowledges facts that don’t fit
with the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism. But my sympathy was gradually eroded by the book’s imbalance in
attention:
While the skeptical parents are described in intimate detail, the
scientists
are rarely quoted and appear uniformly shady, and conspiratorial. And
while
Kirby gives space for inconvenient facts, he goes to great lengths to
explain
them away. These explanations started to feel shakier and shakier to me.
Take this, for instance: Data crunchers among the vaccine activists had
“predicted that if thimerosal [vaccine mercury] were a cause of the
epidemic, then the new cases
of autism should begin to drop sometime around 2004,” Kirby wrote, “or
four
years after mercury removal began—which is precisely what happened, with
steeper declines to follow.” But I after that slight dip in 2004, the
upward
trend in autism cases has continued. It’s a bad sign when your
own
arguments undermine your credibility. And when I really dug into the
scientific literature, I couldn't substantiate a single argument in
favor of avoiding vaccines. As I learned more and more about vaccines I
started thinking of them as "natural" rather than frighteningly unknown technology. (I know that doesn't sound convincing here in this abbreviated format, I explain it more thoroughly in the book).<br />
I found
Arthur Allen's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=9X4D15qDrnMC&dq=inauthor:%22Arthur+Allen%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Vaccine</a> (which tells the good, the bad, and ugly of the
vaccine story from Jenner and the Puritans up to the beginnings of the
mercury scare) and Seth Mnookin's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=mxqVQQMZzFcC&dq=The+Panic+Virus&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">The Panic Virus</a> (which picks up where
Allen leaves off and focuses on the controversy), much more reliable.
Allen comes across as a disciplined historian, who never looses his cool, while you can
feel Mnookin's rising blood pressure pulsing through the pages (which gives the writing some forward momentum). The Panic Virus, I think, it most useful for its detailed accounting of what happened during the scandal: Who claimed what when, and how those claims squared with the facts.<br />
Mnookin spends a lot of time talking about cognitive biases to explain vaccine skepticism, but I never got the sense that he (or Allen for that matter), really understood people like me; that is to say, people who are not denialists, but just grew up in a community skeptical in general of big government, big medicine, and inerrant technological progress. Michael Willrich, however, does seem to understand what it's like to be a part of a rural community that is suspicious of attempts by the ruling powers to control its behavior. Perhaps it's the distance of time that allows him to see this dynamic so clearly, because his book <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Z9y5-M3gX6gC&dq=pox+willrich&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Pox</a> is entirely about the conflict over vaccination at the turn of the 20th century. For that reason, the book about something that happened over 100 years ago is singularly relevant today: If there's any hope of convincing people (as I was eventually convinced) that vaccines are good, it's not enough to simply tell people they are wrong, we've got to earn their trust. And in order to earn someone's trust you've got to understand them.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-30651762659057090202012-08-01T21:51:00.000-07:002012-08-06T14:19:19.806-07:00Good Reads<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGxavz0k1lbNDW-oHbrh4hxh7RSlVO1wBWkXNh5oa5_aITwveOpjoWdR13XUbOkrJVO5GirOtEH6ubmKU_ACgvgBh2TbnRBRxN8xyyagLskVKDvnqcie4oCzPJe9rXLsyUIMm0kYp8Pw/s1600/Good+Books.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfGxavz0k1lbNDW-oHbrh4hxh7RSlVO1wBWkXNh5oa5_aITwveOpjoWdR13XUbOkrJVO5GirOtEH6ubmKU_ACgvgBh2TbnRBRxN8xyyagLskVKDvnqcie4oCzPJe9rXLsyUIMm0kYp8Pw/s320/Good+Books.JPG" width="213" /></a></div>
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</div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">A couple people have asked me for a list of recommendations from the stacks of books that I've read in writing my own (now to be titled All Natural). The list below is not complete (my full source list is over 9000 words) and are in no particular order. These are just the books (and other forms of media) I found particularly entertaining and interesting. Nothing here that you *should* read if you can get around to it in here, and (with great difficulty) I've restrained myself from listing all the books that would make me look smart and might impress you. No, this is just the stuff that was a pure joy for me to consume.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>On our place in the world:</b></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">In <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674061613" target="_blank">Full House</a> Stephen Jay Gould makes the case that microbes rule the world (there's an essay adapted from that <a href="http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_bacteria.html" target="_blank">here</a>), while Michael Pollan plays with the idea that plants are using us rather than vice versa in <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Botany_of_Desire.html?id=Woywyw8LlcgC" target="_blank">Botany of Desire</a>. Neither is meant as an absolutist argument that we are zombies being driven around by plants/microbes, they just serve to delightfully dislocate human-centric perspective and humble. Robert Sapolsky provides a similar service by comparing people to our primate kin in <a href="http://fora.tv/2011/02/15/Robert_Sapolsky_Are_Humans_Just_Another_Primate" target="_blank">this talk</a>, and Olivia Judson amuses by comparing human sex troubles to those of "all creation" under the persona of <a href="http://www.drtatiana.com/" target="_blank">Dr. Tatiana</a>. Then there's Rob Dunn who looks at the way our neighbors, allies, and attackers of other species are shaping the human body in <a href="http://www.robrdunn.com/2011/01/the-wild-life-of-our-bodies-2/" target="_blank">The Wild Life of Our Bodies.</a></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>Given that we are so inextricably enmeshed in our environment it may be rash to meddle too much, and exert our puny human hubris.</b></i> Two fascinating books make the case that humanity went bad with the agricultural revolution. Daniel Quinn's <a href="http://www.ishmael.org/Origins/Ishmael/" target="_blank">Ishmael</a> is a classic (though simplistic in precisely the right way to appeal to me when I was in high school) that presents history and morality from the perspective of a gorilla, and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/04/the-scourge-of-agriculture/3120/" target="_blank">Richard Manning's</a> <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Against_the_Grain.html?id=nY06NAAACAAJ" target="_blank">Against the Grain </a>makes many of the same points in a more sophisticated way. Both are tremendous fun and deserve to be considered seriously. On the other side You have <a href="http://theheidihypothesis.blogspot.com/2009/11/reading-journal-life-is-miracle.html" target="_blank">Wendell Berry</a> lyrically arguing that culture and agriculture are mutually dependent in <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/The_unsettling_of_America.html?id=uSk9gAktmpQC" target="_blank">The Unsettling of America</a>, and Pollan (again) in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3zUqfDxvl48C&dq=second+nature&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Second Nature</a> picking up where Berry leaves off (with less thunder and more humor). <a href="http://theheidihypothesis.blogspot.com/2009/06/native-american-ecology.html" target="_blank">Charles Mann's 1491</a> is worth reading even if you think you have no interest in this stuff, and he adroitly breaks down the image of the noble hunter-gatherer in pre-Columbian America, replacing it with far more fascinating advanced cultures that managed their environment with agriculture and fire. How do we put all of this into practice today? Rebecca Reider follows a group of people who tried to reengineer Eden in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=fMlXSQAACAAJ&dq=Dreaming+the+Biosphere&source=bl&ots=jI8UOJVJpd&sig=1lbYP6h14tPCbkrAF_6mXcTOEZw&hl=en&src=bmrr&sa=X&ei=5HwZUIvbBeWKjAKZ0YG4Cw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA" target="_blank">Dreaming the Biosphere</a>. It's absolutely the best book I've read about this fascinating experiment and it's a little stunning to me that it isn't more widely read. The Biosphere 2 experiment captured so many imaginations and now whenever I mention it people ask me, "Whatever happened with that?" I say, "Read this book!" And then there's one more book, <a href="http://www.yubawatershedinstitute.org/shop.cfm" target="_blank">The Nature of This Place</a>, about people trying to find their place in the environment in a much more humble way, by tinkering and learning what little bits and pieces they can in the Yuba River watershed, where I grew up. </span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>So much for the health of the earth, what about personal health?</b></i> Obviously doing things naturally, or defying nature has implications there too.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>On birth:</b></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Jennifer Block's book, <a href="http://pushedbirth.com/" target="_blank">Pushed</a>, on the state of childbirth in the United States is carefully referenced and skillfully written it's an excellent read. Also fascinating is Atul Gawande's article <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/09/061009fa_fact" target="_blank">"The Score"</a> (included in <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Better.html?id=DepE_UwgkSQC" target="_blank">Better</a>), though I've <a href="http://www.pomona.edu/news/2011/06/21-dad-who-knew-magazine.aspx" target="_blank">quibbled</a> in print with one of his conclusions. </span></div>
<i><b>On vaccines:</b></i>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">I ended up <a href="http://theheidihypothesis.blogspot.com/2012/08/how-i-changed-my-mind-about-vaccines.html" target="_blank">writing about this at some length here.</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b> On natural and technological medicine: </b></i></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">Let's start with the assertion, in the subtitle of Shannon Brownlee's excellent <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=f8H124zvldwC&dq=Overtreated&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Overtreated</a>, that "too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer." Everyone who votes should have to read that book, and it would be no burden - it's a quick, illuminating read. Several <a href="http://www.npr.org/2009/12/21/121609815/how-a-bone-disease-grew-to-fit-the-prescription" target="_blank">great</a> <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/391/more-is-less" target="_blank">radio</a> <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/392/someone-elses-money" target="_blank">pieces</a> helped convince me that Brownlee had gotten it right on balance. But I think there's also something else going on: We don't just get unnecessary medicine because we are dupes, we seek it out because there's a vital part of our health that cries out for attention, but that our medical system tends to ignore. Though I didn't reference it directly, Anne Fadiman's <a href="http://us.macmillan.com/thespiritcatchesyouandyoufalldown/AnneFadiman" target="_blank">The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down</a> does a better job than anything else I've read at teasing out the need for medicine to work on a cultural, perhaps spiritual, level in order to do more good than harm. And, where Fadiman's worked by looking outward at another culture, Chip Brown tackles (what I see as) the same problem by looking inward in <a href="http://www.chipbrown.net/afterwards/index.html" target="_blank">Afterwards, You’re a Genius</a>. The results are, predictably more idiosyncratic which makes things more muddled and sometimes frustratingly difficult to pin down (I got fed up with all the vagaries of the spiritual healing types he was hanging out with) but this is counterbalanced with self-lacerating honesty and humor. More directly on environmental health, Florence William's <a href="http://www.florencewilliams.com/node/29" target="_blank">Breasts</a> is the
most entertaining introduction to chemical endocrine disruptors you'll see.</span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><b><i>On what to eat:</i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">If you really want to understand the evidence on what our ancestors ate as they evolved into us, <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Catching_Fire.html?id=-avfYyMouJEC" target="_blank">Catching Fire</a>, by Richard Wrangham, is the book for you. Of course Pollan (again) does a great job of pointing out that there is no simple answer (as in, "just eat naturally!" or "just eat nutraceutically!" though he leans hard toward the former) in <a href="http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/" target="_blank">In Defense of Food</a>. And the Pollan (yes, yet again) also makes the case that the heath of our food is inseparable from the health of our food system, out economy - in short - our environment in <a href="http://michaelpollan.com/books/the-omnivores-dilemma/" target="_blank">The Omnivore’s Dilemma</a>. He's following in the footsteps of my former dean Orville Schell, whose <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=BVUeAQAAIAAJ&q=Modern+Meat&dq=Modern+Meat&source=bl&ots=QcpWVFHVJP&sig=fpDWpjtc2-HqjavYHL7eom6g7_c&hl=en&sa=X&ei=q-0ZUIr3KYbmiwKN1IH4Cw&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA" target="_blank">Modern Meat</a> stands the test of time and still feels modern many years later. And if you like that you should definitely read another one of it's progeny: the meat-thriller novel <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=TIALgAUc4d8C&dq=My+Year+of+Meats&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">My Year of Meats</a> by Ruth Ozeki. Once you've accepted that the health of the food system is important you need to take into consideration the health of agricultural towns and the conditions in which animals are grown for slaughter. On the latter, the most interesting book I've come across is <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=_htG-Pi2GboC&dq=Scully,+Matthew.+Dominion&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Dominion</a>, by the former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, who makes the case for animal rights on the grounds of Christian morality. On the former, Nick Reding's <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=qYOFM6aXSyEC&dq=Reding,+Nick.+Methland&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">Methland</a> is like watching Breaking Bad, only it's real, and in Iowa. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><b>And one more:</b></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;">This book doesn't fit with the others - it's not a fun easy read. It's difficult, and it's about 600 pages long. But I think it's an important book and tremendously exciting intellectually. I'm talking about <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFs9WO2B8uI" target="_blank">Iain McGilchrist's</a> <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=cXtY5CD4jBcC&dq=The+Master+and+His+Emissary&source=gbs_navlinks_s" target="_blank">The Master and His Emissary</a>. I suggest reading until you get stuck then skipping to the second half - enjoy the whirlwind tour through history - and then come back the the first half once you understand what he's driving at and why it's worth it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: inherit;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: small;">That should keep you busy - I'll add my suggestions on vaccines soon.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-31158089085889839102012-05-28T10:20:00.004-07:002012-05-28T11:48:15.551-07:00The US is weird about breastfeedingThere's been so much buzz over Time's breastmilk-sploitation cover photo (milxploitation? boob-sploitation?) that I've decided the cover of my book should be an image of yours truly breastfeeding Jamie Lynne Grumet or some other suitably hot young mom.<br />
Out of all of that though I found one particularly arresting graph that shows just how strange breastfeeding practices are in this country. As you can see, we are distinctly abnormal.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW_HBUvEDbeBMZ8QA6GiJGLo6BlUhRtd_O6g6dq57dTZ8sIc31ICIJ-YbWosU7gAG6BDWKGL8RqV634WbIdLf5fhcfBbjqAlklmevzcZdS5DnkFhRwqrzVl2Xc-xwfe05hMrnYmEFr4xk/s1600/Weaning.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW_HBUvEDbeBMZ8QA6GiJGLo6BlUhRtd_O6g6dq57dTZ8sIc31ICIJ-YbWosU7gAG6BDWKGL8RqV634WbIdLf5fhcfBbjqAlklmevzcZdS5DnkFhRwqrzVl2Xc-xwfe05hMrnYmEFr4xk/s320/Weaning.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A comparison of age at weaning in the United States and in 64 traditional societies,<br />
reproduced from Stuart-Macadam & Dettwyler (1995)
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Eric Michael Johnson dug that up. You can read <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2012/05/15/out_of_the_mouth_of_babes/">his parsing of the science here</a>. Thanks to my editor at Rodale, Alex Postman, who brought my attention to this.<br />
<div class="zemanta-pixie" style="height: 15px; margin-top: 10px;">
<img alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=01408669-5267-414f-9f91-b19c749a7768" style="border: medium none; float: right;" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-25894216325596659232012-05-27T10:48:00.000-07:002012-05-27T10:48:14.287-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfKOM2J-PgJ7y0qYqm5iRLpfVKfncvbwxTZjMfDIbjJc-ydQT7NSjUQmb3ZIZgezK7OkVnXIshBlBdNOhj0pndaZTKm3q8DpAeg6ritvkER-dJKyobjc5kwakH8Y6jJ2OoqSwrV2HLPio/s1600/science-art-wonder.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="234" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfKOM2J-PgJ7y0qYqm5iRLpfVKfncvbwxTZjMfDIbjJc-ydQT7NSjUQmb3ZIZgezK7OkVnXIshBlBdNOhj0pndaZTKm3q8DpAeg6ritvkER-dJKyobjc5kwakH8Y6jJ2OoqSwrV2HLPio/s320/science-art-wonder.png" width="320" /></a></div>
That place in the overlap is where I try to hang out. From <a href="http://www.imaginaryfoundation.com/the-undivided-mind-art-print.html">Imaginary Foundation</a>, via <a href="http://www.brianhayes.com/scienceartwonder/">Brian Hayes</a>.<br /><br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-88900208491583309132012-05-25T21:31:00.000-07:002012-05-27T10:40:35.257-07:00Big Babies and HomebirthDo 9-plus pound babies need to be born via C-section? That's the thing that stood out for me after reading <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/magazine/ina-may-gaskin-and-the-battle-for-at-home-births.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine" target="_blank">Samantha M. Shapiro's story</a> in this week's New York Times Sunday Magazine. I read this reprise on the homebirth debate with interest (and some dismay, since I talk about <a href="http://theheidihypothesis.blogspot.com/2010/06/visit-to-farm.html">a visit to Ina May Gaskin on the Farm</a> in my book). There are several things I liked about the article (the tone for instance), and several I didn't (the title - ugh). But undoubtedly the strangest thing about the story was this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div itemprop="articleBody">
"When I reached my due date, an ultrasound estimated that my baby weighed
9.4 pounds. I didn’t have gestational diabetes and had gained an
average amount of weight, and fetal tests showed my baby was thriving.
But the baby’s estimated size, combined with the fact that he hadn’t yet
descended into my pelvis, worried my midwife. </div>
<div itemprop="articleBody">
She wanted the baby out by 41 weeks, and to my surprise, she suggested I
consider going straight to surgery without labor. She sent me to be
evaluated by a doctor she worked with. “One way or another, this baby
will be a C-section,” he said."</div>
</blockquote>
Shapiro doesn't go for the prophylactic C-section, and that prophecy comes true:<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"I was told I wasn’t progressing.
The midwife pressed for a C-section, saying if I continued to labor I
risked the chance of infection or shoulder dystocia. Bigger babies are
at a greater risk for this complication, which in rare cases results in
stillbirth or injury to the baby. ... The midwife told us, “You don’t want to wait until the baby shows signs
of distress — at that point it’s too late.” I negotiated for two more
hours, made no further progress and then, under pressure, agreed to
surgery. It was the kind of coercion by dint of not offering any other
options that Gaskin talks about."</blockquote>
Here I wanted to know one more thing: Was this midwife (and the doctor) making good recommendations backed by evidence? In this story it sounds like the medical consensus is that C-sections should be used to prevent shoulder dystocia. It makes intuitive sense that big babies will be harder to deliver, but everything I could remember on the subject said that because it was so hard to estimate the fetal weight it didn't make sense to do preemptive C-sections unless the baby was a real orca (I'm allowed to say that: 11 pound baby right here). Nine and a half pounds is still solidly in the bell curve--if C-sections are a forgone conclusion for all of then, whew, that's a lot of surgeries.<br />
<br />
I asked <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/midwifeamy" target="_blank">Amy Romano</a>, <a href="http://www.optimalcareinchildbirth.com/" target="_blank">who has a new book out</a> on precisely this sort of thing if the weight of evidence supported a prophylactic C-section for 9.5 a pounder. Basically, no, she answered:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Some birth injuries would be averted if all women with suspected
macrosomia [big babies] had c-sections, but the number needed to treat is in the
thousands. (Thousands of women would need to have c-sections to prevent
one permanent injury related to shoulder dystocia)."
</blockquote>
<div>
The problem with this is that every C-section causes damage to the mother and increases her risk down the road, as well as the risk to any more babies she might have. These are small risks, but when you are talking about thousands, they add up. That's why the <a href="http://journals.lww.com/greenjournal/Abstract/2002/11000/ACOG_Practice_Bulletin_No__40__Shoulder_Dystocia.42.aspx" target="_blank">American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists</a> says this:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div>
"A policy of planned cesarean delivery for suspected macrosomic fetuses in women who do not have diabetes is not recommended ... if all fetuses suspected of being macrosomic underwent cesarean delivery, the cesarean delivery rate would increase disproportionately when compared with the reduction in the rate of shoulder dystocia"</div>
</blockquote>
(ACOG notes that there <i>is</i> some evidence to support a C-section if it looks like the baby is over 11 pounds.) This is not some fringe group here--this is the main representative of the specialty reviewing the sum total of the science. Contrast that with the doctor saying “One way or another, this baby
will be a C-section,” as if trying to give vaginal birth to a 9.5 lb baby was just crazy. In other words, this wasn't a case of clinicians being somewhat coercive, this was a case of clinicians being totally anti-scientific (at least it seems that way, maybe there's more to the story).<br />
<br />
When I was reporting on childbirth I would see this kind of variation in care all the time. At one hospital they'd proudly assure me, (let's see, to keep it simple I'll use a made up example) say: "Oh, yeah, we paint every baby red within 5 minutes of birth. No exceptions." And then at the next hospital down the road. "Of course we paint every baby blue, because we've known for years that red doesn't work."<br />
<br />
Case in point, a month ago my sister in law gave birth to a 10.5 pound <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLC4MJ3pvYAvCM6CEGC7pfhVRHX6HYu8m5hyQdPmCEXgW10ELXWzwFGA3moedSn0fxwbD3Io1zxYrePyaHuleGebXaz_eFY1vHeIvcuVwtRJWdSilX4p29k758W_QWNE_LD6vLaoM6Fxg/s1600/Torin+023.jpg" target="_blank">chubster</a>. No one pushed her to have a C-section. And a prophylactic C-section for all babies over 9.5 lbs? The midwifes and doctors on her team (at UCSD) probably would think that was crazy talk. What do you think accounts for this difference? East vs. West medical culture? The legal culture? Or was there maybe something going on that we don't know about with Shapiro?<br />
<div class="zemanta-pixie" style="height: 15px; margin-top: 10px;">
<img alt="" class="zemanta-pixie-img" src="http://img.zemanta.com/pixy.gif?x-id=c9d35766-015e-44b8-a6cf-a2759eeb01f2" style="border: medium none; float: right;" /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-28959646475389287282012-04-04T08:31:00.000-07:002012-04-04T08:31:05.555-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4pYWhALzERwaioFtPfuQKagJ4dFf8o5_mDCvefrp73k35LTc6W1ICCm7BVhCHzzrgsByJoiiO4tlfkvuzspA6-HGN-mVYgJ2Im-F1i6tSbvkD7ils0QSpP0AkdH5f-ERIBNkCv-yqfo4/s1600/Bigshell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4pYWhALzERwaioFtPfuQKagJ4dFf8o5_mDCvefrp73k35LTc6W1ICCm7BVhCHzzrgsByJoiiO4tlfkvuzspA6-HGN-mVYgJ2Im-F1i6tSbvkD7ils0QSpP0AkdH5f-ERIBNkCv-yqfo4/s1600/Bigshell.jpg" /></a></div>
This little shell (I assume a snail shell?) is really quite remarkable for two reasons. The first is that I found it in my desk-side fern (Fernando). I've had Fernando long enough that the surface of the dirt is covered with a layer of moss, so it's unlikely this shell came in with the dirt and I only just noticed it. Since it was on top of that surface layer it makes me think that I had a little snail crawling around. Where did he come from? Are there others? What does he eat, and who eats him? I started imagining the trophic food webs contained in this little pot--an ecosystem at my elbow. Rob Dunn and the other people at <a href="http://www.yourwildlife.org/" target="_blank">Your Wild Life</a> have begun studying the creatures that live with us. Naturalists know a little about how bighorn sheep, and mountain lions, and say sagebrush interact, but we know surprisingly little about the life that thrives in our homes. We know so little in fact that when Dunn sent an undergrad to look closely at the species in New York City she discovered a new species of ant within three days. Here's the other remarkable thing about this shell: <br />
<a name='more'></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqQnye1mz7k1vZZE1Ad1e-jr2ydmQaM490XGXQhr0NxF7Bdb8KtJ_DAAf4qRr00oB4ebPROThUvL88D2XX3Na1xbCGKA2IRp0Cw-2MXttR0uCOebNN6U9h5Q05U4ZF0hh53kreEbWshz8/s1600/shell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="289" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqQnye1mz7k1vZZE1Ad1e-jr2ydmQaM490XGXQhr0NxF7Bdb8KtJ_DAAf4qRr00oB4ebPROThUvL88D2XX3Na1xbCGKA2IRp0Cw-2MXttR0uCOebNN6U9h5Q05U4ZF0hh53kreEbWshz8/s320/shell.jpg" width="320" /></a>This is the same picture, I just zoomed out a bit. You'll notice the penny is still double or triple life size. This thing is tiny. I thought at first it was a speck of dirt, then I looked closer and noticed something symmetrical or ordered about it. And it was only when I put it on a white sheet of paper (carefully - it's too small to pick up with a thumb and forefinger) that it revealed itself to me. What else have I been missing because I've been to busy to stop and examine the dust?<br />
<br />
If anyone can identify this snail, or tell me anything about it I'd be hugely appreciative.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-58592033458018171962012-01-31T12:32:00.000-08:002012-05-27T14:04:21.305-07:00The surface and the depthsOn a superficial level the question I've been exploring here and in my book is: Is natural good? There are some people who tend to believe that what is natural is healthy, and there are just as many of their opposites who are inclined to believe whatever carries any mark of its natural origin is dangerous. For some the fish lifted moments ago from a lake is more wholesome than anything you could buy in a grocery store. For others, it is suspect, uncontrolled and unsanctioned by food-safety authorities. Getting beyond the gut reaction and sorting out the facts is fascinating to me and I think people who read the book will find it entertaining, I only call this stuff superficial because I think there's a deeper, more important level.<br />
To start out, the question as I've just framed it (Is natural good?) presupposes a yes or no answer. But nature is wholesome, nurturing, and abundant at the same time that it is deadly. And the deeper problem has to do with that frame of mind that crosses its arms and says: "Well, which is it? It has to be one or the other." The people drawn to this binary distinction are the most extreme. They are the folks that take a wheelbarrow-load of herbs every day so that they will never die <i>and they are also </i>the people who demand surgery early and often in the vain hope that technical intervention will allow them to live, if not forever, at least until the next surgery can be arranged. These extremes--though at opposite poles when it comes to <i>what</i> they believe in--are strikingly similar in <i>how </i>they go about their lives.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The more I've studied this, the less I care about the <i>what. </i>What's better the all-natural approach or the technological approach? Eh, sometimes one, sometimes the other, the best methods tend to ignore that division. I mean, where do you draw the dividing line between natural and technological anyway?<i> </i>But I do think there's something important to say about the <i>how.</i><br />
At both extremes you can find a narrowness of focus that molds the world to the theory, rather than vice versa. You see a willingness to consider evidence only when it fits comfortably within theory. There's a tendency to divide the world into binary oppositions, to see the world in black and white. And both react to contradictory evidence, not with wonder and curiosity, but with suspicion and dismissive annoyance. The only reason my book is possible is because the tendency to dismiss (rather than consider, adjust, and embrace) is so extreme: No one else has taken these arguments seriously enough to give them the attention they deserve, to get past all the craziness and see where important kernels of truth lie in the critique of technological progress.<br />
Interestingly, when I describe these extremes (the all-natural versus the technological), most people replace the word "technology" with the word "science," as if science were clearly aligned with one extreme viewpoint. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Science is on the side of curiosity and wonder, not dogma. The scientific method teaches us to adjust our theories to fit the evidence, rather than the other way around. That said, there have been times where science has behaved badly, where researchers have put there heads down and refused to see outside their own vision of how the world works. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, when scientists have worked with a theory long enough, they tend to develop a mental crust that keeps thoughts running in the old predictable channels, and leads them to attack what they don't understand. But as soon as this happens, as soon as people are defending against evidence rather than embracing it, I'd say they are no longer doing science.<br />
I'd like to do more than play judge and determine the winners and losers on the natural-technological spectrum. I'd like this inquiry to point out that the extremists both these camps are on one side of a more important spectrum. That's a spectrum between certainty and curiosity. Between orthodoxy and skepticism. Between dogma and science. Between those who sneer and those who feel awe. In every case, I'd argue for the latter.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-23159300341161879392012-01-12T12:28:00.000-08:002012-01-12T12:37:11.593-08:00<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRVZSc_G_kg4vAjlbS2T0JZu0I76gppqxWWR7vwuz3TxPIe6gW3k0egGkw1nGJwaPv9QAdtGY8frL0y3urvaransodoEjVLYBrTF0T3SVXKyzCUg8N3XMC7XW2z1BI5qnXzvb_ziDxcs/s1600/proteinchole.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="304" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcRVZSc_G_kg4vAjlbS2T0JZu0I76gppqxWWR7vwuz3TxPIe6gW3k0egGkw1nGJwaPv9QAdtGY8frL0y3urvaransodoEjVLYBrTF0T3SVXKyzCUg8N3XMC7XW2z1BI5qnXzvb_ziDxcs/s320/proteinchole.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cholesterol (orange) buried within the transparent protein, including
interaction with a lipid in the membrane (cyan). Credit: Grace Brannigan
and Jerome Henin, University of Pennsylvania</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In a good <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_causation/3/" target="_blank">article on the confusion over cholesterol, Johan Lehrer</a> gets at tendency to assume that when we have a lot of detailed information about something we understand it. We have wheelbarrows of data on cholesterol, but have almost no idea how its related to heart disease. Lerher writes:<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
“The cholesterol pathway is one of the best-understood biological feedback systems in the human body. Since 1913, when Russian pathologist Nikolai Anichkov first experimentally linked cholesterol to the buildup of plaque in arteries, scientists have mapped out the metabolism and transport of these compounds in exquisite detail. They’ve documented the interactions of nearly every molecule, the way hydroxymethylglutaryl-coenzyme A reductase catalyzes the production of mevalonate, which gets phosphorylated and condensed before undergoing a sequence of electron shifts until it becomes lanosterol and then, after another 19 chemical reactions, finally morphs into cholesterol. Furthermore, [the cholesterol drug] torcetrapib had already undergone a small clinical trial, which showed that the drug could increase HDL and decrease LDL… The success of the drug seemed like a sure thing.<br />
And then, just two days later, on December 2, 2006, Pfizer issued a stunning announcement: The torcetrapib Phase III clinical trial was being terminated. Although the compound was supposed to prevent heart disease, it was actually triggering higher rates of chest pain and heart failure and a 60 percent increase in overall mortality. The drug appeared to be killing people.”<br />
<br />
<br />
Good scientists know that sometimes it's necessary to step back from the data and look at the big picture. One post-doc friend, when his mentor quizzed him on what we don't know about molecular biology answered (I think correctly) - "All the little things. No wait, all the big things!" The nice thing about looking at the big things is that it forces you to look at the really big things. As T.S. Eliot put it in the opening of “Choruses from the Rock:”<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Endless invention, endless experiment,<br />
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;<br />
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;<br />
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. <br />
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,<br />
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,<br />
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.<br />
Where is the Life we have lost in living?<br />
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?<br />
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?</div>
<br />
Of course, sometimes there is a roundabout path to wisdom through information: Siddhartha Mukherjee, in the Emperor of All Maladies, notes that a successful understanding of certain forms of cancer was generated accidentally from the findings of researchers diligently beavering off in the wrong direction. Perhaps an understanding of cholesterol will rise out of the data in a similar way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-57393424528596468552011-12-10T08:45:00.000-08:002011-12-10T21:35:41.542-08:00Lunar eclipse of 2011 with infant<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9dUQjeMqKY6nLEKqcZERR3p3cUFE5iM1tmQFxVL9Xo5q-2rsssDAuATurT7KoW-I3eK6t05SOHd8Vmhbcjr88GaW5KhkZpNnVZX7E42iJZWNbh6UiFueEJFSoBENnGr6CqjqVDliReQg/s1600/eclipse" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9dUQjeMqKY6nLEKqcZERR3p3cUFE5iM1tmQFxVL9Xo5q-2rsssDAuATurT7KoW-I3eK6t05SOHd8Vmhbcjr88GaW5KhkZpNnVZX7E42iJZWNbh6UiFueEJFSoBENnGr6CqjqVDliReQg/s320/eclipse" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">photo by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewwu88/">matthewwu88</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table> <style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">December 10, 2011 - Bernal Heights</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Josephine woke up at 6 am this morning and was snuffling snotily. She still hasn’t gotten over her cold. I remembered that there was supposed to be an eclipse that morning and I grabbed my computer to see what time it was. Beth looked at my laptop with appalled dismay as if it was a goat or something I was hauling into bed. <br />
<a name='more'></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“What are you doing?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I shouldn’t torment her when she’s in this fuzzy sleep state, but I can’t help myself.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“I just thought I’d watch some videos from the internet.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Oh. Um. Nate? As long as you are up, would you take the baby?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Of course I’ll take her, I was just checking to see what time the eclipse was.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Oh.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Somewhat later:</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Do you think you can make sure she doesn’t get cold?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Unfortunately no.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“She’s just a baby! She has trouble staying warm.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“I’ll find a nice warm dog to slice open like a Tonton.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“What?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“A little hypothermia never hurt anyone.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Do you think you can zip your jacket around her in the carrier?” (This is what we do almost every day when we go out – it’s a big parka and Beth borrows it because it can fit over Jo).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“No can do. The jacket is way to small this morning.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“Thank you so much for taking her.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So we trundled up the hill. I thought it was a solar eclipse so I’m hoofing to the top to get the view to the east. But on Prospect Street, I turned my head and there it was over Twin Peaks, the swollen harvest moon, dusky in the earth’s shadow. I stood there a while, confused. I suppose Beth wasn’t the only one who was hazy. My mind was stubbornly fixed on the idea that the moon was blocking the sun. And the sun rose in the east right? Right. And I was looking, what, west? Yeah, west, the Pacific Ocean lay just beyond that ridge. So what was going on?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Eventually I figured it out. Josephine was looking around, wide eyed, her tiny lips pursed in a little ‘Oh,’ but she does that whenever we go outside. A woman had stepped out of her front door to look and we said good morning. I walked up the steps.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">At the top of the hill a man heard Jo cooing from within my jacket (I’d zipped it up over her head), and his face was immediately transformed by a smile. “Oh there’s a little shnorkums!” The combination of a common focal point (the moon) and cuteness (the baby) was social magic. When I unzipped my parka a young couple nearby broke their embrace. “I was wondering if there was a baby in there,” the woman said. “So cute! Do you want some tea?” The man lifted a samovar and she poured me a cup. “First lunar eclipse?” quipped another neighbor.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Josephine exercised her vocal chords, making long strings of vowels which started like a gurgling cry of distress but evolved to a more meditative tone, as if she were saying, “This! … oorrr, that may-be…” She lifted her eyebrows, her forehead wrinkling. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Another woman with a rambunctious puppy approached and asked if Josephine could see the moon.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">“I have no idea,” I said. “I think her sight is pretty good by now. And she seemed to be howling. Which is, I don’t know, sort of associated with moons?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">But of course the sea of San Francisco lights below us, the bouncing black puppy, the cool morning wind on her cheeks, the sunrise—smearing up the opposite sky—all these things would doubtless be just as miraculous to Josephine as this massive eclipse. That’s the nice thing about babies and eclipses—the world under their strange light can be reenchanted with wonder.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-80077812938629145202011-11-16T15:27:00.000-08:002011-12-10T21:37:37.492-08:00The problem with inexpensive remedies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj00kVPcY2FlImcMhdm3rIIuJMqFlMgGq4cuImPwxXwYc2StUsKRDgPF8fUBrD9vAZUp7EpsuYiBvPzx_490xaYAsWsD3pZ4fu_6W5XWR9LigR4EgQu7DymBJB6QlZwrL8AZ1NWgUUTvWM/s1600/Goth+phase.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj00kVPcY2FlImcMhdm3rIIuJMqFlMgGq4cuImPwxXwYc2StUsKRDgPF8fUBrD9vAZUp7EpsuYiBvPzx_490xaYAsWsD3pZ4fu_6W5XWR9LigR4EgQu7DymBJB6QlZwrL8AZ1NWgUUTvWM/s320/Goth+phase.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><br />
About three months ago my daughter was born, and aside from sometimes looking like ET, and sometimes like Paul Giamatti with a hangover, she was perfect in every respect. Then we noticed that she had some little white patches in her mouth, which I assumed were just fatty milk residue but then had to admit were thrush. Yeasty thrush infection in the perfect baby mouth! Imagine my outrage. It got worse and worse until finally we called the doctor who gave us the Rx for Nystatin, an antifungal. It was this awful, sticky yellow stuff that had a disorienting viscosity and would always drip right when the baby had turned her head. So it got everywhere, and we were supposed to give it every couple of hours, and I felt like I was ruining my daughters palate by making her first significant exposure to a new taste this horrible sugary stuff. Also, it totally didn't work. We fed her the stuff for over a month, carefully spreading it all around. It seemed to fertilize the thrush.<br />
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So like any good, meddling, slightly neurotic parents we look in our infinite library of parenting books and read about another thrush remedy called Gentian violet. We ask the pediatrician about it. "There's a blast from the past," he says. "That'll work." The wife buys some (for $2!) at Walgreens. We stick it in the baby's mouth. Baby now has a purple mouth. The next morning all those white patches are gone save one pin point on the lip. We hit her again with the purple magic. Done.<br />
Then, of course I start getting up on my high horse about the superiority of herbs and blindness that makes us default to prescription drugs even if they don't really work. Next I look up Gentian violet and learn that it's not derived from the purple gentian tulip as I had thought but instead, from coal tar. It's also known as Tris(4-(dimethylamino)phenyl)methylium chloride and in large quantities it's linked to cancer. Oops.<br />
So then we go back to the doctor and tell the story and he gets all worked up about it. The stuff has been used forever, he says, it's perfectly safe, it's got a track record better than aspirin. Everything causes cancer in high enough doses. The reason he's upset is that research only gets done if there's profit in it. And no one is going to pay for a clinical trial of chemical that sells for $2 a bottle (enough for about 300 thrush-mouthed babies). True.<br />
So I'm pretty glad we are no longer buying Nystatin and the baby is once more perfect. But funny how my biases shifted on me when I went from thinking natural herb to chemical. Why should the herb be any safer?<br />
By the way, if you are a parent stumbling on this after trolling the internet at 3 am you should also hear the following addendum. You've no doubt already read that gentian (or crystal violet) stains. I knocked the bottle over, off the top of the toilet and it went everywhere: Down the wall, in the toilet, all over the floor, on my feet... If you are as clumsy as me, break out the rubbing alcohol. That will lift it off non-porous surfaces amazingly well. Still, budget two hours and half a roll of toilet paper.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-13916699125345971912011-10-03T15:39:00.000-07:002011-10-04T09:29:23.638-07:00Why don't we have more midwives?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwVmVHo02R3Gf0WhlOiZ7-2rVgrcbg1_iN1Ynvgs5J6imnMt0XfpXR05dV7buz0lKd0y4Y-l2xB9CUdpYIMbs5fxRD9YFXKPgclUPJVLZxUVBPzDaJHXahkHdohB1jnt0_JxcJcz01II8/s1600/Screen+shot+2011-10-03+at+3.35.44+PM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwVmVHo02R3Gf0WhlOiZ7-2rVgrcbg1_iN1Ynvgs5J6imnMt0XfpXR05dV7buz0lKd0y4Y-l2xB9CUdpYIMbs5fxRD9YFXKPgclUPJVLZxUVBPzDaJHXahkHdohB1jnt0_JxcJcz01II8/s320/Screen+shot+2011-10-03+at+3.35.44+PM.png" width="320" /></a></div>Last summer I made a trip to Kentucky to see what I could learn about an all-but-forgotten part of our medical history. The land on either side of the road grew steeper and greener, and by the time I reached Hyden, Kentucky, I felt I was at the bottom of a well with walls of beech wood and kudzu. This was true Appalachia, where dwellings clung to the rare plot of level ground, a doublewide up on a hillside ledge, a Dairy Queen in the bend of a river, a crook between hills provided enough resting place for the town of Hyden a handful of brick buildings clustered around a crossroads. The house I was looking for was tucked back in the forest, a manorial building of black logs and white chinking that stood above the Middle Fork of the Kentucky River. Hollyhocks were blooming in the yard. It was Mary Breckinridge’s house, and home of the Frontier Nursing Service.<br />
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When Breckinridge came here in 1923, the U.S. maternal mortality rate was 870 per 100,000. And in these deep hollows, where people were cut off from medical treatment, women were even more likely to die in childbirth. Breckinridge changed that. In under a decade it would be safer to give birth in her corner of eastern Kentucky than in the best hospitals in New York. It was as pure an experiment as you could ask for—there were no rich women flying in to deliver, no hospitals to catch the most dangerous cases—just a group of midwives making improvements. What’s more, the data were sterling: Breckinridge, a woman of great chutzpah, knew the world would doubt statistics generated by midwives in the mountains, so she recruited Dr. Louis Israel Dublin, vice president and statistician at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (now MetLife), to do the numbers.<br />
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The results, published in 1932, were astounding. The women the Frontier Nurses serves, who were desperately poor and usually gave birth at home, were ten times less likely to die in childbirth than the average American. The nation would not reach the standard of care in this corner of Appalachia until the 1950s, after the widespread acceptance of antiseptic and the discovery of antibiotics.<br />
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Breckenridge did not quite know what to make of these numbers. “The question that will arise in every thoughtful mind is why there should be this discrepancy between the Kentucky mountain woman and her city sister,” she wrote. “Doubtless there is too much deliberate obstetrical interference in city hospitals but not so much, I am convinced, as people might think.” Then, in what seems like an uncharacteristic lapse of reasoning, she went on to lay out a theory that drew on eugenics: Rather than praising her own work, she credited the racial homogeneity and sturdy birth canals of the population she served. These explanations are no longer scientifically relevant, but even if the racial hypothesis had held up, it did not explain the radical improvement that had occurred among this population.<br />
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A better explanation had to do with the fact that the Frontier Nursing Service midwives were highly trained and able to devote time and passion to their charges, making dozens of house calls per pregnancy. Most importantly, they weren't tempted to use those technological interventions into birth that Breckenridge had mentioned, which often did more harm than good.<br />
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This low-tech armamentarium of time and attention was highly effective. When Louis Isreal Dublin made his accounting in 1931, eastern Kentucky was suffering from a year-long drought and famine, and tuberculosis was running rampant. And yet maternal health was improving. Dublin concluded that, if this style of maternity care were became a model for the nation it would save a million lives within fifteen years:<br />
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“If such a service were available to the women of the country generally, there would be a saving of 10,000 mothers’ lives a year in the United States, there would be 30,000 less [sic] stillbirths and 30,000 more children alive at the end of the first month of life,” Dublin wrote.<br />
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Today, the Frontier Nursing Service now runs a school, which sends some 200 nurse midwives to work in underserved areas around the country. The midwives work at the margins, where more technological care is unavailable. Dublin’s vision had never come to fruition. Rather than remaking obstetric practice in its image, the place of midwifery in the medical hierarchy hadn’t changed much since 1925.<br />
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(This is a condensed excerpt from my book - I figured I'd post for midwives week.)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-19651852715611888342011-06-01T14:57:00.000-07:002011-06-01T14:57:08.272-07:00Reading Journal: Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHAIwJRmHlGxmLx_SlEv-PXWqz69IDnOgu7gSX5gLyIgtMaXs8kP84Vv_98CdGmaMRzVbTqduDPGJx11u0kNggBCdf7awgacdkE1ECKY6ZJYANWXnNIRnjZenHsKj5E0Ta3kWgqxWzAc/s1600/Goom+and+Glory.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbHAIwJRmHlGxmLx_SlEv-PXWqz69IDnOgu7gSX5gLyIgtMaXs8kP84Vv_98CdGmaMRzVbTqduDPGJx11u0kNggBCdf7awgacdkE1ECKY6ZJYANWXnNIRnjZenHsKj5E0Ta3kWgqxWzAc/s1600/Goom+and+Glory.jpg" /></a></div>The reason this book is interesting to me is that it gets at the argument that wilderness areas are worth saving when they are sublime. When people are in those high places, the argument goes, they are able to make contact with something profound and this contact is healing in the broadest sense - it improves lives, improves souls, improves us as humans. See Heidi.<br />
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But then there is the obvious counterargument that goes: wait a second, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yosemite may be sublime for you, but maybe an open-pit mine is sublime for me. It would be useful to know if we can move beyond or dismiss either argument. And next, it would be nice to know with some more specificity what we are really talking about with this feeling of the mountain high.<br />
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Marjorie Hope Nicolson's starting point in this book is to provide a counterexample: It proves that the mountain high is not some universal, timeless, recognition of the sacred in mountains. In England, from the middle ages up until the 18th century, mountains were dismissed with "violent disparagement" as the ugliest of natural objects. But once the Romantic period begins, language regarding mountains becomes exalting, ecstatic, lyrical. On it's surface it seems like this would be enough to dismiss John Muir's arguments about the sacredness of Hetch Hetchy. But remember this is the starting point (page one of the preface), and Nicholson delves deeper. What she really wants to know is, "Why did mountain attitudes change so spectacularly in England?"<br />
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"During the first seventeen centuries of the Christian era, "Mountain Gloom" so clouded human eyes that never for a moment did poets see mountains in the full radiance to which our eyes have become accustomed. Within a century--indeed within 50 years--all this was changed. The "Mountain Glory" dawned, then shone full splendor. Why?" (3)<br />
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What happened was the Enlightenment. As scientific discoveries began to upset the assumptions of the Christian world it produced "one of the most profound revolutions in thought that has ever occurred." No longer did people have a fixed place in the universe in the great chain for being from earthworm up through peasant, squire, king, to God. No longer could they look at the stars and see fixed lights moving in perfect symmetry on spheres. Instead there was a chaotic abundance, each moving in its own path. Jon Donne was so disturbed he wrote a sort of pre-Yeats Second Coming poem, and George Herbert simply tried his best to ignore these changes. The Romantics, on the other hand, were the ones who, rather than resist these findings, discovered a way to bring them into their idea of a God-driven universe. Henry More for instance:<br />
<blockquote>Nature's careless pencill dipt in light<br />
With sprinkled starres hath spattered the Night</blockquote>Here, for the first time, was an English Christian finding God in the infinite disorder of nature. More was first appalled ("An infinitie of worlds! A thing monstrous if assented to") (133), and then enthralled by the implications of astronomy. He decided that this not only made sense, but was inevitable, and he was "Roused up by a new Philosophick furie." Rather than looking for God in simple perfection, More began finding Him in richness, diversity, variety, abundance. If something natural seemed evil it was only because of man's limited point of view. You can see the roots of modern day bio-spiritualism here.<br />
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The discovery of the sublime in nature came not from some literary tradition, but from science, argues Nicholson:<br />
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"Awe, compounded of mingled terror and exultation, once reserved for God, passed over in the seventeenth century first to an expanded cosmos, then from macrocosm to the greatest objects in the geocosm--mountains, ocean, desert. ... Scientifically minded Platonists, reading their ideas of infinity into a God of Plentitude, then reading them out again, transferred from God to Space to Nature conceptions of majesty, grandeur, vastness in which both admiration and awe were combined." (143)<br />
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(Richard Holmes makes the same point more intimately by telling the stories of Romantic artist/scientists in <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=CmoALmtxN2QC&pg=PP3&lpg=PP3&dq=richard+holmes+age+of+wonder&source=bl&ots=CLBt8ceqUN&sig=NDFusUz6whzWUjjw6v9YqCYDrPg&hl=en&ei=RbPmTa7UF5H4swOmlKH8Bg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CFIQ6AEwBTgK#v=onepage&q&f=false">The Age of Wonder</a>).<br />
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So what does this mean practically? Is Muir's claim that Hetch Hetchy is a cathedral shattered because it wouldn't have been a cathedral in 1500? Certainly it shatters the claim that we can know with absolute certainty which places are sacred in a religious sense. There's no more space for orthodoxy. But just because a feeling is subjective doesn't mean that it is not real. There are measurable effects on the body to being surrounded with (subjective) natural beauty. Lowered heart rates. Increased scores on tests. Faster healing. All these very real reactions are influenced, not just by the absolute quality of the place, but the meaning that culture and science have imbued in its scenery.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-58414420713042496642011-05-27T17:49:00.000-07:002011-05-27T17:50:27.611-07:00Is pain always indicative of injury?<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uwyltmUR3MU" width="425"></iframe><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">My wife and I are in a childbirth class with a group of about 30 adults, and recently the question of pain came up. One student (apparently a scientist) argued that all pain was indicative of injury—the normal pain of childbirth, even emotional pain and grief involves small tissue damage in the brain. Fascinating! Who knew?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">But as I thought about it that night, I found that there was something in the argument that didn’t sit right with me. The next morning I realized what it was: It’s one thing to point out that pain is linked to some kind of cellular rending as a clinical fact, but to claim that all pain is by definition injury is to step out of the magisterium of science and onto my turf—because at that point we are talking about the meanings of words.</div><div class="MsoNormal"></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">The word <i>injury </i><span style="font-style: normal;">carries with it a strong connotation of wrongness. It comes from the Latin</span><i> injuria </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(in = not jus or jur = right, eg justice, jurisprudence). There are some types of pain that don’t feel wrong at all—in fact, they can feel very right. Exercise is one example. I think of the line from Chariots of Fire, when Eric Liddell responds to his sister’s demands that he give up his shot at the Olympics by saying. “God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.” I wouldn’t call it God, but I certainly have felt an overwhelming sense of rightness in my own running as I push up against the barriers of pain. Injury is an imprecise, misleading word if it describes something that feels right. </span><span style="font-style: normal;">(NB this is subjective. Running a 60-second 400 meters will be injurious for one person and sublime for another).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal">So what is the right word to describe pain of childbirth, a pain that is usually chosen (and there is bound to be pain in the process, even with an epidural), wanted at some level? <i>Damage</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (damnum – a loss, eg damn) and </span><i>harm</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (old Norse for sorrow) have connotations similar to injury. There are other, less uncomplimentary words, to describe the breaking down of one thing to deliver something new: Tilling, the act of plowing under one kind of life to produce another comes from the German </span><i>zielen </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(to strive) and seems appropriate in nuance, but too poetical for practical use. There is deconstruction, change, transformation, all of which are adequate. Transformational pain seems more on point than injury. All transformations involve some destruction (tree to table, table to ash, ash to tree), but the word does not connote loss or gain.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps this is too obvious to see, but it would also make sense to call desired pain <i>labor. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">All labor, whether intellectual, manual, or uterine, is painful in varying degrees. But it is also productive of something desired. Labor does rend cells, but in the long run it usually makes them stronger. The word in Latin is the same (labor) and it means toil and trouble—though trouble in this Latin sense simply implies changing things up (from turbidus – turbid, trouble the waters). </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">These days labor is frequently used in a negative context: laboring fruitlessly, belaboring the point, laboring under a false assumption. It tends to imply the Luddite banging his head against the wall, too stupid or unskilled to utilize the wings of technology. But I think labor deserves more respect. Now that machinery allows us to satisfy our desires with such airy ease it’s possible to see how unsatisfying such labor-free gratification can be. That which comes easily tends to pass me by almost unnoticed (how many cookies have I eaten?). The things I truly value are those that trouble me, which demand attention—and respect—which force me to sweat, to prove my worth, to become a slightly better person before yielding themselves. In those pursuits I accept (sometimes grimly, sometimes joyfully) the pain, and I think it would be wrong to call it injury.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-42330300831448499562011-03-28T12:23:00.000-07:002011-03-28T12:23:37.760-07:00Bacteria are controlling your mind<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2982.2010.01620.x/abstract;jsessionid=882C8A8E4CE30A46DFD6DD273AC145C3.d01t04?systemMessage=Due+to+scheduled+maintenance%2C+access+to+Wiley+Online+Library+will+be+disrupted+on+Saturday%2C+2nd+Apr+between+10%3A00-12%3A00+BST">More evidence that we are</a> "superorganisms" of many creatures working together and against each other. Bruce German predicted this years ago. The study is pretty basic - they aren't showing that bacteria are responsible for Mozart's musical genius - but it provides proof of concept. There's a good plain-language write up <a href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2011/03/gut_bacteria_may_influence_thoughts_and_behaviour.php">here</a>.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-70018535063984113232011-03-04T17:37:00.000-08:002011-03-04T17:37:08.742-08:00This is cool<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUAP6LsbWj23LIaIHeaDB9FrK3WMZIkHykpQH091-fDDWRqDCz6AoiuKhxkoue6z45nhsQ-ifw39tu3kbbXPQ3uy95S69aZNdBjqUnieGZU1_wGObUFkLXOzKzvCVEXohiNvSaksYmjDc/s1600/llareta_0308.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUAP6LsbWj23LIaIHeaDB9FrK3WMZIkHykpQH091-fDDWRqDCz6AoiuKhxkoue6z45nhsQ-ifw39tu3kbbXPQ3uy95S69aZNdBjqUnieGZU1_wGObUFkLXOzKzvCVEXohiNvSaksYmjDc/s320/llareta_0308.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The plant above is called La Llareta. It's a bush with millions of tiny, tightly-packed leaves. It's in Chile's Atacama desert, and it's more than 2,000 years old. <a href="http://oltw.blogspot.com/">Rachel Sussman is photographing</a> the oldest living things in the world. It's interesting to see the type of things that have had the fortitude, or adaptability, or luck to survive from one epoch into a very different time.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-14449709230084191572011-02-25T15:16:00.000-08:002011-02-26T01:43:42.871-08:00Reading Journal: Politics of Nature<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBVbbezjqQPVxVRA_2pKdVmM66FKJ9HFAizMRCOc_vrnC84zKPcjCSlZzF7prpq7zMYJw9md0hGR15dReYSPGx28Y8WxbwcMqARlzXbNTrb4hgzzHrXYZWfbs4ShJChSsAG1_38IwkrnM/s1600/POLNAT.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBVbbezjqQPVxVRA_2pKdVmM66FKJ9HFAizMRCOc_vrnC84zKPcjCSlZzF7prpq7zMYJw9md0hGR15dReYSPGx28Y8WxbwcMqARlzXbNTrb4hgzzHrXYZWfbs4ShJChSsAG1_38IwkrnM/s320/POLNAT.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><i>Update: Coincidentally <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27FOB-WWLN-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine">there's an article</a> in this Sunday's NYT Magazine on these issues. Latour is quoted about how his formulation against facts has emboldened attacks on climate change evidence.</i><br />
<i> </i> <br />
I have had this on my shelf for a long time. Every once and a while I take it down and work my way through a little more. Philosophy is always hard, and French philosophers in translation have scared me ever since some traumatic experiences alone in my college dorm room with no one to protect me from Jean Baudrillard. With Latour, unlike Baudrillard, I didn't get the sense that he was being deliberately difficult. But he still makes up an awful lot of words (or gives them special meaning which are different from their commonly understood meaning). Anyway - I've slogged through this enough that I think I can summarize in plain English. Though I'm sure I'm losing some of the nuance in translation. So here’s what (I think) Latour is saying in <i>Politics of Nature:</i><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Latour uses Plato’s metaphor of the cave to describe the current state of the way we think about nature: We are the prisoners endlessly debating the projections on the wall, but certain people (those who claim to have science on their side) are assumed to have gone out of the cave and seen the real world (nature), and so they are given the power to cut off the argument and say, this is the way things actually are. So nature in this formulation, or natural law, achieves a sort of transcendent divinity. We worship it. If the laws of nature say we should sacrifice our son Isaac, well, we’d better do it because nature’s dice are loaded (as Emerson put it).<br />
<br />
But he says, there is no cave - and no "out there." There is, in other words, no such thing as nature. Which means that nature can't (or shouldn't) be brought in to trump the debate.<br />
<br />
Latour’s not a relativist – he thinks there <i>is</i> an objective reality, and that the sciences give us better and better pictures of that reality. However – The sciences will never give a perfect picture. We will probably never be able to predict the future. It’s easy for hubris to grow—but in point of fact the sciences still only give a little direction in the majority of decisions we make. The looming problem of our times is that people try to cut off political debate by declaring that their perspective is simply uncontestable reality, proven by science (even if “proven by science” is something a good scientist would never say). Science can help people make decisions, but because it's always incomplete, and always made in the real world by real people (with their own assumptions, and desires, and incentives) it's not really providing access to natural laws that transcend politics. This means that if I accept Latour, I can never pound your fist on the table and say: "We don't need to discuss this - climate change (eg) is a fact and it's a fact that we must raise the gas tax or we are all going to suffer. That's not a political issue - we've sent our best scientists out into nature and we know that it it true. So no matter what you're political orientation you are now bound by a higher law - the transcendent law of nature - to vote with me."<br />
<br />
The solution – First of all, come out of the cave: Recognize that we all have access to (and are part of) nature, and that people claiming that you should trust them without a careful consideration of all arguments are cult leaders (not scientists). <br />
<br />
We need: Fewer appeals to science as a justification for a position, and more authentic science. Fewer indisputable facts, more collective experimentation.<br />
<br />
So how do you make society work if it’s not guided by nature's law? (It’s no more difficult than making a society work even if it’s not guided by religion). Scientists are certainly involved, as are moralists and politicians and economists. The first step is to recognize when there is some new issue troubling the water: It might be the discovery of a new disease, or it could be a group who say there is terrible timber management around their homes (maybe they think the clear cutting with seed trees is not working). The next step is to figure out everything that might be affected by this. Let’s stay with the second example – that might be the people that live in the area, the logging companies, the people who use the timber (home builders, craftsmen), those who consume the timbers, all the species that occupy the forest, or who might if a different strategy of management were adopted, the people downstream in the watershed, the species in those streams, the people whose weather patterns are changed by moisture evaporation from the trees, the people who breath the oxygen they create… and there are probably others. From all these parties we see what they can tell us about what they want. Some of this may be incomplete (we might not know what the fish wants, or to even include a fungus that no one has named yet). But we assemble as much information as possible (each party defining the problem in their own terms). Then we’d create a hierarchy—we’d figure out which party’s needs were the most important to our republic (maybe we don’t care so much about the bacteria that would like the entire forest to be coated in tar-like ooze)—we figure out what parties can live together and what compromises can be made. This would be a knockdown fight, but that’s the nature of politics—we eventually decide that it’s okay for some to die (Latour likes the example of 8,000 people dying from traffic accidents per year in France. Being able to travel quickly ranks higher in the hierarchy than those lives.) Finally, once you have that hierarchy you institutionalize it: You act on it. The next day, parties that are not content with their position on the totem pole come back again and make the case that their problem is hurting the republic – and if there is a big enough disturbance the process starts over. Instead of the laws of nature cutting off debate and creating simple solutions, there is tons of debate and the solutions get increasingly complicated.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-52055226932923775402011-01-24T17:28:00.000-08:002011-01-24T17:28:57.342-08:00A.O. Scott on "Safe"A review of the great - and oh-so-close-to-home - Todd Haynes movie.<br />
<br />
"Are these dangers really out there in the world, or are they just in our heads? Neither answer is likely to make us feel better, or make us feel safe."<br />
<iframe frameborder="0" height="373" id="nyt_video_player" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html?videoId=1247464583973&playerType=embed" title="New York Times Video - Embed Player" width="480"></iframe>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-32373704192963762222011-01-24T09:28:00.000-08:002011-01-24T09:28:43.473-08:00Paleo Diet<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFNwStnUcTVcCGnFSF72EU-iZWkkpd5lo_YU5pBONaF12Rm9iELyDY4FJ0TBq_vAgXbV0wWi4qeuw_4b0O6Chyphenhyphen4_wBiEnPa5XOL8peiOtITkHr-C_uCSZ782eXlmiNjEA_lJLsRY_aS7c/s1600/BanksyCaveman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFNwStnUcTVcCGnFSF72EU-iZWkkpd5lo_YU5pBONaF12Rm9iELyDY4FJ0TBq_vAgXbV0wWi4qeuw_4b0O6Chyphenhyphen4_wBiEnPa5XOL8peiOtITkHr-C_uCSZ782eXlmiNjEA_lJLsRY_aS7c/s320/BanksyCaveman.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Banksy's Caveman, photographed by Lord Jim</td></tr>
</tbody></table>On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:12 PM, <span class="il">-- I got this email from a friend. She --</span> wrote:<br />
Hey Nate, I keep hearing about this damn "Paleo" diet, and it reminds me of your investigation into whether what's "natural" is "good." Seemingly intelligent people claim that humans are in fact best suited to a diet consisting only of what a caveman would have eaten. It seems absurd to me -- I mean, we've physically evolved since that time (pinkie toes have gotten smaller in response to wearing shoes), so how could eating grains that we've cultivated for 10,000 years be bad for us? Not to mention that these same people drive cars, work in buildings, etc. <br />
<br />
My response: I'm inclined to agree (with significant caveats).<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
We know that humans have evolved a lot since the agricultural revolution. Besides the toes (which I hadn't heard about), there have been some digestive changes. I, and most other descendants of the snarling pillaging northern European types, have a mutation that allows us to continue producing lactase into adulthood. Dairy is a really important part of my diet despite the fact that there are a lot of people who believe it's wrong, just wrong, to be drinking mammary fluid as an adult. (If you google around a bit you'll find lots or rants by people who are clearly replacing their milk with something more powerful...) But these people do have some right to complain, something like 70 percent of the world is lactose intolerant (see China) and yet government guidelines have been recommending a nice glass of milk a day forever.<br />
<br />
Okay - I could take that tangent pretty far - but the point is we've changed: People with ancestors from around the fertile crescent have more amylase in their saliva (helps break down starches). And all humans have a long small intestine and short hind gut compared to the great apes, which is consistent with a shift to higher quality foods (less leaves, more grains and meats - or maybe just more cooking).<br />
<br />
So, go ahead and thumb your nose at your paleo diet friends and dig into a sandwich. Or actually, wait - because here come the caveats. Katherine Milton, who has spent years in the jungle studying what monkeys eat (sometimes living with indigenous people) makes some of the same points you did, but also notes that it's pretty clear that our Western diseases, or diseases of affluence (heart disease, obesity, diabetes, colon cancer) are related in some way to diet. As the unstinted flowering of the diet-book tree suggests, we really don't understand what's causing these afflictions. And when people do go on the paleo diet their blood sugar drops, they lose weight, and reverse their diabetes (type 2). In other words: Mock it all you want, it looks like it works. There's a lot of science behind this and a big clinical trial going on at UCSF looking at diabetics on the diet.<br />
<br />
So how do we resolve this contradiction? Clearly we have evolved for a more modern diet - but going back to eat like a caveman is healthier? I think it's not that the paleo diet per se is healthier - but that just about anything is healthier. Here's Milton from another paper: "Information on diets and health of recent and contemporary traditional peoples, both hunter-gatherers and small-scale agriculturalists who also eat wild foods, show that <i>all </i>such societies are largely free of the diseases of affluence, whether the daily diet is made up primarily of wild animal foods, wild plant foods, or a single cultivated starchy carbohydrate supplemented with wild plant and animal foods." You have people who live on potatoes, people who depend on corn and beans, people up north who eat heroic amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol and almost zero veggies, you've got the Masai in Africa whose staple is cows milk sweetened with blood (incidentally there was a separate mutation for lactase in Africa). None of them get heart disease or diabetes on these diets with the anything near the frequency that we do (even if you just look at the cohorts over 60). Basically humans can eat anything - there's just one culture in the world that's hit upon a truly unhealthy diet - and that's us.<br />
<br />
Except - it may not be unhealthy for everyone. There are probably a lot of other factors besides these enzyme mutations that make people different and some of us are probably perfectly well adapted to a sedentary lifestyle and a processed-foods diet.<br />
<br />
NateAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-56347384596518918172011-01-13T21:14:00.000-08:002011-01-13T21:14:46.749-08:00Cool opportunity for Bay Area amateur naturalists<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #31849b; font-size: 16pt;">Academy of Sciences & Farallones Marine Sanctuary Seeking Naturalists</span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="color: #31849b;">2011 Rocky Shore Naturalist Training Course</span></b><span> <br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>WHO: The California Academy of Sciences and Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary <br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>WHAT: Training as Rocky Shore Naturalists <br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>WHERE: California Academy of Sciences, and Farallones sanctuary offices, San Francisco<br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span>WHEN: </span><span>Saturday January 29th at 1PM, first of three f</span><span></span><span>ield trips to Duxbury Reef<br />
</span><span>Classes February 2<sup>nd</sup> from 6:30-9:00PM and <span></span>February 2nd- March 23<sup>rd</sup> from 6:30-9:00PM</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span><a name='more'></a><br />
Volunteers will be trained in invertebrate zoology, natural history, tidepool etiquette and stewardship, intertidal research and monitoring. Naturalists will work at Duxbury Reef in Bolinas as roving interpreters for visitors and conduct monitoring. Volunteers can also work at the California Coast exhibit and Discovery Tidepool at the Academy of Sciences. We meet on Wednesday evenings from 6:30-9 PM at the California Academy of Sciences/Golden Gate Park, or at Sanctuary offices in the Presidio. </span></div><span></span><span>Volunteers must commit to working at least once a month for a year. Volunteers must also complete a two-hour Academy volunteer orientation. <span> </span><span> </span>Visit the Rocky Shore Partnership blog at: <a href="http://www.calacademy.org/blogs/rockyshore/" target="_blank">http://www.calacademy.org/<wbr></wbr>blogs/rockyshore/</a></span> <span>Enrollment is limited. Contact: Rebecca Johnson, <a href="mailto:rockyshore@calacademy.org" target="_blank">rockyshore@calacademy.org</a>; phone 415/ 379-5252.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-14360809029943767362010-12-04T02:17:00.000-08:002010-12-04T16:50:38.959-08:00Awesome things Bruce German saysAs you may be able to tell from my previous post, I just got back from a day trip to Bruce German's land of wonders and curiosities (also occasionally known as UC Davis).<br />
This is not your average food chemist. He has a razor scooter in his office. Also there is some evidence that he is still Canadian at heart: There's a wooden mountie holding up his iPhone charger and a big illustration of a hockey goalie above his desk. He studies lipids - namely the lipids in milk and writes papers about pretty incomprehensible things like the milk fat globule membrane (MFGM) and <i>cis</i>-9, <i>trans</i>-11 conjugated linoleic acid, and yet when he talks about this stuff he consistently blows my mind. The following is mostly just notes to myself. Very rough...<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
"I'd throw diet-book writers in jail. Every one works, but the last thing in the world that you should do is a diet with food restriction."<br />
Weight loss is usually fifty percent muscle and bone deterioration. Then when you eat again, unless you are exercising every single muscle fat comes back faster. And we don't know if you lose smooth muscle.<br />
"If you are traveling you'd want to be eating to turn up the immune system, you could even eat food that is specialized to the microbes in the place you are going ahead of time to build up defenses - versus normally the last thing in the world you want to do is turn up your immune system because then you end up with these autoimmune overreactions to pollen or whatever."<br />
On a new model for teaching kids about nutrition: "We are not telling them what to do, just empowering them to know themselves."<br />
"Milk educates infants as to smells - it instills food preferences."<br />
"I have a set of pre-assumptions that I'm not even aware of and its dictating what I'm thinking. We need these young minds when they're not stuck."<br />
"The industrial authoritarian model of nutrition is in diametric opposition with human evolution. If you look at humans what's most astonishing is not what they've gained but what they've lost" (which leads on a long example - we lost the big crushing jaw muscles but that mutation allowed our heads to get bigger, we literally became less of meat-heads, and allowed the expansion of the brain - this might have happened when we were learning to cook? Perhaps those early campfires were the Promethean flames. I had forgotten that Prometheus had a brother, Epimetheus. Zeus gave them clay to make humans and animals, plus a lot of cool features like claws and prehensile tales, armored shells, poisonous venom, and of course big crushing jaws. Epimetheus really go into designing creatures to go with these features and realized too late that he had used them all up before Prometheus had finished molding the humans. So Prometheus feels sorry for us and steals us fire - you know the rest. So, we may not have cool attachments, but we can cook. The mouse can tell when it is deficient in calcium, and sniff it out - we can starve to death next to a nutrient that would save us - we've lost that instinctive eating - but we have gained freedom, while the panda is enslaved by bamboo.<br />
"We are at the the platinum level of freedom and we are all supposed to eat the same way, and we are doing this for fear of heart diseases that only goofball white men in middle America are getting?"<br />
I suggested that instead of nutrient deficiency diseases we were getting nutrient ultra-sufficiency diseases - he thinks that's not it:<br />
"It may end up really being imbalance diseases. If you look back through history at the extremes of nutrition, usually when there was an abundance of food there was more movement, people built cities. And when food is short, I've gone to villages where food is in short supply and around noon the kids all just sit down. They are almost catatonic. But they are conserving energy because they are low on calories. But here we have a situation where kids are eating a lot, and its discouraging movement. It's a total aberration. So I think it may have to do with an imbalance, the wrong combination of nutrients. You know when I was a kid my mom wasn't standing at the door saying get out there, she was standing at the door saying get in here and do your homework."<br />
<br />
Re the hooded seal and fat: "There's got to be a trigger that says okay open up the gates, out you go."<br />
Just overdose everyone with essential nutrients - flood out variety with excess.<br />
HAMLET - points to structure importance elegant change (old milk)<br />
Freesland-Campina Dairy co-op Andre WorkmanAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-9292824358714404212010-12-03T23:45:00.000-08:002010-12-03T23:45:07.725-08:00Things you find in a milk labThe place where milk is broken down and examined piece by piece looks a lot like your high-school chemistry lab probably did, only more so - more pipes and cables swooping up past hanging fluorescent lights, more battered and mysterious machines crowding the faux-wood lab bench, more cool things that steam or blaze and could be induced to go boom, along with stern, though tattered, instructions forbidding blazing and booming pasted to the walls.<br />
One in a red font that crams exclamation marks into every letter reads: "Danger invisible laser radiation Avoid eye contact or skin exposure to direct or scattered radiation." A freezer is marked, "Biohazard," and someone has taped two blue napkins to it with the words, "Do not open" inked fiercely in red on each. A digital display on the door shows the interior temperature to be -30 degrees Celsius. Above the lab bench hangs a professionally carved wooden sign, the sort that on country houses display the surname of the inhabitants, which some wit has designed to say, "Spectrometry for the masses."<br />
There are two blackboards on the wall covered in acronyms I don't understand with arrows pointing from one to the next. There is another freezer without frightening signs, and this one contains hundreds of test tubes and beakers and vials with frozen milk scabbed to the glass.<br />
On the benches slim patches of workspace are scattered: a pair of blue cryo gloves (like oven mits), several blue pipettes, a plastic purple honeycomb half full of disposable pipette tips, a toaster-sized machine called the Mini Vortexer with a dial that goes from one to ten--it is turned to ten, and another machine for enzymatic cleaving. On the floor at the far end of the bench is a torpedo-like tank of helium, painted maroon. Next to it are two silver tanks of liquid nitrogen. A graduate student, her hair pulled back in tight braids opens the valve one one of these and then rests her elbow on top of the tank and watches as hissing ice clouds form around the hose leading to the big white mass spec machine which dominates a quarter of the room and looks as if it might have been stolen from the engine room of a steamship. This is one of the machined designed by Carlito Lebrilla, the man German calls "a wizard." This machine is essentially a scale, a scale so precise that it can divine the atomic composition of milk molecules simply by weighing them. "It's like weighing a battleship to see if there is a fly on the deck," German says, shaking his head in wonder.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2908338462511482943.post-19356515512485779382010-10-18T06:10:00.000-07:002010-10-18T06:10:14.888-07:00Ioannidis profile in the AtlanticMedical scientists are facing the fact that they have an evidence problem, according to <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/">this profile.</a><br />
But some wonder if they should admit that publicly:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>Already feeling that they’re fighting to keep patients from turning to alternative medical treatments such as homeopathy, or misdiagnosing themselves on the Internet, or simply neglecting medical treatment altogether, many researchers and physicians aren’t eager to provide even more reason to be skeptical of what doctors do—not to mention how public disenchantment with medicine could affect research funding. </blockquote>John Ioannidis, the subject of David Freedman's story (check out his very interesting blog <a href="http://www.msomed.org/">here</a>), says hiding uncertainty is the wrong approach. <blockquote>We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that. <br />
“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.” </blockquote><br />
I'm reading Bruno Latour's "Politics of Nature" right now, and he pins a lot of what's wrong in this world in our desire for science to deliver the answers relevantly and on time. We (mistakenly) think of the world as divided into two parts: nature and civilization. In civilization we talk a lot, we have opinions, we debate, we struggle over politics. Nature (according to this view of the world) has no talking, it's silent but it contains the truth. The trick then, is to send someone out into nature and bring back the truth to put an end to all the arguments. We call this person "a scientist."<br />
The problem with this is that 1. Even scientists have trouble finding the truth (see above) and 2. They aren't above politics (see above again).<br />
A more healthy system, according to Latour, would be to recognize that civilization is in nature and inextricable from it, and that science is not exempt from politics. He's not denying the existence of objective truth, but instead of saying X-Files style that "The truth is out there" he's saying "The truth is right here" but that we have to be honest about how little of it we can see - which means accepting that politics and debates about who's vision of the world is more correct are an essential part of governing. We can't hope for science to trump politics. Doing so get's us into a lot of trouble.<br />
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hat tip to <a href="http://normal-birth.blogspot.com/">Faith Gibson</a> for sending the story to me...Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11882562187532431218noreply@blogger.com0