Dean's World

Via Chuck Simmins, I found the following quote. It's quite illuminating. Dr. Robert G. Webster is quoted as follows, regarding so-called "bird flu":

"Society just can't accept the idea that 50 percent of the population could die. And I think we have to face that possibility,: Webster said. "I'm sorry if I'm making people a little frightened, but I feel it's my role."

He also gives the likelihood of so-called "bird flu" mutating so that it spreads from human to human as "even odds." (SOURCE.)

Okay, I'm no expert on the flu virus. But I am a taxpayer. And I can virtually guarantee that the vast bulk of Dr. Webster's funding has come either directly or indirectly through my tax dollars. He's almost certainly gotten substantial grants from the National Institutes of Health throughout his impressive published career, and he may well have substantial investments in vaccines and other drus that were only possible because of that government-funded research.

To be clear, I don't know that he has such investments. But it's highly likely, because this is extremely common these days. Today, unlike 30 or 40 years ago, the pattern in a lot of biological research looks a lot like this:

1) Get a grant from NIH to study a disease, or a treatment for a disease.

2) From your work on that grant, get a patent or several patents that you can sell through drug companies.

3) Get more government grants.

To be very clear, I am not alleging corruption. What I have described here is increasingly just how infectious disease research is done. The U.S. Government funds an incredible amount of such research, and those who do the research--especially gray-haired distinguished researchers--often reap substantial personal or corporate rewards from the results of that research.

Indeed, the National Institutes of Health funds many research grants even outside of the United States. Canada, Europe, southeast Asia, Africa: you'll find NIH grants funding researchers all over the globe.

Now, as I say, I do not allege corruption. I do not allege conspiracy theories. I merely ask you a simple question:

If Dr. Webster's research concluded that the flu virus is not the threat it's been made out to be--if he concluded that it's a very minor threat at best--do you think he'd be getting any more grants to study the problem?

More simply put: to what extent is his entire livelihood, not to mention reputation as an "expert," contingent upon making bold, frightening statements--like "oh my God, half of us could die!"

Another question: if it doesn't happen, what exact mechanism do we as taxpayers have in place to say, "You scared the crap out of us and nothing happened. Can you explain to us, please, why we should keep giving you and your colleagues hundreds of millions of our dollars?"

Also, how often do we as taxpayers get to ask, "just how much are you worth, Dr. Webster, and where do you derive most of your income?" If the answer is flu shots and drugs, then is it appropriate to ask, "Dr. Webster, do you think you have any conflict of interest when you pronounce that the flu could kill half of us in the very near future?"

I'll tell you what I believe: this kind of thing would never pass muster in any book on sound business practice, or any guide on good government.

Would it? Am I wrong?

(What do you think, Chuck?)

AP is reporting physicists at a Princeton science conference are saying data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe support the cosmic inflation theory which states that the universe underwent an incredible expansion (expanding by a ratio of 10^30 in something like 10^-17 seconds, if I'm remembering correctly off the top of my head) in its early moments. It sounds like it's not ironclad proof, but the new information gathered tends to support the theory pretty strongly.

To me, the most fascinating thing about inflation is the idea that the Universe was perfectly uniform until inflation took quantum uncertainties and inflated them to the point that we got irregularities that coalesced into stars, galaxies, etc.

Interestingly, the article also quotes Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe and Fabric of the Cosmos, probably the best layman-accessible books on cosmology, quantum theory and string/M theory.

Interesting: The journal Nature did a peer reviewed study on science articles in Wikipedia and found it to be surprisingly robust, and to compare fairly well with the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Overall it had somewhat more errors, but not a lot more, and many of its articles had fewer errors than the venerable Brittanica. You can read about it here (Thanks Derek).

I find the results utterly unsurprising. I have been a Wikipedia contributor for some time now, and watched it grow. My experience has been that, while it is not trustworthy when it comes to politically charged subjects, it's no worse than traditional sources in that regard. As a student, I found it to be easily the most indispensible reference available--I rarely cited it directly, but came to rely on it as my default starting place for all research for my many papers. I routinely found it the best place to start on almost any subject. Like open source software, Wikipedia relies on the basic concept that many eyes smooth errors.

My prediction is that over time Wikipedia will only continue to be more reliable, more comprehensive, and more useful--and that as this happens, predictions that it will soon dissolve into chaos will continue unabated.

Peter Duesberg sometimes shares his correspondence with me. It's usually quite interesting. He's given me permission to reprint it whenever I want. Here is an interesting exchange he recently had with someone named Jim who emailed him regarding the "Bird Flu" scare. That would be the flu that we were being told just a few months ago might kill anywhere from 5 to 150 million people around the world:

---

Dear Jim,

The reason why the Flu was so successful in 1918 was primarily the "terrain", namely the millions of immuno-deficient hosts and hostesses starved and stressed by 4 years of war.

Secondarily, one can speculate that the 1918 flu strain may also have been a "new" recombinant to the 1918 population and thus more successful than a more established seasonal strain may have been. As I found in 1968, flu, unlike practically all other animal viruses, has multiple RNA segments, equivalent to multiple chromosomes and thus can readily form new recombinants - the reason why we have seasonal flus, but have measles, mumps, polio, pox etc. only once in a lifetime.

Thirdly, the odds that the Centers for Disease Control alias World Health Organization ever predicts an epidemic prior to its arrival are not good: They have predicted in past several years numerous epidemics or "pandemics" such as the flu, the hanta-virus, anthrax, the rotavirus, the Ebola virus, the West Nile virus, "mad cow" epidemic, the Sars-virus epidemic, an epi-pandemic of "random, eg. heterosexual non-drug user-AIDS" - but none of these ever materialized (see, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery publishing, Washington DC, 1996). The last one that came close to an epidemic was polio in the 1950s and that was not predicted by American public health scientists.

Fourth, the currently hyped prospective Flu pandemic has long missed its chances. It has been hyped almost daily in the San Francisco Chronicle since November. But all that happened was a dead chicken in Nigeria, a hamster in Germany, two sick (dead?) kids in Turkey, a euthanized swan in Sweden, several dead or euthanized chicken in Iraq (Yes Iraq!!) etc. That is not the pattern of a potential killer microbe. All "new" killer viral or microbial epidemics of the past have spread exponentially within weeks to months and then declined exponentially owing to the induction of immunity or death of susceptible hosts - take Albert Camus' "Plague" as a classical example.

The current Flu propaganda is thus a mix of ignorance and self-interest and an exploitation of general ignorance by the CDC, WHO, the vaccine, pill and test-kit manufacturers of our universities and pharma companies, and of our "science" journalists, who need to fill their daily columns - and must sell their aging vaccine stocks before they decompose and their Tamiflu pills before the summer.

But despite hyping in dozens of microbial Godots - no Godot has come since polio. People are just too well nourished these days, and thus have optimally maintained immune systems, for microbes to attack more than just the fringes of the ever growing human herd. That in fact is their historical share. The 150 million+ Flu pandemics are hype for fund raising by the ever more costly science/health armies in search for real enemies. Their success is based on the invisible monsters of the microbial epidemics of the times, when nutrition lacked vitamines, proteins and sanitation or was lacking all together - and on the never failing microbial and viral horror phantasies of our science writers, politicians and Hollywood producers.

And now I have given you a lecture, although I had intended to feed you just a few convenient lines...

Hope you like it and dont mind that I cc it several colleagues who have asked but didn't get a good answer, because I was too "busy" to write.

Regards,

Peter

It's a surprisingly interesting question: Why is the sky dark at night?

You have all these nearly-infinite light-generating things called stars. Many of them orders of magnitude brighter than our own sun. All that nearly-infinite light is bouncing off the incredible amount of dust between the stars. So why is it that when our tiny planet turns its face away from our local star (i.e. the sun), we see an inky blackness punctuated by stars, rather than a warm glow of starshine?

It's not a dumb question. Some of the brightest minds of physics have pondered it for centuries.

Surprisingly, no one has a clear and definitive answer. If you read the Dean's World comments on the question, Scott Harris and a few others have suggested some intelligent answers. But the truth is, no one's entirely sure.

Paul Lutus has more on the issue. Click through and wonder.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico have created the hottest temperatures every recorded on Earth: 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit.

This really caught my eye though:

One thing that puzzles scientists is that the high temperature was achieved after the plasma’s ions should have been losing energy and cooling. Also, when the high temperature was achieved, the Z machine was releasing more energy than was originally put in, something that usually occurs only in nuclear reactions.

Sandia consultant Malcolm Haines theorizes that some unknown energy source is involved, which is providing the machine with an extra jolt of energy just as the plasma ions are beginning to slow down.

That's obviously extremely unusual. There's an off chance we've accidentally stumbled onto a powerful, esoteric new energy source. Unlikely, but potentially world-changing if it pans out.

Frustratingly, it doesn't give any indication as to the magnitude of the (alleged) energy gain.

UPDATE: More details here.

The new phenomenon could be exploited in fusion power as a trigger that would set off a controlled nuclear reaction by heating a small amount of deuterium or tritium. It is likely to be more efficient than other proposed methods because it produces higher temperatures while requiring less input energy.

Not as exciting as a zero-point module, but sounds like it may be useful.

This month's edition of National Geographic magazine discusses how genetic markers passed down to us from our ancestors are leading scientists back across time to trace human migration patterns:

"By comparing markers in many different populations, scientists can trace their ancestral connections. In most of the genome, these minute changes are obscured by the genetic reshuffling that takes place each time a mother and father's DNA combine to make a child. Luckily a couple of regions preserve the telltale variations. One, called mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), is passed down intact from mother to child. Similarly, most of the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, travels intact from father to son. The accumulated mutations in your mtDNA and (for males) your Y chromosome are only two threads in a vast tapestry of people who have contributed to your genome. But by comparing the mtDNA and Y chromosomes of people from various populations, geneticists can get a rough idea of where and when those groups parted ways in the great migrations around the planet."

Interesting. Just yesterday I took a mitochondrial DNA test to trace the specific African ancestry of my mother's mother's mother's mother's line, back through the generations. The same lab that did the mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA tests for the nine famous black Americans in last month's "African American Lives" series on PBS is doing my test. Unlike other branches of my family tree - three of which we can trace back to 1820 to 1830 in the antebellum South - my matrilineal line can be traced back to C.D., my maternal great-great-great grandmother born in rural Mississippi in 1845. And of course, my family history is one of a forced migration - slavery - from West Africa to the United States.

In four to six weeks - maybe earlier - my test results will return. I am excited and nervous. Since I was a child, I have wanted to travel to Africa. In the past couple of years, I have stated that I will first travel to the specific country or countries which correspond to the modern-day locations of my ancestral links. What ancestry will my mitochondrial test show? Will there be an exact match for only one tribe, as was the case for Quincy Jones (Tikar tribe, modern-day Cameroon)? Or for several tribes as was the case for Oprah Winfrey? (Kpelle tribe, modern-day Liberia and Sierra Leone; Bamileke tribe, modern-day Cameroon; and a Bantu tribe out of Zambia). Will I unfortunately be among the 15-20% of test takers whose DNA test comes back inconclusive, which happened to astronaut Mae Jemison?

Back in the mid-1990s I did a huge amount of research on the subject of low-fat and low-carbhohydrate diets, for a book I never finished. I had taken a strong interest in low-carbohydrate diets because I kept encountering people who had terrific success on them. And by "success" I do not mean "ooh, I lost ten pounds!" I mean people who lost 40, 50, 60 pounds, even one lady who lost 165 pounds. The results for some of these people were dramatic: major improvements in serum lipids, amelioration or outright reversal of diabetes, and more.

Mind you, I also encountered people who had poor reactions to this approach, or only minor results. Which I found unsurprising.

An interesting thing is that the granddaddy of all of these diets was Robert Atkins, a New York cardiologist. And there are two things about Atkins that are funny to me: he was regularly accused of selling a "fad diet," but unlike the vast majority of diet and exercise gurus, he never claimed that his diet was perfect for everyone. Indeed, both in interviews and in his books, he always said that some people didn't do well on his diet and should try something else. He recommended that you consult with a doctor before trying his diet, and, if it didn't work out then talk to your doctor about other approaches.

In other words, he openly recommended experimenting with other approaches, some low-carb (he had positive things to say about the Heller approach, for example) and some not. He even said that some people ought to try vegetarian or other low-fat diets because that might work better for them. He never, not once, claimed his diet was a sovereign or universal remedy. Quite the opposite.

Yet, he was absolutely savaged almost any time he and his diet were brought up. Not just as a "fad diet" mind you, but outright dangerous: his diet would kill you. Kill you dead. He was tantamount to a murderer for recommending it. The benign dietary ketosis it put you in would land you in the hospital. It would destroy your kidneys, your liver, raise your cholesterol, your risk of stroke and heart attack, and more.

Over the last ten years a spate of studies have come out disproving all of that. It does not harm the kidneys. Healthy people can handle the diet just fine and don't have to be hospitalized. Many who use it do in fact show improved blood sugar control, improved blood pressure, improved serum lipids, and substantial real weight loss. Some endurance athletes also show improved performance from it. Although no one puts it forward as a sovereign remedy for everything, increasingly the medical community is acknowledging that this is a viable alternative that works well for some patients.

To date I have yet to see a single apology from the establishment for the savaging that Atkins got, or for the absolute ridicule his defenders were faced with.

What's just as telling to me is that those who did the savaging have also yet to be called onto the carpet for the horrific fad they started and have never apologized for: the low-fat diet craze, the biggest failed diet fad of the last 20 years.

Back in 1997, two British researchers broke the ice on the dam with this paper: The Low-Fat, Low-Cholesterol Diet Is Ineffective. It was a signal turning point in the low-fat diet craze. (You might also read this old paper of mine: The World's Biggest Fad Diet.)

In the nine years since the publication of the British study of low-fat diets, the medical establishment has very slowly, very carefully, changed its tune. First, they cautiously announced that "some fats" are good for you and some not: basically, the unsaturated and monosaturates were good, the saturates were bad. In the last couple of years, they've slowly started acknowledging that, well, all right, in fact some saturated fats are good for you, even vital to health, and some are even heart-healthy. Increasingly they're telling us that it's hydrogenated fats ("trans-fats") that are the real danger. And admitting that low-fat diets aren't any more effective for weight loss than any other form of calorie-restricted diet, or low-carb diets.

In other words, they are slowly admitting that they were wrong about virtually everything they said for over a decade. Yet no admissions, no apologies, no reaching out to the people they once savaged as being practically murderers for dissenting. It's like none of it ever happened, and they are innocent, blameless.

Scott Ott recently had a brilliant sendup of all this: Low-Fat Debunked, Scientists Back Low-Vitamin Diet. My favorite part:

A spokesman for the National Institutes of Health said scientists were not surprised by the findings of the study, that refuted a decade of nutritional wisdom.

“Science works by first making definitive recommendations, and then doing several years of research to discover if we were right,” said an unnamed NIH spokesman. “During the research phase, our job is to vigorously promote our assumptions until the facts disprove them.”

But the whole thing's a scream. It's also a damned on-target indictment of how too many of our government-paid research facilities work these days--and not just on dietary recommendations either.

At first I thought this was interesting:

Diets that distinguish between "good carbs" and "bad carbs," are not an effective way of controlling blood sugar levels, a new study suggests.
...
The new study, published in the February issue of the British Journal of Nutrition, relied on food questionnaires from more than 1,000 people over five years and assessed their consumption of high- and low-glycemic foods. Researchers tested their blood sugar levels twice during the study period and found no significant correlation between the glycemic index of foods and the blood-sugar levels of participants.

After reading that last part I could only laugh at the silliness of the study. The whole point of the glycemic index is the short-term effect on blood sugar. If you wanted to challenge the benefit of a low glycemic index diet, you'd have to test blood sugar levels at least twice a day, not twice in the course of five years.

As Glenn is wont to say, sheesh.

Researchers at NASA have published a recent paper in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) showing massive flooding caused by drastic climate change about 8,900 years ago.

This sort of thing is why a lot of us are rather skeptical that human action is causing unprecedented changes to the planet's ecology: the ecology has never been all that stable in the first place. We came out of the last major period of glaciation barely 10,000 years ago. Europe came out of its own "little ice age" only about 500 years ago. When George Washington famously crossed the Delaware river, his troops walked across it because it was frozen over solid--the famous painting of them doing it in boats was pure artistic license. I don't believe the Delaware has frozen over in living memory.

For less than the cost of implementing the Kyoto protocol, which all the scientists admit would be only a tiny first step, we could provide clean food and drinking water to 100% of the world population. Meanwhile, there's substantial reason to believe that within a half century (maybe well within it) most of the world will be off of petroleum as a primary energy source anyway. Why turn the world upside down when we're on the brink of bringing most of humanity into a better place anyway?