Richard G. Petty, MD

Finding Your Ancestors

I think that most of us have at least a little bit of curiosity about our ancestry. Growing up in Europe, most people have quite a good idea where they came from. It is very different in the “New World.”

People here often have deeply personal reasons for wanting to know their ancestry. Some hope to validate genealogical records or fill in gaps in family histories. Others are searching for a connection to specific groups or places in Eurasia or Africa. Many African Americans hope to trace ancestral links lost during the slave trade. Other hope to obtaining Native American tribal affiliation or to challenge tribal membership decisions.

Hence the proliferation of services offering genetic analyses to individuals. And it has become big business.

A quick search on Google just found least two dozen companies who market genetic ancestry tests to help people discover the origins of their ancestors. The tests typically cost between $100 and $900, and in the United States alone it is said that more than 460,000 people have purchased the tests during the past six years.

But there have been lingering doubts about the value and accuracy of the tests.

In "The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing," which appears in the today’s issue of the journal Science Deborah Bolnick, assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin and 13 researchers from universities across the country call upon the scientific community to educate the public about the limitations of the tests, and also urge consumers to approach the tests with caution.

The writers argue that the assumptions and limitations of the tests make them less informative than many people realize. Secondly, the rapid commercialization of the tests may have led to misleading practices that reinforce misconceptions.

They make several important points:

• Most tests trace only a few of your ancestors
• Most only test a small portion of your DNA
• Tests are not likely to identify all of the groups or locations around the world where a test-taker's relatives are found
• When we do genetic research we spend a great deal of time checking and re-checking the accuracy of the tests. But commercial tests may report false negatives or false positives
• Limited sample databases mean test results are subject to misinterpretation
• There is no clear connection between DNA and racial/ethnic identity: the similarities between the races are far greater than the differences
• Tests cannot determine exactly where ancestors lived or what ethnic identity they held

There is also an excellent feature story, entitled "Deep Roots," that may interest you.

Caveat emptor!

The Neuronal Shield

Sometimes Nature does our experiments for us, and nobody - especially any animals - need to get hurt at all.

Diabetes mellitus is one example, in which heart disease, arteriosclerosis and stroke are many times more common than they are in the general population, and give us a perfect place to start looking at some of the causes of arterial diseases in general.

Another, and far more rare, example is a group of brain diseases called lissencephaly, in which whole layers of the cerebral cortex fail to find their homes and develop. The result is a brain that has a fairly smooth surface, rather than being covered in the complex hills and valleys (“gyri” and “sulci”) that cover the surface of the healthy brain. People with lissencephaly usually have quite severe mental retardation, motor problems, muscle spasms and seizures. What normally happens during embryonic development is that the six main layers of the cerebral cortex are generated by neuronal progenitor cells that migrate long distances before they finally find their correct place and settle down. At the beginning of brain development the cells look like an unruly mob trying to find their seats at a concert. Eventually they find their spot, settle down and get to work. The precise spatial organization of these layers of cells is essential to normal cortical functions.

Though lissencephaly is rare, there are other disorders, including some forms of epilepsy and some types of schizophrenia that also result from abnormal migration of nerve cells during the development of the brain.

Researchers from the Mouse Biology Unit of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Italy have now discovered that a protein called n-cofilin, that helps organizing the cells' skeleton is crucial for preventing such defects. In the current issue of Genes & Development they report that mice lacking n-coffin show many of the classic signs and symptoms of lissencephaly.

The skeleton of a cell consists of constantly growing and shrinking filaments that function like strings and struts to give the cell shape and stability, and it is largely responsible for the migration of neurons in the developing brain. N-cofilin interacts with actin - one kind of skeletal filaments - and helps to disassemble them into their individual building blocks. Interfering with this filament remodeling impairs the cell's ability to move and that blocks migration of neurons during cortical development.

N-cofilin also controls the fate of neural stem cells that are involved in development of the cortex. If it is absent, stem cells stop moving and re-new themselves instead of differentiating. This imbalance depletes the pool of neuronal progenitors cells so that fewer cells can be made to build a complete and functional cortex. The study provides the first proof that proteins affecting actin filament dynamics are involved in neuronal migration disorders.

It is remarkable that a single gene can be so important in the development of the brain, and it opens up new fascinating possibilities for treatment.

The Dark Galaxy

Every time that we think that we’ve got the laws of physics, cosmology and biology nailed down, along comes another observation that has everyone scratching their heads.

So it is with the some very puzzling observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. Deep in space is a mysterious, galaxy-sized cloud of hydrogen known as VIRGOHI21.

Galaxies are thought to coalesce from normal, or baryonic, matter that has collected in clouds of dark matter. Dark matter is still a hypothesis, but a very interesting one. The trouble with this model is that surveys have turned up fewer galaxies than expected, suggesting that, for reasons unknown reasons, some galaxies are stillborn and simply fail to form stars.

When VIRGOHI21 was discovered in 2005 it seemed to provide the first evidence that dark galaxies existed. But other researchers suggested that this mysterious cloud had been pulled out of another galaxy and another passed by. What became known as the “hit and run” model.

But Robert Minchin of the Arecibo Observatory discounts such "hit-and-run" models. If one galaxy if rushing past another, its gravitational field should pull out some stars as well. And they have not been found. Minchin and his team used the Hubble Telescope to observe a patch of sky 50,000 by 50,000 light years across, centered on the position of the hydrogen cloud. They found only 119 red giant stars. That is the number found in a typical region of the same size in intergalactic space and three times fewer than expected if the cloud were a large piece of celestial wreckage.

These new images they do confirm a mystery raised by previous studies. The object's normal matter weighs a few hundred million times the mass of the Sun. But its dark matter – inferred by studying the rotation speed of the cloud – appears to weigh at least 100 times as much.

That ratio is much higher than expected – in all other galaxies, dark matter outweighs normal matter by a factor of only 10. "Even if this is a dark galaxy, it is not what you expect to find. The number of baryons is too low," said Michael Merrifield of the University of Nottingham in the UK, who was not on Minchin's team.

Minchin agrees that this is a puzzle. A number of surveys at Arecibo and other radio observatories aim to find more examples of dark galaxies, which could shed light on how much dark matter they contain. But so far the surveys are finding little to match the characteristics of VIRGOHI21.

You can watch an animation showing VIRGOHI21 and its two galactic neighbours from a variety of perspectives.

Anyone who thinks that ANY current model has all the answers is sorely mistaken.

I was interested recently to see that a number of authors who have recently re-analyzed several of the pillars of science, and asked whether the current model of evolution – chance happenings leading to large scale change - is mathematically possible. Others have pointed out that Einstein’s reputation is largely built on two pillars: four days of earlier experimental work performed by two scientists called Albert Michelson and Edward Morley. And others have claimed that his first contribution was not original at all, but was a contribution to the theories of two other scientists named Ludvig Lorenz and Henri Poincaré, though he failed to reference them. The second is that experimental work confirmed his theory of relativity, when in fact several experimentalists produced data that did not support him. But they were ignored.

The good news is that we have methods that enable us to ask questions and obtain answers that move our understanding forward just a little more.

What other discoveries are waiting out there? Discoveries that may turn our worldview upside down?

“We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are.”
--Harry S. Truman (American Statesman and, from 1945-1953, 33rd President of the United States, who made the decision to drop the atomic bomb, 1884-1972)

The Development of Color Vision

Last year we looked at the research suggesting that the reason why primates developed color visions was so that they could pick up color changes on the faces and posteriors of other apes.

Now researchers at Ohio University have found that after primates evolved the ability to see red, they began to develop red and orange skin and hair.

As we discussed last year, humans, apes and Old World monkeys, such as macaques and leaf monkeys, all have trichromatic vision, allowing them to distinguish between blue, green and red colors. Primatologists have disagreed about whether this type of color vision initially evolved to help early primates forage for ripe fruit and young, to be able to red leaves among green foliage, or to tell the state of anger or arousal in other apes or to help them select mates.

Now a new study published online this week in American Naturalist by Ohio University researchers Andre´Fernandez and Molly Morris suggests that red-color vision evolved for non-social purposes, possibly foraging. But once developed, trichromaticism - i.e. three color vision - drove the evolution of red skin and hair through sexual selection.

Andre´Fernandez first began to question the strict correlation of food choice and color vision while studying howler monkeys in Costa Rica. He recently compiled data on the color vision, social and sexual habits and red skin and pelage (hair, fur and wool) of 203 different primate species.

The researchers then used a phylogenetic tree representing the evolutionary relationships among all the primate species under study to test hypotheses about the order in which the traits of red color vision, gregariousness (highly social behavior) and red coloring evolved. By comparing the traits of individual species in this evolutionary context, Fernandez and Morris could use statistical methods to deduce the probability of their ancestors having the same traits. They could also see if any of the traits were correlated with one another.

They found that the species that could discern red and orange hues were more likely to develop red and orange skin and hair, as well as highly social habits that make it easier to visually compare mates. In fact, the more social the three-color vision apes are, the more red coloring they show.

Fernandez said,

“Neuroscience research has found some evidence of a perceptual bias for more brilliant colors, so it is reasonable for primates with trichromatic color vision to respond more when they see bright colors."

Molly Morris, the co-author on the paper is a fish biologist who studies how physical traits such as coloring evolve through sexual selection.

She said,

"It looks like red skin and hair became a sexual preference, so while the benefits in terms of eating may not apply anymore, the (red-color) vision in some groups is now relevant in social terms."

So while foraging may have initially sparked red color vision, the new ability was likely "recruited" for social purposes.

This is not just an interesting little evolutionary tidbit. There are plenty of systems in the human brain that evolved to do one thing, and are now used for something quite different. And sometimes these new uses conflict with some of the other programs running in the brain. This is likely to be one of the causes for some types of psychological problems. when the brain is trying to do too many things at once, and there is an imbalance between the older limbic regions of the brain and the cerebral cortex.

Sex Makes You Fat

Shortly after the earth cooled, I was given a book with the arresting title of the Dieter's Guide to Weight Loss During Sex.

I have no idea why. Nothing in the title seemed at all relevant to me.

So now I learn that sex makes you fat.

But only if you're a female tick.

I would like to share with you that after mating, the weight of the female African ixodid tick balloons until she is 100 times her original size. That is truley astonishing.

This observation has lead a researcher from the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta to investigate what it is about copulation that triggers such a massive weight gain.

In a new paper published in the Journal of Insect Physiology, Dr. Reuben Kaufman suggests that there are several differences between the ixodid tick and other blood-sucking beasties - mosquitoes, tsetse flies, bedbugs and kissing bugs – that may help explain the weight gain. None of them has anything like this kind of weight gain: it seems to be unique to the female African tick.

Kaufman suggests that the ixodid tick displays a significant difference in lifestyle from the other insects and that it is adaptive for the virgin to remain small before mating: she wants to stay below the host's radar.

This species of tick remains on the host for a number of days, rather than minutes. As Kaufman says,

"In this family of ticks, mating takes place on the host. Most other insects mate before or after their brief blood meal - the two acts are totally separate, but not with these ticks."

Female ticks require six to 10 days to engorge fully. First, she attaches herself to the skin. Then she feeds to 10 times her unfed weight and finally, after copulation, she increases her weight a further tenfold.

On the other hand, the virgin tick rarely exceeds the critical weight necessary for laying eggs. She will hang on to the host for weeks waiting for a male to find her. If the virgin gains too much weight and is groomed off the host, she will not be able to reattach herself to another host and continue feeding. If she remains small she still has a chance to reattach itself to another host, which hopefully will be infested with some feeding males. Then she cannot only continue feeding, but may also have the chance of meeting a mate.

As Kaufman says,

"If a male eventually copulates with her, she will engorge normally and then be able to lay eggs. This is one reason why it might be adaptive for the virgin to remain small until mated."

In terms of what causes the female to become so engorged, it seems to have something to do with the exchange of bodily fluids. The male fluids contain two engorgement factor proteins that together act as a signal to tell her to complete engorgement.

This work may sound as if it is a bit out of left field, but it is actually very important. Ticks can be a real problem in many parts of the world: even in Georgia, it is a daily ritual to check the dog, cats and horses for ticks.

This work is part of a research program to produce an anti-tick vaccine. Some experiments have already suggested that normal, mated ticks are unable to fully engorge when feeding on a host that has been immunized against the engorgement factor proteins. If these observations can be confirmed and extended, an effective anti-tick vaccine to protect livestock and pets could be on the horizon.

Why Aren’t We Furry?

For years now, people have wondered why most humans have very little in the way of fur. I have just read about an interesting idea that I hadn’t seen before. The suggestion is that humans are hairless because Stone-Age mothers regarded furry babies as unattractive.

The article was written by written by Judith Rich Harris, the author of two controversial, but challenging and absorbing books: The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. The article is entitled "Parental selection: a third selection process in the evolution of human hairlessness and skin color" and was published in the journal Medical Hypotheses. The article just won the 2006 David Horrobin Prize for medical theory, which has been awarded annually and named in honor of Dr. David Horrobin, who was a renowned researcher, expert in biotechnology and founder of Medical Hypotheses, who died in 2003.

In the paper Rich Harris speculates that in Stone Age societies the mother of a newborn had to decide whether she had the resources to nurture her baby. The newborn's appearance probably influenced whether the mother kept or abandoned it and therefore an attractive baby was more likely to be kept and reared.

Harris' theory is that this kind of parental selection may have been an important force in evolution. If Stone Age people believed that hairless babies were more attractive than hairy ones, this could explain why humans are the only apes who don’t have a natural fur coat. She goes on to suggest that Neanderthals must have been furry in order to survive the Ice Age in more Northern Regions than the Cro-Magnons from whom we are descended. Our species would have seen them as "animals" and potential prey. So her final hypothesis is that Neanderthals went extinct because our human ancestors ate them.

It is certainly an interesting idea, but I need a bit more convincing. Humans, like most other mammalian species are hardwired to protect the young at all costs, and it difficult to imagine how many Stone Age Sophie’s Choices would have had to have been made to create a hairless species.

We may learn more from continuing research into the fate of the Neanderthals: did they die out, or, as the psychologist and writer Stan Gooch suggested, did we mate with them? Are modern humans not simply the children of Cro-Magnons, but hybrids of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals?

Stem Cell Treatment for Cerebral Palsy?

Medical News Today is carrying a interesting article entitled, "Dramatic Improvement For 19-Year-Old Hungarian Cerebral Palsy Sufferer After Stem Cell Treatment."

According to the report a 19-year-old from Hungary named Gabor Bocskai had stem cells injected into the fluid around his spinal cord.

It goes on to say,

"The successful procedure, performed at China's top stem cell facility, makes Mr. Bocskai the first teenage European CP patient to   see rapid improvement through stem cell therapy. Unedited   videos taken before and after Mr. Bocskai's injections dramatically demonstrate the profound improvement in his 19-year battle to walk, write, focus his eyes, concentrate, and overcome the many other detrimental effects resulting from the CP he acquired at birth. More details and the videos have been published on China's leading Stem Cell News site at http://www.stemcellschina.com.

    Some of Mr. Bocskai's most noticeable and immediate physical   improvements after the eight-week stem cell therapy program   include improved vision, increased eye focus and better   concentration on one subject. He also reported clearer writing, enhanced muscle tone, the ability to sit up unsupported, and a new capability to walk and swim in an unassisted manner. As a lifelong quadriplegic with paralysis in his lower limbs, Mr. Bocskai was never able to walk independently, using a wheelchair for transportation. Within four months of the initial treatment, he stated that he was able to walk with the help of a walker and no other support, and at a rate three times faster than ever before with increased maneuverability in his legs and torso. Even his   speech became clearer and faster.

    In Mr. Bocskai's most recent blog entry dated March 11, 2007, he excitedly stated, "My ability to concentrate has increased up to 6 hours a day as a result of stem cell treatment, so studying is much easer than before. I no longer get tired from learning." (Gabor's CP Blog is at   http://www.stemcellschina.com/blogs/Gabor%20cp/)The   Hospital announced that Mr. Bocskai has since returned to   Hungary from China and has reported continued daily   improvement. It also cautioned that not every teenage CP   patient treated with stem cell therapy should expect the   same impressive results."

There is very little information on the procedure, and I could not find any information about where the stem cells came from. I do see that he also had "certain medications" as well as hyperbaric oxygen.

The article is so enthusiastic that it reads like an advertisement!

I do very much hope that Gabor gets some real help from all of these treatments, but we need to be very cautious until we have a great deal more information not just about the science, but also the ethics of the treatment that he has had. For example, where did the stem cells come from? Do we know that they were stem cells?

It is always great to hear about success stories, but sad to say, we then need to do the boring bit: the checking, the testing and the replicating that go into sustainable medical progress.

I have done an extensive literature search and cannot find any published scientific reports, but I only covered the languages that I can read. So there could be something in Chinese that I missed.

I shall let you know immediately if we find out any more about the use of stem cell treatments in humans.

The Accelerating Open Access Revolution

It is only a couple of days since I last wrote something on the revolution in open access to information, but here are two new things that I need to share with you.

First, today saw the launch of the journal Open Medicine.

These are a couple of extracts from James Maskalyk's editorial in the inaugural issue:

...To attain their true worth, medical journals need to place the knowledge on their pages into as many capable hands as possible. In the past, this opportunity was limited mainly to those with a university library close by. Now, because of the Internet, one simply needs to be near a telephone line. The capacity of medical journals to disseminate knowledge has never been greater...

Unfortunately, physicians attempting to answer a clinical question are faced with two unappealing options: to navigate a sea of unedited pages of varying quality, or to pay for access to more carefully reviewed scholarly information. It seems an anathema to the spirit of medical research that, largely for economic reasons, the information it produces remains hidden from many potential users. Access is limited not only for health professionals in poorer countries, but also for health care providers in wealthy countries (most of whom do not have "free" access to information unless they work in universities), and for patients, who deserve the opportunity to become informed about research that affects their lives. The transformation of research findings and discussion of the results — the application of knowledge — is curtailed. Just as importantly, the debate over its merit is stifled before it can properly begin....

Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people's lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago....


The second thing is something very helpful on Peter Suber's excellent blog:

OA podcasts from non-OA journals

Charles W. Bailey Jr. has collected some links for journals offering OA podcasts.

In a recent SSP-L message, Mark Johnson, Journal Manager of HighWire Press, identified three journals that offer podcasts or digital audio files:

• BJM
• JAMA
• New England Journal of Medicine

Here are a few others:

• ACS Chemical Biology
• Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine
• The Journal of Law, Economics and Policy
• The Journal of Neurologic Physical Therapy
• The Lancet
• Nature
• Science

Biomedical Journals and Open Access

I have written before about my enormous admiration for the global attempt to make research freely available to everyone. This is such an important step toward patient empowerment and greater transparency in science and medicine.

There is currently an online petition to support free and open access to European research, and if you also believe in the principles of integrity, transparency and personal empowerment, you may want to consider signing.

I was gratified to see how many major journals are now making articles immediately and permanently available online without charge. A number of journals require an institutional or a personal subscription to view other content, such as reviews or paper reports. Free trial subsciptions to these journals are available.

This seems to be the most up-to-date listing, and everyone involved really deserves our gratitude. I shall continue to update this list as more journals become involved.

	A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
	Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica     all content Open Access

	AIDS Research and Therapy     all content Open Access
	Algorithms for Molecular Biology     all content Open Access
	Annals of Clinical Microbiology and Antimicrobials     all content Open Access
	Annals of General Psychiatry     all content Open Access
	Annals of Surgical Innovation and Research     all content Open Access
	Arthritis Research & Therapy     all research articles Open Access; subscription required for other content; free trial available
	Australia and New Zealand Health Policy     all content Open Access
	Behavioral and Brain Functions     all content Open Access
	Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry     all content Open Access
	Biology Direct     all content Open Access
	BioMagnetic Research and Technology     all content Open Access
	Biomedical Digital Libraries     all content Open Access
	BioMedical Engineering OnLine     all content Open Access
	BioPsychoSocial Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC series
	BMC Anesthesiology     all content Open Access
	BMC Biochemistry     all content Open Access
	BMC Bioinformatics     all content Open Access
	BMC Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Biotechnology     all content Open Access
	BMC Blood Disorders     all content Open Access
	BMC Cancer     all content Open Access
	BMC Cardiovascular Disorders     all content Open Access
	BMC Cell Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Chemical Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Clinical Pathology     all content Open Access
	BMC Clinical Pharmacology     all content Open Access
	BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC Dermatology     all content Open Access
	BMC Developmental Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Ear, Nose and Throat Disorders     all content Open Access
	BMC Ecology     all content Open Access
	BMC Emergency Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC Endocrine Disorders     all content Open Access
	BMC Evolutionary Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Family Practice     all content Open Access
	BMC Gastroenterology     all content Open Access
	BMC Genetics     all content Open Access
	BMC Genomics     all content Open Access
	BMC Geriatrics     all content Open Access
	BMC Health Services Research     all content Open Access
	BMC Immunology     all content Open Access
	BMC Infectious Diseases     all content Open Access
	BMC International Health and Human Rights     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Education     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Ethics     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Genetics     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Imaging     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making     all content Open Access
	BMC Medical Research Methodology     all content Open Access
	BMC Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC Microbiology     all content Open Access
	BMC Molecular Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders     all content Open Access
	BMC Nephrology     all content Open Access
	BMC Neurology     all content Open Access
	BMC Neuroscience     all content Open Access
	BMC News and Views     all content Open Access
	BMC Nuclear Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC Nursing     all content Open Access
	BMC Ophthalmology     all content Open Access
	BMC Oral Health     all content Open Access
	BMC Palliative Care     all content Open Access
	BMC Pediatrics     all content Open Access
	BMC Pharmacology     all content Open Access
	BMC Physiology     all content Open Access
	BMC Plant Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth     all content Open Access
	BMC Psychiatry     all content Open Access
	BMC Public Health     all content Open Access
	BMC Pulmonary Medicine     all content Open Access
	BMC Structural Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Surgery     all content Open Access
	BMC Systems Biology     all content Open Access
	BMC Urology     all content Open Access
	BMC Veterinary Research     all content Open Access
	BMC Women's Health     all content Open Access
	Breast Cancer Research     all research articles Open Access; subscription required for other content; free trial available
	Cancer Cell International     all content Open Access
	Carbon Balance and Management     all content Open Access
	Cardiovascular Diabetology     all content Open Access
	Cardiovascular Ultrasound     all content Open Access
	CBD Ubiquitin now accepting submissions
	Cell & Chromosome     all content Open Access
	Cell Communication and Signaling     all content Open Access
	Cell Division     all content Open Access
	Cerebrospinal Fluid Research     all content Open Access
	Chemistry Central Journal     all content Open Access
	Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health now accepting submissions
	Chinese Medicine     all content Open Access
	Chiropractic & Osteopathy     all content Open Access
	Clinical and Molecular Allergy     all content Open Access
	Clinical Practice and Epidemiology in Mental Health     all content Open Access
	Comparative Hepatology     all content Open Access
	Conflict and Health     all content Open Access
	Cost Effectiveness and Resource Allocation     all content Open Access
	Cough     all content Open Access
	Critical Care     all research articles Open Access; subscription required for other content; free trial available
	Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development     review journal; subscription required
	Current Opinion in Investigational Drugs     review journal; subscription required
	Current Opinion in Molecular Therapeutics     review journal; subscription required
	CytoJournal     all content Open Access
	Developmental Epidemiology now accepting submissions
	Diagnostic Pathology     all content Open Access
	Dynamic Medicine     all content Open Access
	Emerging Themes in Epidemiology     all content Open Access
	Environmental Health     all content Open Access
	Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations     all content Open Access
	Filaria Journal     all content Open Access
	Frontiers in Zoology     all content Open Access
	Genetic Vaccines and Therapy     all content Open Access
	Genome Biology     all research articles Open Access; subscription required for other content; free trial available
	Geochemical Transactions     all content Open Access
	Globalization and Health     all content Open Access
	Harm Reduction Journal     all content Open Access
	Head & Face Medicine     all content Open Access
	Health and Quality of Life Outcomes     all content Open Access
	Health Research Policy and Systems     all content Open Access
	Human Resources for Health     all content Open Access
	IDrugs     review journal; subscription required
	Immunity & Ageing     all content Open Access
	Immunome Research     all content Open Access
	Implementation Science     all content Open Access
	Infectious Agents and Cancer     all content Open Access
	International Breastfeeding Journal     all content Open Access
	International Journal for Equity in Health     all content Open Access
	International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity     all content Open Access
	International Journal of Health Geographics     all content Open Access
	International Journal of Mental Health Systems now accepting submissions
	International Seminars in Surgical Oncology     all content Open Access
	Journal of Autoimmune Diseases     all content Open Access
	Journal of Biology     all research articles Open Access; other content currently available free of charge
	Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration     all content Open Access
	Journal of Brachial Plexus and Peripheral Nerve Injury     all content Open Access
	Journal of Carcinogenesis     all content Open Access
	Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery     all content Open Access
	Journal of Circadian Rhythms     all content Open Access
	Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine     all content Open Access
	Journal of Experimental & Clinical Assisted Reproduction     all content Open Access
	Journal of Immune Based Therapies and Vaccines     all content Open Access
	Journal of Inflammation     all content Open Access
	Journal of Medical Case Reports     all content Open Access
	Journal of Molecular Signaling     all content Open Access
	Journal of Nanobiotechnology     all content Open Access
	Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine     all content Open Access
	Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation     all content Open Access
	Journal of Neuroinflammation     all content Open Access
	Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology     all content Open Access
	Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research     all content Open Access
	Journal of Translational Medicine     all content Open Access
	Journal of Trauma Management & Outcomes now accepting submissions
	Kinetoplastid Biology and Disease     all content Open Access
	Lipids in Health and Disease     all content Open Access
	Malaria Journal     all content Open Access
	Medical Immunology     all content Open Access
	Microbial Cell Factories     all content Open Access
	Molecular Cancer     all content Open Access
	Molecular Neurodegeneration     all content Open Access
	Molecular Pain     all content Open Access
	Neural Development     all content Open Access
	Nonlinear Biomedical Physics now accepting submissions
	Nuclear Receptor     all content Open Access
	Nutrition & Metabolism     all content Open Access
	Nutrition Journal     all content Open Access
	Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases     all content Open Access
	Osteopathic Medicine and Primary Care     all content Open Access
	Particle and Fibre Toxicology     all content Open Access
	Pediatric Rheumatology     all content Open Access
	Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine     all content Open Access
	Plant Methods     all content Open Access
	Population Health Metrics     all content Open Access
	Proteome Science     all content Open Access
	Radiation Oncology     all content Open Access
	Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology     all content Open Access
	Reproductive Health     all content Open Access
	Respiratory Research     all content Open Access
	Retrovirology     all content Open Access
	Saline Systems     all content Open Access
	The Scientist     magazine; daily news free; subscription required for other content
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The Song of the Whales

I suppose that it has something to do when I grew up, but I’ve always been fascinated by animal communications in general and the amazing songs of the whales in general.

A few years ago I was speaking at a conference in Maui, and I stopped speaking and took the assembled throng outside because some migrating whales were coming in very close to shore. Our wait as not in vain: I saw something that I’d only ever seen on documentaries: two adult whales and their calf leaping out of the water in harmony. Later that day someone took me out beyond the surf and had me swim underwater. The whale song was crystal clear, even though some of the whales were now miles away.

A few months ago I wrote about the data suggesting that dolphins call each other by name. Web Mistress Carol has just sent me a report of some research that was published in January by a group from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series. 

The scientists used harmless tags suctioned to the whales' bodies, to track the whales and found that as they feed they send out calls to let each other know where they are. Each group employs a different sound.

The noises play a similarly important role during mating season when males sing long, low-pitched songs to indicate their reproductive fitness to females. Females select mates based on size and estimate that by evaluating males' songs: Larger males can take in more air and hold notes longer.

A related study, also by Scripps researchers, found that there are distinct "dialects" of whale-speak in different regions of the ocean.

The scientists used acoustic recordings to delineate nine population regions worldwide. They found the whales weren't evenly distributed, though: Populations using a "Type 1" call, for example, live within a narrow band of ocean hugging the North American coast, while whales that use a "Type 4" call are spread over a large swath of the Northern Pacific Ocean.

The second study was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Cetacean Research Management. 

The scientists say the dialect findings could help guide conservation efforts for blue whales, whose numbers dwindled to dangerously low levels before whaling moratoria were enacted: There were once an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 in the Southern Hemisphere, but today that number is closer to 1,000.

Here is a terrific video (just bear with the commercial at the beginning) and an audio file of whale song: Audio: Hear Whales Sing

Video: Starving Whales

I would also like to pay tribute to the Scripps Institute for making the entire article open access.

Giant Squid Uses Light as a Weapon

Over the centuries mariners have had an eerie fascination with giant squid, and there have been countless tales of ships being dragged to the depths by some enormous creature. I don't know of any credible evidence that such a thing has ever happened, but it is clear that there are all manner of strange beasties living in the depths.

I have been reading that one of the world's largest species of squid has been filmed for the first time hunting in the wild by Japanese researchers. The three foot long eight-armed squid, Taningia danae, was caught on camera as deep as 900m in waters off the Chichijima Islands in the north Pacific.

There's a fascinating video here, that shows the squid circling and finally attacking a baited line that was lowered to depths of between 240 and 900 meters. A digital video camera that had been reinforced to withstand the pressure, was suspended next to the bait to capture the creature in action. On one of the squid's arm-tips is an organ that produces bright flashes of light prior to attacking. In the intense blackness of the deep ocean, this probably blinds its prey.

Although interestingly the researchers also speculated that the lights might have another function as well: the squid emitted several short pulses of light as it swam around the torch lights from the research ship, possibly, they thought, in an attempt to court the vessel.

The research paper was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, it is available as a free download and contains four other video clips.

Now that wouldn't have been possible in the days of paper journals.

And don't let the videos scare you from going in the water: these squid would probably explode if they tried swimming to shallow water.

Stonehenge

One of the most amazing monuments in England is Stonehenge. These days most people cannot enter it, but  when I first saw it as a teenager in the early 1970s you could still go inside, and it was one of the places that I was taught to dowse. The power of the place has undoubtedly risen with its fame and mystery, but the fact remains that most sensitive people are quite strongly affected by it.

Some of the stones were probably brought from South Wales and the entire Stonehenge complex was built in several construction phases spanning about 2,000 years, although there is evidence for activity both before and afterwards on the site. There was a wooden henge of the site long before the stones arrived.

The BBC is reporting that archaeologists have discovered a huge ancient settlement used by some of the people who built Stonehenge.

Excavations at Durrington Walls have uncovered remains of ancient houses. People seem to have occupied the sites seasonally, using them for ritual feasting and funeral ceremonies.

It is thought that in ancient times, this settlement would have housed hundreds of people, making it the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain. The dwellings date back to 2,600-2,500 BC - according to the researchers, the same period that Stonehenge was being built or re-built.

Mike Parker Pearson from the University of Sheffield, said, "In what were houses, we have excavated the outlines on the floors of box beds and wooden dressers or cupboards."

The researchers have excavated eight houses in total at Durrington. But they have identified many other probable dwellings using geophysical surveying equipment. They think there could have been at least one hundred houses, each measuring about 5m (16ft). They are square, made of timber, with a clay floor and central hearth. The archaeologists found 4,600-year-old rubbish covering the floors of the houses.

And archaeologists love rubbish!

The evidence suggest that Stonehenge drew Neolithic people from all over the region, who came for massive feasts in the midwinter where they consumed prodigious quantities of food. The bones were then tossed on the floors of the houses.

Durrington has its own henge made of wood, which is strikingly similar in layout to Stonehenge. It was discovered in 1967.

Both henges line up with events in the astronomical calendar - but not the same ones. Stonehenge is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunset, while Durrington's timber circle is aligned with the midwinter solstice sunrise. So it would seem that they were complementary.

Stonehenge lies on an extraordinary system of ley lines that crisscross the British Isles, parts of Northern France and parts of China. The lines are usually dismissed as pseudoscience, and it is certainly sometimes difficult to follow what some writers have to say on the subject. There is also a small body of evidence that some people can sense these ley lines. For people who can, the sensation is much the same as feeling the acupuncture meridians of the body. This apparent similarity has lead some experts in Feng Shui to approach personal wellness in the same way that they recommend the placement of plants, mirrors and other objects. Both the body and the land are looked at like gardens that need to be cultivated.

With some people, where they live, how they lie in bed and where they are treated can all be affected by these lines. Others don't seem to notice a thing. I was once treating a lawyer with insomnia, and things were not going well. Until she went on vacation to England and she was fine for a couple of weeks. On her return to the USA we just moved her bed and the problem was solved. I just wish that it were always that easy!

It took me a long time to be persuaded that what I and others felt at Stonehenge and along these lines was real and not just make believe. But now I am convinced. The Ancients knew something about the relationship of the land to their lives, and we are finally recovering some of that knowledge for ourselves.

Open Access

I have had a number of kind comments about my brief piece concerning the revolution in open access to information.

Few people have yet realized the impact that it will have on our lives.

I am most honored to have just received this note from Peter Suber:

Hi Richard: PLoS is part of a larger movement for open access to peer-reviewed research literature, and a lot has happened since PLoS was launched in 2001. For details, see my Timeline [ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm ], and for daily updates see my blog, Open Access News [ http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html ].

I have had a good look at Peter's material, and I have also subscribed to his blog, so it will now appear on the left-hand side of this blog under "What I'm reading," so you can access his writings without having to dart all over the place.

The entire open access movement encompasses a great deal more than just scientific and medical research, and is all precisely aligned with my aim of achieving greater personal empowerment, so that you can take control of your life, your health, your future and the legacy that you leave behind.

Several correspondents have agreed with my point, that the next imperative is to teach people how to use this information.

Science and Medicine at Your Fingertips

There is a very important initiative which will likely have far reaching consequences.

A number of organizations are creating a Public Library of Science (PLOS), which is a non profit organization of scientists and physicians who are committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. The impressive Board of Directors includes the Nobel Prize winner Harold E. Varmus, Chairman of the Board, and President & Chief Executive, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Patrick O. Brown , Stanford University School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Michael Eisen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory University of California at Berkeley.

Some of the journals that are relevant to Health, Integrated Medicine, Meaning and Purpose are in the "journals" section in the side bar on the left.

Let me explain why this is so important. Since the early days of science, most of what has been written has been hard to get at and therefore often open to misunderstanding and misquotation. Books - including textbooks - are full of errors that have been repeated from one to another, in most cases simply because the authors did not bother to check their sources. There's a good example in popular literature. Book after book has repeated the story of the Hundredth Monkey. According to the story, Japanese scientists in the 1950s discovered that when a hundred monkeys learned a new task, monkeys elsewhere - without any physical means of contact - suddenly and spontaneously learned the same thing. The idea was that once the global monkey mind learned something, then the information was available to monkeys everywhere.

A number of years ago I looked at all the original research papers, copies of which are lodged in the Senate House Library in the University of London. The papers showed that the whole thing was untrue! There is a short piece about the hoax here.

If the papers had all been openly available, this urban legend would never have been able to take root.

Our next task will be to show people without a strong scientific background how to go about reading a paper: it is not as simple as it may seem, but is a learned skill. So almost anybody can be shown how to do it.

This is a terrific step toward greater freedom of information and everyone involved deserves our thanks.

Dark Matter Mapped

As we have discussed before, many creative scientists working at the cutting edge of physics and astronomy have a strong intuition that dark matter is more than just an astronomical curiosity, but something of immeasurable importance to all of us.

An extraordinary article was published this morning in the journal Nature.

Dark matter does not reflect or emit detectable light, yet it is thought to account for 80-90% of the mass in the Universe. Using the Hubble telescope astronomers have presented data at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington, showing a map of the cosmic scaffolding of dark matter upon which the stars and galaxies are assembled.

The research involved over 1,000 hours of observations followed by many more thousands of hours of analysis. The research provides the best evidence yet that the distribution of galaxies follows the distribution of dark matte,  because dark matter attracts "ordinary" matter through its gravitational pull.

Previous studies of dark matter relied on simulations, this one details its large-scale distribution in 3 dimensions. As the authors said in a press conference, it is like suddenly seeing a map of a city for the first time, when before all you had to go on was an aerial picture of the street lamps at night.

What is fascinating is that this is direct confirmation of what until now had just been a theory. But interesting problems remain, so we certainly do not know everything yet.

Students of the Ageless Wisdom will be intrigued by these findings that seem to echo predictions and statements about the Universe made many centuries ago.

There are some amazing pictures here.

I shall keep you informed as this story develops and as its practical implications are revealed.

Predicting Response to Medicines

Much as we would all like to rely upon natural and non-invasive approaches to treatment, there are times when pharmaceuticals also have their place.

A common question is whether there are any good ways to predict who will respond to what treatment and whether we can predict the risk of side effects. Unfortunately the answer is that although we are getting better, and the research base if growing rapidly, there is still a lot of trial and error in prescribing.

An exciting and relatively new area is called pharmacogenetics: using our genetic make-up to allow us to tailor treatments to each of us individually. Over the last few months there have been a lot of media reports about being able to use simple blood tests to predict who will respond to antidepressants. (As an example, see this report from the Washington Post).

Unfortunately these reports, though undoubtedly well meaning, have not told the whole story. You might be interested to see a brief article about this interesting topic that helps put things in perspective.

Though there are some highly reputable institutions that are trying to help provide genetic testing not only for drug responses but also to predict the risk of developing certain illness, unfortunately there are also plenty of rogues who prey upon the worried and unwary. I was recently shown pages and pages of all kinds of tests on an individual: genetic tests; biochemical tests; allergy tests and all kinds of unorthodox tests using every imaginable type of gizmo, from magnets to devices claimed to measure the aura.

Not surpringly, the individual was thoroughly confused by this vast morass of information. The best thing to do was to tear it all up and to start again with the simple question: "What do you think is wrong?" Deep down inside, she knew the answer.

I have spent years working in and running laboratories, so I am not shy about using science and technology.

Science and technology must be our servants and not our masters.

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.”
--Bernard Mannes Baruch (American Financier and Government Official, 1870-1965)

“We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race."
--John Naisbitt (American Futurist and Author, 1929-)

“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
--Murray Bookchin (American Ecologist, 1941-)

Eye Color

“The eye is the jewel of the body.”
--Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

In November we had a look at new data suggesting that eye color may have developed as a kind of “instant paternity test.”

Now scientists in Brisbane, Australia are reporting that they have uncovered the genetics of eye color, and that they are surprisingly simple. Which is just what we would expect if something were biologically important.

The research is published in the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.

After studying 3,839 individuals, it turns out that of the six billion or so “letters” that make up the human genetic code, a handful of "single nucleotide polymorphisms" (SNPs - pronounced "snips") are largely responsible for the color of your eyes. These SNPs consist of a change in just one “letter” in the genetic sequence. All the SNPs are located near a gene called OCA2. This gene produces a protein that helps give hair, skin and eyes their color. And mutations in OCA2 cause the most common type of albinism. So these gene mutations modify the amount of pigment in the iris: people with brown eyes have more pigment than people with blue. The odd one out is people with green eyes. In them the changes in the genes seems to have produced a functional change in the pigmentation protein itself.

This is interesting for another reason. There are a small number of medicines and clinical conditions that are associated with changes in the color of the iris. But I have also seen some people whose eye color has changed very rapidly in response to changes in mood, attention or concentration. I have also sometimes seen it happen when people have achieved some altered state of consciousness through prayer or meditation. Yet there is hardly any scientific research into this odd but uncommon phenomenon.

I did find two studies from Korea that attempted to associate a gene for angiotensin converting enzyme and the apolipoprotein e gene with iris type. The trouble with these studies was that they were very small and started with the assumption that iridology could be used to diagnose a physical problem, even though the research (1. 2. 3. 4.) has shown that it cannot.

I had assumed that these rapid changes in eye color had something to do with changes in blood flow in the eye, and that does remain the most likely explanation. But the question now is whether the SNPs associated with eye color are themselves modulated by mood, cognition or spiritual insight.

If you have ever observed changes in iris color in yourself or other people, I would be very interested to hear from you.

“All our souls are written in our eyes.”
--Edmund Rostand (French Poet, 1868-1918)

A Biological Marvel

The BBC is carrying a fascinating story today, though I wonder if it would have attracted as much attention at any other time of the year!

The world's largest lizard - the Komodo dragon has joined the list of creatures that has produced offspring without male contact. It is called parthenogenesis and there is going to be a paper about this in the journal Nature, but a lot of interest has focused on Flora, a resident of Chester Zoo in England, who is awaiting her clutch of eight eggs to hatch, with a due-date estimated around Christmas. Kevin Buley, who is a curator at Chester Zoo and a co-author on the paper in Nature said: "Flora laid her eggs at the end of May and, given the incubation period of between seven and nine months, it is possible they could hatch around Christmas - which for a 'virgin birth' would finish the story off nicely."

Flora, who has never been kept with a male Komodo dragon, produced 11 eggs earlier this year. Three died off, providing the material needed for genetic tests.

These revealed the offspring were not exact genetic copies (clones) of their mother, but their genetic make-up was derived just from her. The research team concluded they were a result of asexual reproduction, and are waiting for the remaining eight eggs to hatch.

This has shades of Jurassic Park, where it was thought that only breeding females and excluding boys would guarantee no breeding.

Think again.

Life is tenacious and resourceful. If there is a way to survice and to leave a genetic legacy, it will.

Energy and Fields, Prana and Qi

I just had a kind and important letter from a correspondent:   

Dear Dr. Petty,

I enjoy reading your reviews in Amazon.com. Could you allow me to ask a question here?
I saw in a couple of reviews you oppose the idea of "Everything in this world is made of energy." Could you recommend some books which can explain this more beside Entangled Minds?

Thanks & Best Regards

One of the problems that I explore in detail in Healing, Meaning and Purpose is what I refer to as “Physics envy:” the attempt by non-specialists to use physics to buttress comments about “Energy” in biology and healing. Comments that would produce apoplexy in most practicing physicists. Within the last few days I have been listening to some CDs by a biologist in which he makes the usual claim that quantum physics “proves” that the universe in made of energy and that consciousness and matter are inextricably linked. He then goes on to say that the famous equation E=MC2 proves it, despite the fact that we are still waiting for a rapprochement between quantum and relativistic theories. To his dying day, Einstein remained skeptical about quantum mechanics.

The biologist may be right. The trouble is that his evidence is not.

The loose usage of the word “energy” may make people wotking in biology and healing look foolish and ill informed, and it is guaranteed to prevent any meaningful dialogue between biologists and physicist. This is not a semantic argument but a practical one.

When someone says, “I like his energy,” or “the arrangement of the furniture has good energy,” or I got his to tap his hand and that cured his energy,” what do these statements actually mean?

According the Lawrence LeShan, the idea that “energy” is some universal substances that is the basic building block of the universe arose from a slogan created by a popularizer of science in the early 1950s. The original slogan was that the “Universe is made up of energy,” with the corollary that all solid matter was simply congealed energy. This was some years before the development of modern field theory. Journalists, broadcasters and science fiction writers commonly wrote about converting matter into energy, though this is impossible according to the current understanding of the laws of physics.

Energy is always manifested as a state of a particular field. It may be manifested as a matter-field or an energy-field. When one form of being is converted to another, its energy is passed on. I am indebted to Professor Chris Clarke formerly of the University of Southampton for an excellent metaphor: “when one form of manifest field converts into another, its energy is like a relay-runner’s baton that is passed on, but always requires a runner; though without the baton there’s no point in running. The universe is made of energy in the sense that without the energy the fields could not actualize; the universe is also made of fields, in that without the fields there would be nothing to carry the energy.”

There is only one energy and its different manifestations – electricity, the strong and weak forces, and so on - are fields.

There is an extremely interesting idea in philosophy, called “Energy monism,” that proposes that energy and consciousness are aspects of one another. This is an attractive concept about which I shall have a bit more to say on another occasion.

This concepts about “energy” as the fundamental force of the universe later became consolidated with a wonderful example of an inappropriate use of metaphor: Qi and Prana were equated with energy, though nobody schooled in Chinese or Sanskrit would translate the words that way. So many New Age ideas conflated “Energy” with Qi and Prana, and some even went so far as to claim that matter is no more than a series of vortices in the primary “stuff.”

I once termed some of the common intellectual fallacies, Petty’s Paralogia:

1. The inappropriate use of metaphor
2. The King’s New Clothes phenomenon
3. Moving the goalposts

If you are looking for some more reading, it depends a little on the level that you are looking for.

Here are one or two that I have recently found interesting, useful and very readable:
Healing Beyond the Body by Larry Dossey
Decoding the Universe by Charles Seife
Radical Knowing by Christian de Quincey
And finally for Energy Monism, Paradigm Wars by Mark Woodhouse is excellent.

If these do not give you what you need, do let me know: I have scores of other recommendations. You may also find some of the lists that I’ve put up at Amazon may guide you, for example this one.

The Maharishi Effect

In 1976, researchers associated with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi first described that in communities where there were large numbers of serious meditators, crime rates went down as the number of meditators went up. This has become known as the “Maharishi effect,” and some of this research has been published in highly reputable journals. You can see a summary of some of the research here. I also discuss this whole fascinating issue in more detail in Healing, Meaning and Purpose.

As you can imagine, it is controversial and has stirred up some heated arguments. But mounting research is pointing to evidence of a global consciousness that is developing and evolving.

More data on this effect was presented at a news conference on Wednesday, November 1, at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa. Scientists reported on a rigorous, controlled econometric analysis of the first 100 days of a $12 million scientific demonstration project to monitor the effects of 1200 advanced Transcendental Meditation practitioners on quality of life indicators.

The research is said to show that since the project began on July 23, 2006, the Dow Jones Industrial Index and the S&P 500 have posted total gains of approximately 12%, and the NASDAQ has climbed nearly 18%. The Dow has repeatedly hit all-time record levels, the S&P reaching a 5.5-year high, and the NASDAQ climbing to a five-year high.

If true, this is astonishing.

I don’t doubt the sincerity or scientific expertise of any members of the research teams. I’ve checked out some of the other work that each has done, and it has all been of the highest order. The one problem is that this is like a pharmaceutical company having a press conference to tell the world about a new wonder drug before anyone outside the company has had a chance to check out the research. Yes the data is out there, but there are a hundred and one messy little details that need to be checked over.

We have no reason to doubt, except that doubt has to be the perpetual mind set of the scientist. Many factors can make the markets go up and down. And until the research has been checked and validated by every interested person in the world we have to remain skeptical.

Let me tell you how this checking is done. Last week I was sent a research paper by a prestigious journal with a personal note from the editor asking me to see what I thought of the research. I read through the paper in great detail, checking the citations, the methodology, statistics and even the spelling.

This is a task undertaken by every senior academic, often once or twice a week. We don’t get paid for doing it, and the whole process is anonymous: I don’t know who did the research and they don’t know who is passing judgment on their labors. We do this work for the common good. Earlier this evening I completed my report to the editor. But it doesn’t stop there. One or two other experts will have done the same with the paper and then the editor decides based on all of our reports.

Then there are two more steps. If the editor decides to publish, then the global scientific community will crawl all over the research to see if we reviewers have missed anything and if the research looks okay. Finally others will have to replicate the study.

This is why research often seems to progress at a snail’s pace. In actual fact it isn’t. It is going very quickly, but each step is being checked extremely carefully. Even with all of this conscientious effort, research regularly gets published that turns out not to be correct after all.

And with such extraordinary claims we require extraordinarily good proof.

If, as I suspect, the research is indeed found to be correct, it could change the world forever.

Arsenic and Water Safety

Here is a new study that may turn out to be one of the most important of the year.

Tens of millions on people around the world, most particularly in Bangladesh, are forced to drink water containing dangerously high amounts of arsenic. The very same stuff that has been used by countless poisoners.

The classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning are:

• Headache
• Abdominal pains
• Vomiting
• Difficulty breathing
• Light headedness
• Delirium
• Neuropathy
• Stroke
• Skin lesions: usually thickening of the skin of the palms and soles with wart-like excresences
• Reduced production of red and white blood cells
• Increased risk of cancers of the lung, skin, bladder, liver, kidney and prostate
• Death

The exact pattern of symptoms depends on the acuity of the exposure, the amount of arsenic to which a person is exposed and the individual's own makeup.

The new research - published this week in the journal Science - is from Rice University's Centre for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology in Texas, and it may give us a quick and cheap way of getting most of the arsenic out of drinking water. The investigators used minute particles of iron oxide - very similar to common rust - to bind large amounts of arsenic. The iron oxide particles are really tiny: just 12 nanometres (billionths of a metre) across, about 5,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. When mixed into contaminated water, the tiny crystals became coated with the poison and began behaving like iron filings. The iron oxide/arsenic combination can then be removed from water using a simple hand-held magnet.

One of the investigators, Professor Doug Natelson had this to say, "The idea of using magnetic particles to filter and clean water is not particularly new. The trick here is that these particles are very, very small, which means they're essentially all surface. So the arsenic sticks to the surface of the particles, and what we've found is that when the nanoparticles are in the right range of sizes, you can pull them out of solution with a relatively small magnetic field gradient that you could get from, say, a permanent magnet."

As an additional refinement, the scientists needed to develop a technology that would be usable in one of the poorest parts of the world. In one experiment flakes of rust were made into nanoparticles by heating them in coconut or olive oil at 350C. They could then be used in water purification.

This is excellent news, and if confirmed, it could save hundreds of thousands if not millions of livees, and unspeakably awful chronic ill health.

Eye Color: An Instant Paternity Test?

Most of us learned some genetics in high school. You were probably taught about sweet peas, height and eye color. If mom and dad have blue eyes and little Johnny has brown, then mom probably has some explaining to do.

Sweet peas, height and eye color are examples of genetic determinism: genes determine outcome. But as I have written before, many other genes are not so simple: in behavior and metabolism genes do not so much determine behavior as how the person will react to the environment.

Now there is some fascinating new research about eye color published in the current issue of the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

The color of the human iris is determined by a simple, predictable and reliable genetic pattern of inheritance.

Investigators from the University of Tromso in Norway have shown that blue-eyed men find blue-eyed women more attractive than brown-eyed women. The researchers have postulated that there could be an unconscious male adaptation for the detection of paternity based on eye color.

At first blush this look like a bit of a stretch, but it may not be.

Let’s do a quick revision from high school genetics:

1. If both parents have blue eyes, the children will have blue eyes.
2. If both parents have brown eyes, a quarter of the children will have blue eyes, and three quarters will have brown eyes.
3. The brown eye form of the eye color gene (or allele) is dominant, whereas the blue eye allele is recessive.

It then follows that if a child born to two blue-eyed parents does not have blue eyes, then the blue-eyed father is not the biological father. From an evolutionary perspective, males would be rather interested in knowing whether any children were theirs. So it is reasonable to expect that a man would be more attracted towards a woman displaying a trait that increases his “paternal confidence,” that any children would be his. If the mate also has blue eyes, it would be easy to uncover his partner's sexual infidelity.

In the study, eighty-eight male and female students were asked to rate the facial attractiveness of models. The pictures were displayed on a computer screen and were close-ups of young adult faces of people who were not known to the participants. The eye color of each model was manipulated, so that for each model's face two versions were shown, one with the natural eye color (blue/brown) and another with the other color (brown/blue). The participants' own eye color was also recorded.

Both blue-eyed and brown-eyed women showed no difference in their preferences for male models of either eye color. Similarly, brown-eyed men showed no preference for either blue-eyed or brown-eyed female models. However, blue-eyed men rated blue-eyed female models as more attractive than brown-eyed models.

In a second study, a group of 443 young adults of both sexes and different eye colors were asked to report the eye color of their romantic partners. Blue-eyed men were the group with the largest proportion of partners of the same eye color.

The lead investigator - Bruno Laeng – had this to say, "It is remarkable that blue-eyed men showed such a clear preference for women with the same eye color, given that the present experiment did not request participants to choose prospective sexual mates, but only to provide their aesthetic or attractiveness responses…based on face close-up photographs."

Blue-eyed men may have unconsciously learned to value a physical trait that can facilitate recognition of their own kin.

See if these findings ring true in your own relationships or in the people around you.

Life is Information at Work

“Information is "a difference that makes a difference.”
--Gregory Bateson (English Anthropologist, Social Scientist, Linguist, Cybernetician and Writer, 1904-1980)

Much of the work in which we’ve been engaged needs us to look very hard at what is life? Is it simply a collection of biochemical reactions glowing in the dark, or is it something more complex, laden in meaning and purpose. This is not an academic exercise: unless and until we can better understand the fundamental processes of life, it is difficult to advance the practice of medicine and the processes of health and wellness.

A fundamental tenet of Healing, Meaning and Purpose is that we live in a non-dual Universe, of which consciousness, information and energy are the primary manifestations and principles. I present a great deal of solid scientific material that you can use immediately. It’s all based on the fundamental concept that illness is caused by degradation in the storehouse of information that sustains the body.

Comprehensive treatment and persistent robust physical, psychological, social, subtle and spiritual health is rooted in clear, harmonious, integrated information. And that is why physical treatments – sometimes including medications – may be an essential component of helping someone get well, but is nonetheless just one piece of the puzzle. It is essential also to ensure that the information and communication between each aspect of a person and his or her environment are also clear, harmonious and integrated. Without those other pieces, we may be doing no more than putting a band aid on a problem.

Valentino Braitenberg the former director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, has always had some interesting things to say. He is a truly original thinker who’s also, IMHO, a fine human being.

I recently came across this in his last book, Das Bild der Welt im Kopf: Eine Naturgeschichte des Geistes, published in 2003 by LIT Verlag, Munster:

“Living organisms contain information, are the result of information, pass on information, and information made flesh in the conditions that their environmental niches impose for survival. To read this information is to recognize the very essence of a living organism.”

I think that this is the most succinct summary of what is to be a living organism. Yes, of course, you are made up of atoms and molecules. But the key point is that you are maintained by a constantly flowing river of information. Without it your body, your mind, your relationships and your spiritual essence would cease to flow.

Any treatment worth its salt will always be directed toward correcting and modulating and integrating this flow of information.

Anything less, and we are simply moving around the deckchairs on the Titanic.

“The original root of the word "information" is the Latin word informare, which means to fashion, shape, or create, to give form to. Information is an idea that has been given a form, such as the spoken or written word. It is a means of representing an image or thought so that it can be communicated from one mind to another rather than worrying about all the information afloat in the world, we must ask ourselves what matters to us, what do we want to know. It's having ideas and learning to deal with issues that is important, not accumulating lots and lots of data.”
--Theodore Roszak (American Social Thinker, Critic and Writer, 1933-)

“Man must go back to nature for information.”
--Thomas Paine (English-born American Political Theorist and Writer, 1737-1809)

Quantum Mechanics and Zen Koans

I have talked before about the ways in which some people abuse and misuse quantum mechanics.

Since I wrote that article, I’ve had loads of examples sent to me. I’ve also seen lots of books  that are often pretty good.

Except for the quantum fig leaf that they use to provide authority and support for what the author is saying.

Even for highly gifted mathematicians – and I’ve known many – understanding quantum mechanics can be a bear. Remember that Einstein himself was unconvinced by the theory, and he was not just a gifted mathematician, but a superbly creative individual who could visualize like no-one else.

And that was part of his difficulty. One of the problems of popular interpretations of quantum mechanics is that they consist of forced metaphors and comparisons with familiar events rather than actual descriptions. Let me take an example: In a quantum system a particle following two different paths at the same time, while not being observed. For most people that sounds like a Zen Koan. Because it is completely different from the way in which things work in the real world, it is very difficult to grasp.

Quantum mechanics is something that you have to learn to accept and get used to, rather than trying to imagine it in terms of familiar observations in the macroscopic natural world. Many of the concepts cannot be fully expressed in English. Many of the best science writers are always at pains to tell us that what they are saying is suggestive of the ideas, rather than being a complete description of a mathematical construct. Using written language to describe a phenomenon in the quantum world is a bit like using a tape measure to determine the volume of water in a puddle. You can come up with a rough approximation, but not an accurate number.

The only way in which you are able to really understand quantum mechanics is with a change in perception. The moment when people “see it” for the first time, it’s a bit like looking at a Necker cube:

If you look at the corner that I’ve marked “A,” is it pointing toward you or away from you?

Most people see it one way and then if they stare for a moment, it will “flip” it will look the other way.

It’s a simple visual illusion, but it demonstrated the perceptual shift that you need to really understand quantum mechanics. It requires you to be able to think in a completely new way, and very few people have been able to do that.

This is really what the Danish Physicist and Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr meant when he made the famous comment, “Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.”

The Parachute Approach to Evidence

Almost three years ago, one of the British Medical Journal – one of the top rated medical journals in the world - published an amusing article with an extremely serious sting in the tail. The article, entitled "Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma due to gravitational challenge," highlighted some of the absurdity surrounding the constant demand for scientific validation using only one set of criteria.

The authors pointed out that - as with many interventions intended to prevent ill health - there had been no randomized controlled trials of parachutes in preventing the major trauma that may be caused by gravity!! Yet we would hope that nobody would consider exiting a plane in flight without first equipping himself or herself with a parachute.

Advocates of evidence-based medicine have criticized the adoption of interventions that have only been evaluated by using observational data.

The authors therefore said that, “We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organized and participated in a double blind, randomized, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute.”

They used the lack of randomized controlled trials in testing parachutes to show that situations still exist where such trials are not only unnecessary, but also dangerous.

Anyone who has spent 30 seconds on this blog knows that I’m firmly committed to the rational analysis of data. But I am just as certain that there are many valid types of evidence.

There is an important article in this week’s issue of the British Medical Journal that lies at the heart of Integrated Medicine, and the research that we’ve been facilitating. The article suggests that waiting for the results of randomized trials of public health interventions can cost hundreds of lives, especially in poor countries with great need and potential to benefit. If the science is good, we should act before the trials are done.

The article argues that the “parachute approach,” where practice and policies are based on good science but without randomized trials, is often more suitable in resource poor settings. They go on to consider three areas of critical importance, in which there are real ethical, moral and logistical problems if we wait for the results of randomized controlled trials.

They use the three examples of:

1. Oral rehydration therapy
2. Male circumcision to prevent HIV infection
3. Misoprostol for postpartum hemorrhage

We have constantly run into the same kinds of problems with alternative, complementary and now Integrated Medicine. In most of theses fields there is precious little in the way of randomized controlled trials, but a wealth of clinical reports and case series. The problem with unorthodox medicine is that much of it does not fulfill one of the criteria for the parachute approach: to be “based on good science.” This is one of the reasons for expending so much energy on finding common ground between conventional and Integrated Medicine, and for investigating several advances in the basic sciences that may help us square the circle.

It is also why we have adopted a second criterion: the potential for a therapy to do harm. Clearly the level of evidence for risk and benefit is quite different for a potentially risky surgical procedure, compared with, say, crystal therapy. The biggest risk with crystal therapy is that it might get used inappropriately in place of a treatment that has been shown to work.

But above all else, when we are dealing with sick and suffering people, we have to take action. Safe action, action that has a good chance of helping, and action that is fully explained to the individual. Honestly and straightforwardly, and without false optimism.

“A man's best friends are his ten fingers.”--Robert Collier (American Writer and Publisher, 1885-1950)

Nobel Prizes 2006

This is always an exciting week for anyone interested in science, the arts or the future of humanity.

Every year, the first week of October is the time when the Nobel Prizes are announced. Many of us have our short lists of people we think SHOULD get the Prizes, and it's always interesting to see who does. I also have to admit to a personal interest: I have several friends and colleagues who are in the running, so I've got some fingers and toes crossed for them.

Last year the Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to the discoverers of Helicobacter. Their discovery has lead medicine to reconsider just how many illnesses might be caused by infections in combination with genes, stress and environmental factors. In one moment we moved from blaming a whole group of illnesses on bad behavior to bad bugs.

I just got a little flash on my screen to tell me that this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded.

At the risk of sound like an announcer at the Oscars, the 2006 Prize has gone to Andrew Fire from Stanford and Craig Mello from the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

Their work on RNA interference has been receiving massive plaudits amongst biochemists for the eight years since it was discovered. It is doubly remarkable that the Prize has come so soon after the first publication: that is very rare. It is a fundamental mechanism by which genes are regulated in the body, and we believe that the discovery has the potential to allow us to switch off harmful genes. The discovery also allowed us to systematically test the functions of all human genes.

When I have talked about mechanisms by which environmental factors and even thoughts and emotions can change gene expression, it was driven in part by an understanding of some of this work.

Let me add my warmest congratulations to their magificent achievement!

Reversing the Irreversible

When I am analyzing current medical research for you, I focus on findings that are relevant to our underlying theme of Integrated Medicine.

One of the most important of all is the evidence for “spontaneous” remissions of otherwise fatal illnesses, and the reversal of diseases that are usually thought of as irreversible. It is exciting when we can show that arteriosclerosis and some neurological disease may be reversible, though most physicians still do not know that good news.

Two years ago I was asked to comment on a remarkable clinical problem. A 28-year old woman had seen a neurologist about some odd symptoms, which included quite severe visual disturbances. On MRI and electrical she had clear evidence of demyelination, the hallmark of multiple sclerosis. All of which has resolved after just one month of complete withdrawal from her diet of the sweetener aspartame. Multiple sclerosis is a disease that comes and goes, but the point of this case is that there was clear evidence that it went away completely. The neurological lesions in the brain that should have stayed forever, just melted away. I’ve looked at thousands of brain scans and this is extraordinary. And clinically the young woman is just fine.

Cases like this must be very rare: the FDA has determined that aspartame is safe, though on a future occasion I’ll say a bit more about the pros and cons of sweeteners. Discussions about artificial sweeteners usually generate more heat than light, but there is a lot of very helpful data to guide us.

Now let’s look at another condition that is supposed to be irreversible: cirrhosis of the liver. The liver is a remarkable organ. It has almost unique regenerative abilities. I’ve often wondered if the Ancient Greeks somehow knew about that remarkable attribute of our largest solid organ. When Prometheus was chained to a rock, an eagle came every day to eat his liver, which had re-grown by the next day.

The trouble is that if the liver keeps getting damaged and trying to re-grow, it produces a lot of fibrous scarring, the hallmark of cirrhosis. For more than a century, every expert has said that this fibrosis is irreversible. Now some first class research has shown that it isn’t true. An inexpensive medicine can reverse the fibrous changes in the liver.

The medicine is called sulfasalazine (sulphasalazine in the UK) that is normally used for treating inflammatory bowel diseases and some kinds of inflammatory arthritis. A team of scientists lead by Professor Derek Mann has recently moved from Southampton to Newcastle University has made a series of ground breaking discoveries. One of the most exciting is that sulfasalazine can reverse fibrosis in the liver.

The results were published in the journal Gastroenterology. A second and third papers published in Apoptosis, that describe the - then - Southampton group's collaboration with chemists and oncologists to produce novel and more effective derivatives of sulphasalazine.

The researchers believe that, subject to further research and clinical trials, sulfasalazine could potentially be used to treat types of chronic liver disease – like cirrhosis – that are currently considered untreatable. Sadly because of greater alcohol consumption, especially binge-drinking, and obesity, liver disease is rising dramatically.

And if a simple medicine can reverse something previously believed to be irreversible, the final question that we have to ask is whether other the non-invasive methods may also help? Since most of the non-invasive methods work at deeper and more subtle levels of the organism, the answer to that one is, “Highly likely.” But it is going to have to be tested scientifically, just as every other hypothesis has to be tested.

Vitamin D and Interstitial Cystitis

I think that interstitial cystitis (IC) must be one of the most distressing of conditions to have, and it is certainly one of the most challenging to treat. Outside the United States, it is more often called painful bladder syndrome (PBS).

IC is a condition that results in recurring discomfort or pain in the bladder and the surrounding pelvic region. The symptoms vary from person to person and even in the same individual. It can vary from an experience of mild discomfort, pressure, tenderness, to intense pain in the bladder and pelvic area. Symptoms may include an urgent need to urinate (urgency), a frequent need to urinate (frequency), or a combination of these symptoms. Both may be severe: I’ve seen people who had to urinate every ten minutes. Pain may change in intensity as the bladder fills with urine or as it empties. Women's symptoms often get worse during menstruation, and some experience pain with vaginal intercourse. There is a good website provided as a service of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), that is fairly up-to-date.

Because IC varies so much in symptoms and severity, most researchers believe that it is not one, but several diseases. There are clear links between IC and fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic fatigue, and probably many other illnesses.

There is good evidence that inflammation in one pelvic organ can cause pain in other organs that share some of the same nerve supply. Inflammation of the colon may make some nerves coming from the spinal cord hyper-excitable, which in turn makes nerves running to the bladder hypersensitive. Because the same nerve plexus connects with the ovaries and uterus, it is no surprise to learn that phases of the menstrual cycle impact the way in which inflammation in one pelvic organ can cause inflammation in another.

IC appears to be becoming more common, although that is always a risky comment, because it was undoubtedly not often recognized in the past. The old teaching was that it was only something that occurred in menopausal women, but it is now being diagnosed in men as well as women, and in people as young as their late teens.

The cause of IC remains unknown, though there have been many theories: infections, allergy, autoimmunity, neurological and genetic. There have been recent claims of the discovery of responsible genes, but hey would most likely be susceptibility genes, rather than causative. Otherwise why should the rates of IC genuinely seem to be increasing? What seems clear is that the normal mucus lining of the bladder wall is damaged.

Multiple types of treatment have been tried, from medication to pelvic floor exercise, to neurological implants and homeopathy and acupuncture. The report of anything new that may help is always welcome.

So I was interested to see a report from investigators in Milan on the efficacy using a molecule that has been attracting a lot of interest recently: vitamin D. The active form of vitamin D is known as calcitriol or 1,25-dihydroxycholecalciferol (1,25(OH)2D3) that is manufactured in the kidney. Its in vivo biological effects include regulation of bone metabolism, control and modulation of the proliferation of cells and some aspects of the immune response. These characteristics have already led to therapeutic applications in osteoporosis, secondary hyperparathyroidism, and psoriasis. Many reports show beneficial effects of vitamin D in animal models of diabetes, organ graft rejection, experimental allergic encephalomyelitis, lupus nephritis, and in asthma. Despite what you may have seen in some advertisements, just taking extra vitamin D does not help, and may make matters worse: they key is to have the right form of vitamin D, that can reach and affect the right areas of the body.

The Milan team used a vitamin D3 analogue (BXL628) in a mouse model of chronic cystitis. What they found was that a specific inflammatory marker in the blood went down with treatment, and at the same time histological analysis showed a decrease in edema and white blood cell (leukocyte) infiltration in the bladder wall. This and some other biochemical evidence of what is known as “mast cell degranulation,”  is very encouraging and strongly supports the potential therapeutic use of BXL628 in diseases such as human interstitial cystitis.

This is the kind of mechanism-based research that holds out enormous promise for everyone’s welfare and will help us in our goal of using science to inform the development of the next generation of treatment, health and wellness.

Quantum Flapdoodle

Regular readers will know that I talk about a large amount of contemporary research relating to our central themes of Integrated Medicine and Personal Integration and Growth. And unless someone is making a dangerous recommendation, most of the time I let mistakes and misunderstandings go. But I’ve just seen some articles that really do need a response.

The authors are misleading us.

And even if you do not see the main article that I’m going to be focusing on today, you may see other similar articles or websites, and I do not want you to be deceived.

I am not a physicist by training, but I’ve spent years getting myself educated in fields like quantum mechanics and relativity theory by some of the foremost authorities in the world. I’ve read their books and papers; I’ve had meetings with them, visited their labs and had them answer a lot of questions, some of which probably tried their patience!

It took a great deal of time and effort. The reason for doing it was not idle curiosity, but because I need to be better able to understand the world, so that I can give sensible advice and we can all survive the critical next few years.

So it is a shame to see books and articles claiming that quantum mechanics or some other field of science “proves” what some writer is saying, when they clearly don’t understand anything about the field.

There have been some notable exceptions: Ken Wilber, Gary Zukav, Fritjof Capra and Deepak Chopra all talk about things quantum and have done their homework. Sadly the majority of people who write books and articles using quantum mechanics to buttress their arguments have not. They constantly show a complete misunderstanding of entire subject. It would not matter in the slightest if folk just wanted to entertain themselves. But when they use false information to try and influence other people to believe something, it gets to be a problem. Particularly if it has to do with your health and your personal destiny.

In some cases it is a matter of people “not knowing that they don’t know.” In others it’s been frank intellectual dishonesty.

I’ve just been sent an article for my comments. It’s one of the worst of its type that I’ve seen in months. And that’s saying something! I don’t want to take the paper and do a line-by-line critique: it’s not necessary.

Instead, I would like you to get some ideas about how to interpret an article that uses quantum mechanics, relativity or molecular biology to support what it says. You wouldn’t spend money on an infomercial with outrageous claims, so don't get taken in by a pseudoscientist. So let me show you the first steps toward being a savvy reader.

Nobody expects a popular article to be a scientific treatise. But you, as a reader, have every right to expect honesty from the writer.

The author says that the “Law of Attraction” - an old alchemical and Theosophical concept – has been proven by modern science. He says that “Science calls it the Law of Quantum Physics. Metaphysics calls it the Law of Spiritual Attraction.” “Like energy attracts like energy.”

I honestly don’t like being critical, but this is bovine excreta.

The author must have forgotten about the North and South poles of a magnet. Or gravity, quark, strangeness and charm?

There is indeed a Law of Attraction: it is important and provable. But what the author writes about is not it.

He then uses some patently absurd interpretations of physics to buttress his arguments. We don’t need to go through the details of what he’s written. But why it all matters is this: what he has to say has no basis, either in logic, in intuition, or in an appeal to the Traditions. It holds serious work up to ridicule.

The writer then goes on to cite some interesting observations by a Russian scientist named Vladimir Poponin, who’s written some very interesting papers about coherent light: what has become known as the DNA Phantom effect. The writer of this article doesn’t seem to have read any of Poponin’s papers or bothered to analyze the debate that has followed his reports. Are the experiments any good? The writer doesn’t tell us, because he doesn’t seem to know.

Yet he writes about this work as if it is all cut and dried. Poponin’s work is extremely interesting, he's a careful scientist with a good track record, but like the Emoto experiments on ice crystals that appear to respond to emotions, it needs to be replicated under controlled conditions. And so far nobody’s been able to do that.

Then we are told that photons are “particles of light.” I can only assume that the writer got that from some primary school text.

And here’s more: “Quantum physics is discovering that all physical matter is made of electromagnetic photon energy-light.” If anyone can explain that sentence, I’d love them to tell all of us.

Whenever someone is trying to dazzle us into believing what he or she has to say, there are some dead giveaways:

1. Always cite quantum mechanics: chances are that none of the readers knows much about it.
2. Then talk about the way in which quantum theory tells us about the way that everything in the universe is interconnected. It doesn’t. That is a separate field of inquiry. Though it a specialty that is generating many very interesting leads.
3. Mention the work of some “independent scientists,” whose work is about to revolutionize the world. I’ve been keeping files on these “revolutionary ideas,” since the late 1960s. Looking back over the files I see that this same group of people was predicting permanent colonies on Mars by 1980; limitless power available to everyone before 1990, and scientific proof of the existence of Atlantis, God and the Grays by 2000.
4. Talk about secret government research. Yes, there’s been lots of it. But it’s unlikely that someone who thinks that in the quantum realm “like attracts like,” is going to be on the inside track of that work.
5. Drop a few names of people who might vaguely support what you are saying. Throwing in Einstein's name is common. I’m not alone in getting loads of papers from people who believe that they have found the secret of the universe. These papers usually come from independent scholars, and are usually light on facts or proofs. People that I’ve known, including the late David Bohm, Norman Geschwind, Karl Pribram, Colin Wilson and Rupert Sheldrake have all lamented the way in which they get inundated with papers from people wanting endorsements of their work. Professor Sir Peter Medawar once told me that Albert Einstein had – during his years at Princeton - a secretary whose main job was to provide polite responses to fans and people who would send him their papers about how he’d got things wrong, and how they could help. I have not met Ken Wilber, but I gather that he also gets his fair share of papers from people wanting his endorsements about their work, however “unorthodox” it may be. I've received more than one paper and then immediately found my name on a website claiming that I endorse work that I've not even read!
   
6. Use your own unique terminology. Another writer tells us that there are differences between emotions and feelings, but without telling us what they were. A whole new theory of moods and motivations followed. But it was based on quicksand.

Mistakes and misquotations happen all the time. I’m always grateful if someone finds a hole in something that I’ve written or said. That’s how we make progress. By constantly checking and revising we get ever closer to the truth.

It’s not just amateurs who sometimes misquote or misinterpret. I once heard a Nobel Laureate give a lecture at which he was trying to use neuroscience to confirm his religious beliefs. He was a kind and brilliant man and after his lecture we had a few minutes to talk privately. In one of the key studies that he used to support his views, he’d turned the data upside down. He was shocked to hear that he’d got it wrong. “How do you know the data so well?” he asked. “Because I was an investigator on the study,” I replied. I’m sure that he never used the data again: that’s “checking and revising” in action.

Does any of this matter? Shouldn’t we just let people say anything they want to? In general, of course they should; nobody wants some kind of thought police telling people what they can and cannot write. But the difficulty comes when people move out of their intellectual sandpit and use false information to give advice on how you should run your life or care for your health.

The authors of papers like this are misleading you. Either through their own ignorance, or perhaps even deliberately, the people who write these things are misdirecting you from the real findings about manifesting, consciousness, connection and enlightenment.

We are living at a time when the curtain seems to be coming down on some interpretations of reality such as string theory, and the veil between different compartments of reality is being torn asunder.

Articles like the one I’ve just quoted are futile distractions that lead skeptics to ridicule everything that we are doing to construct a unified model of reality and our place in it.

And any advice that’s based on these kinds of misunderstandings will not have much value for any of us.

What to do?
Nobody can be an expert on everything. But apart from the warning signs that I mentioned, here are some other warning signs that what someone is recommending to you might not be all that it seems:

1. If people present testimonials as evidence
2. If they use selective anecdotes to support a theory
3. If they claim the support of science without using its principles of falsifiability, impartiality, replication, correction and revision
4. If they misrepresent the basic tenets of science and its practitioners
5. If they suggest that research is underway to confirm his or her pronouncements
6. If they claim that a breakthrough is imminent
7. If they make claims that he or she says are amazing, when to a specialist they are not amazing in the slightest: people do sometimes just get better on their own, and there are hundreds of diets, each of which will likely help someone somewhere
8. If people use graphs and charts in place of empirical evidence
9. If the author makes false claims for experience and credentials: somebody claimed to have treated 10,000 people in one year using a new technique based on quantum biology. If he had worked non stop, ten hours a day, five days a week for the whole year without a single break, he would have had to see, evaluate and treat a new person every fifteen minutes. During which he would also have had to make his notes, write letters and make calls to people that he had seen. Does that sound credible to you?
10. If there are no credible scientific references to back up what the author is saying.
11. If he or she bases claims on authority rather than verifiable data: remember a moment ago I mentioned a Nobel Laureate who’d made an honest mistake. Yet it wouldn’t surprise me if other people were still quoting that mistake all these twenty years later.
12. And finally be very careful about people who use one mystery to explain another. People who wave their hands a lot (a sure sign of someone who doesn’t know what he or she is talking about!), and speak airily of the way in which quantum mechanics explains parapsychology have to prove what they say. Some fine people like Gary Schwartz and Dean Radin have peered deeply into the mysteries of physics and found a framework that may indeed be able to explain anomalous phenomena. Their books and papers are highly referenced and they have generated a ton of empirical data.

So the next time that you see someone say something about the Law of Attraction or tell you that “quantum mechanics has shown that…”

Caveat emptor!

Telling Who's Telephoning

Regular readers will have spotted that I highlight Rupert Sheldrake's website on this blog, and I have written approvingly of some of his work.

Some years ago, when I still lived in the United Kingdom, we had a number of spirited discussions. We certainly did not agree on everything, but he always impressed me with his intelligence, insight, integrity and humanity. He thinks very quickly on his feet, and is also not lacking in courage and resilience: vital commodities when exploring areas that lie outside the academic mainstream.

Carol Kirshner just found an article that came out yesterday.

Rupert presented a paper at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The fact that he was reporting on experiments looking at the phenomenon of a type of precognition - knowing who is on the line when the phone rings or knowing who sent an email - shows that Rupert has considerable intestinal fortitude.

The numbers in the trials were small, but he reported a hit rate of 45 percent, rather than the 25 percent you would have expected in these trials.

This is the latest report of a work in progress, and it is being done slowly and deliberately becaue if it is correct, the implications for all of us will be stunning.

The only unfortunate thing about Rupert's work is the number of people who snipe at him instead of engaging in debate and futher research. The attitude of some academics is one of intense fundamentalist intolerance, a point made in a book that I recommend: Alternative Science, by Richard Milton.

I don't agree with everything that he says either, but many of his points about scientific intolerance are right on target. The book was written over ten years ago, and little has changed.

Except for the worse.

The Epigenetic Code

In Healing, Meaning and Purpose I reveal some of the extraordinary changes that are occurring in our understanding of genetics and inheritance. Even if you are currently learning genetics in college, it is quite likely that some of what your professors are teaching may already be out of date. I say that with the greatest possible respect: I find that in some of my fields of expertise, I am often having to update my teaching materials every week.

One of the remarkable discoveries that is generating huge amounts of new information is what we call epigenetics. This is the study of a form of inheritance that can occur without fundamental changes in gene sequences. This has to do with the idea that there is a second layer of programming on top of our DNA. A code that can change over our lifetimes in response to environmental change. Diet, hormones, chemicals in the environment, stress and even thought, emotion and behavior, can all change the ways in which our genes are expressed. Some of these epigenetic changes can be passed on to other generations. In other words, there can be an inheritance of acquired characteristics. Something that has been denied for over a century.

Let me give you a simple example. Studies of a particular species of mouse have shown that maternal diet has an effect on the coat color of the offspring. This was the result of what is known as methylation that altered gene expression. These changes in coat color were carried on to the next generation: the grandchildren of the mouse given the special diet. This created quite a stir, because it had been thought that epigenetic changes in cells are erased each time that a cell divides. Obviously that was not happening. We now have many examples of epigenetic changes being passed on to the next generation and the next. There are literally hundreds of scientific papers on the subject.

As I have written before in my last book and CDs, in articles and in reviews at Amazon and elsewhere, the traditional view of genetics has been one of genetic determinism. That we are all little robots whose entire lives are dedicated to nothing more than passing our DNA from one generation to the next. And the genes even dictated how we did that. I still know many gene jockeys who are convinced that the whole of human behavior will ultimately be explained by our genes, and that free will is therefore a myth.

I’m just as sure that they are wrong.

Let me give you an example. Identical twins have identical DNA, yet we have known for fifty years that one twin may get a genetic illness that the other does not. And the brains of identical twins, though they start out identical, quickly become quite different from each other because of the impact of the environment. Twin studies of mental illness have been going on at the Institute of Psychiatry in London since 1960. Every patient coming to the hospital is asked by the clerical staff if he or she is a twin. And there has been groundbreaking research on mentally ill twins at the National Institute of Mental Health for decades. And what have we learned? Though there may be a genetic component in schizophrenia, when we look at people with schizophrenia who have identical twins, only half of the twins have the illness, despite having the same DNA. The key difference is at the epigenetic level.

Marcus Pembrey from the Clinical and Molecular Genetics Unit at the Institute of Child Health, part of University College, London, has been at the forefront of the work on epigenetics. Marcus has had the opportunity to study the unusually detailed historical medical records of the isolated northern Swedish city of Overkalix. He and his colleagues found something astonishing. The grandsons of men who experienced famine during mid-childhood went through puberty earlier and had longer life spans, while the grandsons of men who were well fed in early childhood had an increased likelihood of diabetes. For females, the effect was similar but it was tied to the grandmother, rather than the grandfather. Presumably these responses are designed to adjust our early growth and reproduction to be ready for unpredictable changes adverse events in the environment. I would call this epigenetic resilience.

In a separate study done in Bristol in England, Marcus studied two generations of families, and found that fathers who had started smoking before age 11 had sons who were significantly heavier than average. There was no similar effect on daughters.

There is already some evidence that epigenetic factors may play a role in the development of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.  Many of us are becoming excited about the potential benefit that may flow from a better understanding of genetic and epigenetic mechanisms in major psychiatric disorders.

There is a new journal called, appropriately, Epigenetics that contains a treasure trove of important information. The editor is Moshe Szyf, form McGill University in Canada, and he recently pointed out that one single gene could have as many as 700 epigenetic programs associated with it.

His own research has linked epigenetic change to social interactions: the way in which we behave toward one another can lead to a change in how our genes operate.

Rats whose mothers groom and lick them when they are young grow up to be much calmer than rats whose mothers neglected them. There is, of course, nothing surprising about that. We all understand the importance of good child rearing. But what was surprising was the finding that epigenetic changes are the cause. By nurturing their young, the rat mothers activated a gene that suppressed the creation of cortisol, one of the stress hormones.

Pups who were neglected did not have that gene activated, so they produced more cortisol and were therefore more stressed out.

Knowing this, the researchers were able to increase the well-nurtured rats' stress by injecting them with methionine, an amino acid commonly found in food supplements.

Here we have proof that the link between food and mood is not just due to transient chemical changes in the neurotransmitters of the brain, but that a chemical in our diet could cause fundamental changes in the way in which our genes work. In this case a rat’s emotions and state of mind. The implications for all of us are extraordinary.

Since 2003, a consortium of public and private firms in Europe has been working on the first Human Epigenome Project (HEP), and it hopes to have completed 10% of the map by the end of this year. As you can see, it is a lot more complicated than mapping the human genome, and epigenetic codes are constantly moving targets. The first reports from HEP have indicated that at least 20% of the genes studied so far can have their behavior modified by the environment. The food that we eat, the chemicals that we ingest and the attitude of our parents and peers can all change the way in which our genes function. As Marcus Pembrey has said, “Child care has a whole new meaning.”

This is all crucially important, because one of our most important discoveries has been that human beings have been undergoing extremely rapid physical as well as psychological and social change, and that is one of the reasons why the Laws of Healing have been changing over the last century.

Science, Quantum Mechanics and Mystical Experience

I've had a very long standing interest in altered states of consciousness.

For me this has never been an academic exercise. Though I grew up at a time when meditation and mysticism was all the rage, I was actually trying to make sense of some of my own experiences. Since early childhood I'd had all manner of odd experiences that in later life I learned were the norm. It's just that most people ignore or forget their experiences or are "trained" not to talk about them. In the mid-1980s I lectured on the subject of mystical experiences at the Society for Psychical Research and the College of Psychic Studies in London. (I recently discovered that there are still tapes of those talks available after all these years!)

As part of another project, I recently analyzed most of the world literature on altered state of consciousness in all the languages that I can read, and found over 2,800 valuable papers. There is a huge amount of research going on.

I've also come across a number of short but very interesting interviews with a number of original thinkers in the field of consciousness, including Huston Smith, Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson and a number of other thinkers. If you have any interest in consciousness you will probably find something to interest you here.

Enjoy!

Scientific American Podcasts

One of the very many useful resources on the Internet is the Scientific American website.

Attached to it is a weekly podcast that summarizes a few of the most important recent new items.

For those of us engaged in developing, evolving and refining a new model of reality that will have practical applications to health, wellness and personal evolution, it's really important to know about the most up to date discoveries of conventional science. And how they fit in with - or challenge - our attempts to grow our field.

So many people have claimed to create new models that have collapsed at the first challenge. They usually contain the words "quantum" or "Einstein" somewhere near the beginning, or some half-remembered piece of High School or "Pop" psychology. It is usually easy to see that most have not done their homework!

We have instead been embracing new data from many sciences, from clinical experience, from intuitives and spiritual teachers and constantly testing the concepts and methods to see if they can be refined or improved. I'm pleased to report that we have been making rapid progress.

Enjoy the podcasts!

English Cows Have "Regional Accents"

I once knew a man from the county of Yorkshire who could identify whereabouts in the county a fellow Yorkshireman came from: he was usually able to pinpoint people within eight miles of the place where they were raised.

I've never had quite that facility, but it still surprises American friends that I can tell them almost exactly which part of England someone has come from. And I'm not bad with most European accents.

Now if a report from the BBC is to be believed, English cows have regional accents. Picked up, perhaps, by spending a great deal of time with their humans. Listen to the audio and see what you think.

Birds pick up local variations in their songs, and our two Irish horses certainly seem to have different "accents" from their American-born bretheren.

Is this human projection or animal learning?

I'm pretty sure that it's the latter.

What more do we need to learn about the abilities of animals before we realize that they are very far from being "dumb???"

Dark Matter and Subtle Energies

There have been many attempts to explain observations about subtle energies, Qi and Prana. Amongst the most promising scientific candidates is dark energy and dark matter. The trouble has been that it is a fundamental mistake to try and explain one mystery – subtle energies and subtle systems – with another: dark matter and dark energy.

So I was delighted to see that Scientific American is reporting on a new paper in the coming edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

For almost 75 years, astronomers, cosmologists and physicists have deduced that ordinary matter must be surrounded by vast quantities of an invisible substance that is not substantial enough to collide with atoms or stars but massive enough to keep galaxies from flying apart. Named dark matter, this mysterious material has eluded the most careful means of detection, but has been assumed to exist because of its gravitational impact.

Observations of a relatively recent collision of two galaxy clusters have finally proven the existence of dark matter. The discovery is a triumph of perseverance, creativity and rigorous mathematics.

My own understanding about all this is that dark energy and dark matter may indeed be the mechanism by which these subtle energies interact with our universe. But beyond or within that lies something else: Consciousness, Mind or the Informational Matrix. This is the realm of the One, the First Cause.

Why all this matters to us, is that this new research provides further evidence that there is more to the Universe than the things that we observe with our normal senses. It already has us thinking of ways in which this will likely impact our maintenance of health and management of illness.

We had to learn about dark matter from observations of the unimaginably large, but it has implications for the very small: the fundamental structure of the systems and materials that constitute our bodies.

“We perceive and are affected by changes too subtle to be described.”
--Henry David Thoreau (American Essayist and Philosopher, 1817-1862)

Convergence

One of the many things differentiating complementary and alternative medicine from the more conventional type, is that complementary practitioners are not much interested in a pathological diagnosis, and instead focus far more on the whole person. There are more than 500 types of complementary and alternative medicine, and virtually all work on the principle that they want to stimulate the body to heal itself.

It is not so well-known that in recent years some of the most cutting edge academic research in medicine has been breaking down artificial organs-based barriers, and focusing instead on the whole person, and look at research in a more holistic way. So a cardiologist and liver expert may be working together on the same problem.

Someone was asking me why this blog has so many categories? The reasons is that artificial barriers between illnesses, health, wellness, consciousness and spirituality are breaking down, and this blog reflects that. I was asked, “So are you interested in self-help or health and wellness?” the answer to that one is “Yes.” All of these are inextricably linked.

A second conceptual change, that is not much known outside of research centers, is that much of the current thrust in pharmacology is based on modulating the body’s responses, rather than simply blocking diseases processes.

Despite this apparent convergence, there are still some enormous differences in approach:
1.    The medical research enterprise remains profoundly reductionist, and so it tends to ignore some key aspects of what it is to be human: we are a great deal more than sets of biochemical reactions.
2.    Dismissing the social and psychological aspects of health and illness remains an Achilles’ heel of most academic research. When I was working in academia, a distinguished colleague came over form the England to give a lecture. An expert in brain imaging, he spoke a lot about consciousness and free will. As one of my American friends said afterward: he sound just like you in our research meetings!
3.    Complementary, alterative and now integrated medicine remains firmly focused on relationships as a key to healing. Not just the relationship of a client and their family, but the relationship between client and therapist. And there is a third arm to this. When, in the mind-1980s, we first started putting together the principles of this new Information Medicine known as Integrated Medicine in the United Kingdom or Integrative or Integral Medicine in the United States, a key component of it was the insistence that the therapeutic encounter would require the therapist to do more than just show up and do something technical. But that the therapist would also be aware of the impact of the encounter on them, and the importance for the therapist to be involved in growth work themselves. There was a time when psychotherapists would remain in therapy throughout their careers. That may not now be feasible. But it is entirely feasible for a therapist to take a bit of time each day to calm themselves; to reflect on what is going on inside them and in the subtle currents of the interactions between them, the person who has come to them for help and guidance, and all the other people involved in the situation. This is the way in which medicine is going to develop in the future.

The extraordinary advances of biomedical research can be an incredible boon to humanity, but they need to be leavened by an understanding of the context within which they are developing.

“A physicist who rejects the testimony of saints and mystics is no better than a tone-deaf man deriding the power of music.”
--Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (Indian Philosopher and, from 1962-67 President of India, 1888-1975)

Technorati tags: Alternative medicine Complementary medicine Integrated medicine

Cosmology and the Ageless Wisdom

“Everything that has a beginning has an ending. Make your peace with that and all will be well.”
--The Buddha (a.k.a. “The Awakened”, a.k.a. Siddhartha Gautama, Indian Religious Figure and Founder of Buddhism, c.563 B.C.E. – c. 483 B.C.E.)

I was very interested to see a paper in Science by Professors Paul Steinhardt from Princeton University and Neil Turok from Cambridge University.

Based on calculations and observations, the new theory proposes that instead of there having been one Big Bang that lead to the creation of the Universe, there are instead cycles of "Big Bangs" and "Big Crunches", meaning our Universe is merely a "child of the previous one". This proposal challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old and may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. It also suggests that there's a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica. This whole idea is so startling that it was picked up by the BBC.

However, there is another piece to this that does not seem to have been picked up yet. Various publications of the Ageless Wisdom seem to have done a good job on predicting many findings of contemporary science. There are some interesting papers here.

One of the key postulates of the ancient teachings is that the Universe goes through cycles. In the metaphorical language of the ancients, the Universal Mind breathes out the Universe that we can see around us, and then inhales, collapsing the Universe, before once again breathing out. Precisely what the new model is also saying.

I’ve previously reported about the speculations concerning “dark matter,” and whether this has something to do with the subtle systems of the body. This new model includes a consideration of dark matter.

This represents a remarkable confluence of the Ageless Wisdom and some of the most creative scientific thinking.

“Each thing is of like form from everlasting and comes round again in its cycle.”
--Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor and Philosopher, A.D. 121-180)

Technorati tags: Ageless Wisdom Cosmology Subtle energy Qi Dark matter

Why Blog?

Just before I entered a Web-free zone, I was looking at Susan Polgar’s chess blog, where she had written a set of answers as to why she should spend so much time and effort on writing blogs. Susan is a legendary chess payer: the first woman to become a men’s International Chess Grandmaster, and a member of an extraordinarily gifted family. I have written about them before.

I was not surprised to see that Susan’s motivations for doing this in the chess world were very similar to mine in the areas of health, wellness and human performance. In the last couple of weeks, I must have been asked twenty times: “Why do you bother to spend so much time on an activity that is extremely time consuming, and for which you get no obvious return?”

1. I have been concerned that even the best journalists do not have access to some of the great research work that is going on right now, and which can have an immediate effect on the lives of millions of people.

2. Some of these new observations, research and treatment options languish in hidden corners, because they may not fit the prevailing medical model. The medical and scientific worlds are full of tales of first-rate research that got shelved because others could not immediately see its importance. There is a wonderful story of the way in which the German-born British scientist Hans Krebs was basically told, “Thanks, but no thanks,” when, in 1937, he submitted a short paper about his now famous cycle. Fourteen years later he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Albert Einstein once made an important statement:
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” Another version of the same sentiment, that is a bit closer to what he said in German is: “Great spirits have always found violent oppression from mediocrities.”

3. It is no secret that medical publishing and the award of prizes are tightly controlled by a small group of individuals. And it is right that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. But when we have that evidence, it is only right and proper that you should have access to information that may help you. This blog is designed to be both a filter and a lens.

4. There is no longer any doubt that the laws of health and healing are changing. I doubt that you have heard that elsewhere, andyet the implications for your health and wellness are stunning.

5. Blogging is a medium through which non-professionals can contribute to discussions. I have already learned things from the experiences of people who have had to struggle with diagnoses and labels that hampered, instead of helped them.

6. I have had a great many discussions with fellow physicians and scientists about communicating science and medicine to the public. My own view is that the public is paying for our research and anything that we can do to empower people is all to the good. Yet many colleagues feel that any attempt to explain science in an accessible way somehow cheapens it. I think that they are dead wrong. I was already in medical school when Jacob Bronowski presented the Ascent of Man on television. Marvelous stuff that changed and energized my approach to medicine. If we do not explain the potential benefits of what we are doing to the public, then why should they, the government or pharmaceutical companies fund us?

7. Susan Polgar has reservations about the way in which chess is being taught, and I am concerned about the way in which medicine and science are being taught, particularly in the United States. Not that it’s bad or wrong, but just that it could be better and more patient-oriented.

“Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first it is ridiculed, in the second it is opposed, in the third it is regarded as self evident.”
-- Arthur Schopenhauer (German Philosopher, 1788-1860)

Technorati tags:  Weblog  Blogging  Jacob Bronowski  Albert Einstein  Nobel prize

The Neanderthal Question

There is an extremely interesting new study about the links between modern humans and Neanderthals. Unfortunately “Neanderthal” has come to be used as a term of abuse. Yet Neanderthal people were probably the first to bury their dead and there is a great deal of evidence that they had a highly sophisticated culture. These people lived across Europe and parts of west and central Asia from approximately 230,000 to 29,000 years ago. It is unclear what factors led to their demise, but climate change and competition from modern humans may have played a role.

Svante Pääbo and his group at the Max Planck Institute in Germany have isolated the long segments of genetic material from a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil from Croatia. The work reveals how closely related the Neanderthal species was to modern humans, Homo sapiens. I have had the opportunity to visit the Vindija Cave outside Zagreb, Croatia, where the 45,000-year-old male Neanderthal was found, and whose DNA is now being studied.

I was particularly interested in this apparently esoteric research because of a series of books that are not as well known as they should be. They were written by a psychologist named Stan Gooch who made a strong argument that we – modern human beings – are a hybrid of sun worshipping Cro-Magnons and moon worshipping Neanderthals. Stan has many other interesting ideas, that were a factor in considering the importance of the cerebellum in human cognition.

Preliminary analysis has shown that Neanderthal Y chromosomes are very different from modern human and chimpanzee Y-chromosomes; more so than for the other chromosomes in the genome. This might suggest that little interbreeding occurred between our own species and the Neanderthals.

This is a great example of the way in which good quality science can be used to check out almost any kind of idea.

Technorati tags: Neanderthal Cerebellum

A Mini Experiment

Well we consumed the first of the squash, cooked with onions and walnuts: delicious! And I’ve been a real bore telling everyone about my horticultural adventures.

But there’s another small piece to all this. It’s almost ten years since I became a Reiki Master. The person who performed the final initiation worked in the business world and told me that all the plants in her office leaned toward her desk, rather than the sunlight. Since then I’ve known a number of Reiki practitioners who have told me that they have used it to help the growth of plants.

So I thought that I would try it on the new vegetable garden. But being a good scientist, I just used it on half of the vegetable garden. Look at the picture, and see if you can guess which half of the vegetable plot got the treatment.

You can certainly see that one half has a luxurious growth of corn, beans and squash, and the other half a great deal less.

I’m not going to read too much into this little experiment. Although the whole plot has received identical care, and the pH of the soil is same from one end to the other, there could still be some other factors influencing the growth of half the plants. But it has made me think about doing a more formal experiment. And for now I’m going to do a typical crossover study: I’m going to go out and use reiki on the half of the garden with the less impressive growth and see if we can get some catch-up growth.

Technorati tags: Reiki Plant growth Experimental method

Crucial New Insights Into the Metabolism of Medications

When we examine the interactions of medicines with the body, we are interested in what the medicine does to the body, and also what the body does to the medicine: what we call pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. But it has long been known that these two essential considerations are far from being the whole story: there are enormous differences in the ways in which people respond to medicines: some people need huge doses of a medicine, whilst there are others who cannot tolerate medicines at all. Though part of the explanation for those differences is clearly not just pharmacological – the same people who are super-sensitive to medicines are often also extraordinarily sensitive to acupuncture and homeopathy – there is a new kid on the block: a new factor in drug metabolism.

Men and women handle medicine differently, the time of day that a medicine is taken, as well as things like the food eaten in the last few hours can all impact the outcomes of taking a medicine. We have also known that there are many other variables in a person’s response to a medicine.

For more than two decades physicians and pharmacologists have wondered if the three pounds of bacteria living peacefully in our intestines might have a major impact on the metabolism of medicines. This question was first prompted by clinical observations: first, people with no intestinal bugs exhibited many oddities in how they handled medicine, and second, there are some rare situations in which overgrowth with unusual bacteria can chew up certain essential nutrients.

New research reported by the BBC confirms these clinical observations.

Researchers at Imperial College London and the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have used a “pharmaco-metabonomic” approach that uses a combination of advanced chemical analysis and mathematical modeling to predict responses to drugs. Details of the research are published in the journal Nature.

The method is based on an analysis of the chemical products of the body's metabolism. We think that examining these patterns can help diagnose diseases, predict an individual's future illnesses, and their response to treatment.

The principle investigator is Professor Jeremy Nicholson and he has said the 'pharmaco-metabonomic' approach appears able to take account of individual differences in the way that drugs are absorbed and processed by the body. It differs from person to person depending on factors including the type and amount of bacteria found in the intestines.

These new techniques could be the first step towards the development of more personalized pharmacological treatments. For those of us practicing integrated medicine, this is a most welcome development.

Technorati tags: drug metabolism gender differences intestinal bacteria pharmacodynamicspharmacokinetics

Dolphins Have Names

It seems that not a day goes by without new research breaking down the barriers between humans and many of the other species that share our planet. I have reported on the burgeoning research into emotional expression in animals. No surprise to anyone who spends much time interacting with them, but a shock to some of my more conservative colleagues. Within the last ten years I have spoken to countless psychologists clinging to the notion that animals are just bundles of reflexes designed to protect them and allow them to reproduce.

The evidence for complex communication patterns in dolphin has long fascinated me. This was triggered in part by the work of the late John Lilly. One of my mentors in neurology was firmly of the opinion that it was impossible because they did not have the right neurological machinery. It seems that he was wrong. There is an extraordinary new report picked up by the BBC and the National Geographic  from a team of scientists based at St Andrews University in Scotland: the same place that Prince William attended for four years. In a three-year-study  of wild dolphins, conducted in Sarasota Bay off Florida's west coast and funded by the Royal Society of London, they found that dolphins communicate like humans by calling each other by "name.” Using whistles, these mammals are able to recognize themselves and other members of the same species as individuals with separate identities. They have labels for each other just as we do.

This is important not just because of the implication that they have evolved some of the same abilities that we have, but because it likely means that they have a sense of self and of identity and that they able to differentiate each other as individuals.

I was talking about these findings with She Who Must Be Obeyed, and she pointed out that our horses appear to be able to do the same thing: if you watch them closely they have different calls for attracting each other’s attention, and these calls are different when they are at home or when they are in competition. Two of the horses are constantly going to competitions together, and after they have done well, they have a new repertoire of sounds with which they communicate with each other, and yet others with which they communicate with other horses. For people not used to being around these animals, they always assume that we are simply anthropomorphizing. But I don’t think so: it really seems that they call to each other in a precise and predictable way after they have done their jobs well. We have often said that they are bragging: perhaps we’re not so far from the truth.

Technorati tags: dolphins communication horse communication self

Lazy Mole-Rats

No, this is not a term of abuse. But I’m not sure whether I should tell you about some research from South Africa that seems to give lazy teenagers a ready made excuse.

A new study in the journal Nature reports that laziness exists outside the bedrooms of American teenagers. The research involved the subterranean Damaraland mole-rat, a small burrowing little creature native to the Kalahari Desert. It turns out that these little fur balls have an interesting social structure, in which only one female (the Queen) and one or two males reproduce. The technical term for this is a “eusocial organization.” You will be familiar with it in ants, termites and some bees and wasps. But this kind of social setup seems to be unique amongst mammals.

Dr. Michael Scantlebury and Professor Nigel Bennett from the University of Pretoria studied the energy demands of these little critters.

In a mole-rat colony, there are industrious animals that are active all year round and perform more than 95 percent of the work, including digging barrows, looking for food and raising the offspring. Meanwhile, up to 40 percent of the colony is fat and lazy. This slothful group does virtually no work, but requires food from their comrades. The lazy moles in fact are not degenerating or living an unhealthy lifestyle.

They are waiting.

“For what??” may you ask. Well, they have been busy at something else: building up of their fat stores. It does not rain much in the Kalahari, but when it does the energy expenditure of the previously fat and lazy mole-rats skyrockets. Now digging is easier and there are new opportunities to disperse and reproduce. So the lazy mole-rats are on standby, ready to invade new territories when the opportunity arises and snaffling food during the lean times. As one of my colleagues put it: “So you’re telling me that the layabouts are actually contributing to the survival of the species?” Sad to say, that seems to be about it.

Indeed Michael Scantlebury had this to say: “Imagine the infrequent workers are like teenagers. They do nothing around the house and they eat all your food. Yet you tolerate them because they are your only way to spread your genes into the wider world.”

Come to think of it, maybe I shouldn’t blog about this study…

You may also be interested to know that Nature is now publishing a weekly podcast discussing papers published in the journal this week. You can find it here.

Technorati tags:  teenagers, adolescents, laziness

Climate Change and Your Health

When I hear the continuing arguments about climate change, I often fancy that I can in the far distance hear Nero playing his lyre while Rome burns. In March the BBC reported faster than expected warming of the Antarctic over the last 30 years. This report was based on a paper in the journal Science by a team from the British Antarctic Survey.

Gradual climate change is drawing particular attention in Europe, where the climate is exquisitely dependent on the Gulf Stream. In some places records have been kept for centuries, and there seem to have been genuine changes in a short space of time. A few years ago I was in Stockholm in the week before Christmas, and it was so warm that I was able to walk around in my shirtsleeves. That made it the warmest December in almost 800 years. People notice things like that, and governments and populations are eager to do something before the Arctic is reduced to a puddle.

Even if we are just seeing a natural climatic cycle, the consequences could be disastrous. Leaving aside the obvious matter of a rise in sea level, there is also the impact of global climate change on health. Earlier this year the BBC reported a speech by Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, to the Society of Applied Microbiology at the Royal Society in London. He pointed out that global warming, with hotter summers and more frequent and heavy rainfall and storms, would create the right conditions for an increase in food poisoning and other gastrointestinal upsets caused by microorganisms.

Global warming could also create conditions favorable for a return of malaria to the United Kingdom. Professor Hunter has published papers on this important topic before. He is no alarmist, and his work underscores the way in which our environment and we are closely interlinked, and even small climatic changes may have major effects on illness.

We could discuss this topic in a great deal of detail. Suffice to say that it is more important than ever for all of us to get into the habit of washing our hands, ensuring the cleanliness of food, and even more so of the water that we use, and that we do all that we can to build our resilience.

There is also another matter of equal importance, and that is the dwindling supply of fresh water around the world. The number of us is growing fast and our water use is growing even faster. A third of the world's population now lives in water-stressed countries, and it is expected that this will rise to two-thirds by the year 2025. The cruelty of the situation is that there is altogether more than enough water available for everyone's basic needs. The water is in the wrong places and much of it is unusable.

The United Nations recommends that people need a minimum of 50 liters of water a day for drinking, washing, cooking and sanitation. Global water consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 - more than double the rate of population growth - and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.

As important as quantity is quality - with pollution increasing in some areas, the amount of useable water declines. Each year, more than five million people die from waterborne diseases, which is 10 times the number killed in wars around the globe. Most of the victims are children.

Seventy percent of the water used worldwide is used for agriculture. Much more will be needed if we are to feed the world's growing population, which is predicted to rise from about six billion today to 8.9 billion by 2050. And consumption will further increase as more people expect Western-style lifestyles and diets. Here is a useful statistic: one kilogram of grain-fed beef needs at least 15 cubic meter of water, while a kilo of cereals needs only up to three cubic meters. Many futurists are already predicting that water will become as much of a strategic issue as oil is today, with wars being fought over the water supply.

As of today, we should all start thinking about ways in which we can reduce our own water consumption and make provision to collect and purify water ourselves.

“Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” -- Charles Dudley Warner (American Author, 1829-1900)

Technorati tags: global warming, water, Environment, Climate Change, pollution

Further Evidence for Attention Deficit Disorder

You may think it surprising that I would even raise the question about whether ADD and ADHD exist. But when I was trained in the UK, there was still a lot of skepticism about the diagnosis, and there was the constant question about whether Americans physicians, educators and psychologists were simply using a medical label for an undesirable behavior, rather than it being a separate clinical entity. There are still some people - apart from Tom Cruise(!) - who cling to the notion that ADD is not a scientifically valid illness, despite the fact that treatment can transform lives. I recently received an extraordinary article claiming that there's no scientific basis to psychiatry. Though written by a someone with a medical degree, I found at least twelve factual errors in the article, before he moved on to tell us how to use some natural methods for treating these non-existent conditions!

I have always been strongly opposed to turning natural life events and individual styles into new illnesses, something about which I shall have more to say on another occasion. But for all the people who claim that ADD does not exist, here is a video which helps prove that it does. To me it is even more convincing, because the work was done at my alma mater in London, and the research arose out of that skepticism.

Technorati tags: ADHD, ADD,

Neurogenesis 101

The great Spanish histologist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was probably the first modern scientist to say that neurons in the adult brain did not divide.  In other words, humans are born with a finite number of brain cells and an individual cannot develop/grow/replicate new cells over the course of their adult lives. This is an axiom that underlies some parts of the stem-cell debate.

There is emerging research that seems to refute this notion.  I have written a long article for my friends over at Psychiatric Resource Forum discussing the research indicating that humans may have the ability to produce new neurons in key regions of the brain throughout life, a process called neurogenesis.  I also discuss what this means for field of psychiatry.

The concept of neurogenesis also engenders hope for the fields of personal and spiritual development.  I will discuss these at a later date.  I just wanted to link to this article because it provides (along with the links) a good primer on neurogenesis that will be helpful as I write new posts.

Technorati tags: neurogenesis, personal growth, Self Improvement

Scientific Sensationalism

Earlier today I found myself in the audience for a really excellent seminar. But there was one thing that left me troubled. The presenter, who has published a great many successful books, suggested using the services of a research professional in a library to hunt down publications that could be used in books and articles. That’s great advice, but ONLY if the writer then goes and checks all the data in the articles. I have several times highlighted the problems of published research that has been reported in the media, but which turns out has fundamental flaws.

One of the jobs of reporters is to bring us information as quickly and as accurately as they can. I have known a great many people in the media, and they are almost all very smart and inquisitive. They are usually excellent at asking good questions. But nobody can be an expert on everything. I have written articles here about studies that have been reported around the world, but turned out to have great big holes in them that make data interpretation a precarious business! But it is my business to analyze papers in the biomedical field. I’m pretty good at working out the pros and cons in my own fields. But ask me to do a detailed review of a paper in higher mathematics, and I’ll quickly need someone to start administering oxygen to me!

The BBC carried a story About a report from the British Social Market Foundation, which can be downloaded here. The Foundation has warned about something that has been on concern to many of us working in science and medicine, that irresponsible reporting can undermine public confidence in science. The problem is the science rarely produces certain answers: it is painstaking, step-by-step process. There’s an old Yugoslavian proverb: “Grain by grain a loaf, stone by stone, a castle.”

And it’s quite correct: that’s how science progresses. On the other hand, the media has to put out stories quickly, and is less tolerant of the uncertainties inherent in science.

This is also why blogs like this one will, I hope, help the public understanding about science. I’m also going to continue to highlight other blogs and websites that are providing quick, accurate reports of new scientific findings. Let me know how I'm doing!

Technorati tags: science, media, blogging

Glucosamine and Chondroitin

A study has been published in last week’s New England Journal of Medicine that seems to show that there’s no advantage in taking the popular dietary supplements glucosamine and chondroitin. Indeed that’s what has been reported in the media . But notice that I said, “Seems to show,” for on closer examination there is more to this paper than it appears.

The investigators are to be congratulated for doing the study in the first place. What they did was to take a large group of 1583 patients who all had osteoarthritis of the knees, and divide them into five groups:

• A placebo group
• A group that took celecoxib (Celebrex) 200mg/day
• 1500mg of glucosamine/day
• 1200mg of chondroitin/day
• A combination of 1500mg of glucosamine/day and 1200mg of chondroitin/day

The study lasted 24 weeks, and the main outcome measure was pain in the knees. The study showed that although patients on Celebrex did very well compared with the placebo group, those on glucosamine and chondroitin did not do better than placebo, although the combination was better than using either supplement alone. But one of the odd things was that people with moderate to severe pain WERE helped by the combination, and in fact the combination out-performed Celebrex!

Not only does the combination seem to help people with the biggest problems with pain, but also there are some other important points:

1. The worse someone is, the bigger the room for improvement. If someone only has mild pain, you need a lot more patients to find a statistically significant improvement.

2. As in most studies, multiple measurements were done, and Celebrex was no better than placebo in 12 out of 14 of them. So if the “active comparison” failed on multiple measures, we need to be very cautious about how we interpret the study.

3. The placebo response rate in the study was 60%, while the average is 30-35%. This is a huge difference. This may be because the patients knew that they had a four in five chance of getting a treatment that might help them, so they went into the study with high expectations.

4. This is only one study, concerning one type of joint problem. There are more than 30 others that have in general been even more positive then the findings in the moderate to sever group, including a very long-term study that showed that over an eight-year period, the combination dropped the rate of knee replacement by almost 75%. It is crucially important to examine the results of any study in the context of everything else that has been known and discovered. Every type of study has to be checked, and verified.

5. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and is the first of two parts, with a second study of the impact of the treatments on X-rays of the knees still pending.

6. None of the groups had many side effects, but it is worth remembering that medicines of the Celebrex type are under intense scrutiny because of the possible association with cardiovascular disease.

7. Many specialists use anti-inflammatory medicines together with glucosamine/chondroitin, at least at the beginning of a course of treatment. And that makes good sense.

8. What about the dosing of the supplements? Although those are the doses used by most people, they may not always be enough. In patients who weigh more than 200 pounds, many experts recommend 2000mg of glucosamine and 1600mg of chondroitin. It is also wise to take the supplement in divided doses with food. (I have sometimes also found it very useful to add Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM), 1000mg/day to the glucosamine and chondroitin, though there is little research to support it.)

None of these treatments can be given to pregnant women or nursing mothers.

One other small caveat, if you are having surgery make sure that you tell you surgeon if you are taking these supplements. Chondroitin has minor anticoagulant activity , and so may glucosamine.

And remember that the maintenance of joint health is not just a matter of taking some supplements. It is a judicious mixture of taking the right medication when needed, together with supplements, a healthy diet containing some omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants, exercise, management of posture, particularly of the spine, and weight management. To say nothing of ensuring that joint problems are not being compounded by psychological and relationship problems, and disturbances in the subtle systems of the body.

Technorati tags: glucosamine, chondroitin, knee pain, arthritis

The Naked Ape

When I am looking for new articles to analyze for you, gentle reader, I am very fortunate that Carol Kirshner, my web mistress (is that the politically correct term??), is also a researcher, and she does a great job of finding new items that are relevant to our basic themes. But sometimes I wonder if she is kidding me, as happened when she pulled up an article with the enticing title: “All the better to see you blush, my dear...”

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology just published a study in the Journal Biology Letters in which years of painstaking neurophysiological research lead them to speculate that the reason that primates evolved complex color vision was not, as previously thought, so that they could find the most tasty ripe fruit, but so that they could detect a blush on someone else’s face or, ahem, their posterior.

The main color sensing cells in the retina are the rods and cones, and it turns out that the cones are exquisitely sensitive to skin tones. The trouble with the old theory about color vision and fruit is that there has never been much evidence for it, and as someone who lives with horses, I know that they have some quite sophisticated color vision, yet are more than happy to munch away on grass.

This new study shows that primates have three-color vision, and the system seems extremely well adapted to pick up colors that are prevalent in the skin, in particular the amount of oxygenated hemoglobin in the blood. This three-color recognition system can signal a primate if a potential partner might be having a rush of emotion in anticipation of mating. It might also be the mechanism for telling if an enemy’s blood has drained out his face because of fear. And rosy cheeks, like smooth skin, are subconscious signs of health and vitality in a potential mate.

As the principle investigator - Mark Changizi - points out; old-world primates are all unique in that they have bare faces and bare posteriors. After all, there’s not much point in being able to see miniscule changes in skin color if the key areas are all covered up. So there seems to have been some co-evolution of the ability to see color modulations in the skin and the loss of fur.

Could this be the real reason for humans being the “Naked Ape?”

And I think that I shall leave it for you to consider all the implications of hiding a signaling system that has evolved over millions of years…

Technorati tags: evolution, Science,

More on Scientific Misconduct

Today there have been reports from Reuters and the BBC that South Korean prosecutors have started questioning the disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk. The reason for their interest is that his fraudulent research was largely funded by public money. Thus he could be accused of misusing government funds.

The shock waves from this sordid scandal are still spreading.

A report  has just been published by a panel at the University of Pittsburgh that has cleared Gerald Schatten, director of its department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences, of any scientific misconduct in his collaboration with Hwang Woo-suk. However, the University panel decided that although he was not involved in the falsification of data, he should have taken greater steps to ensure that the data were correct. The panel decided that Dr. Schatten was guilty not of research misconduct, but of “research misbehavior.”

Five years ago a former colleague of mine who has had a distinguished scientific career, became mired in scandal. Not because of something that he had done wrong, but because of something that he failed to do right, some ten years earlier. A young researcher in his department was cooking up research data, and even when the first suspicions were brought to his attention, for some reason he failed to check it out.

It is the responsibility of everyone involved in a research project to ensure that everything is correct. After that is the responsibility of reviewers to re-check everything. We owe that to patients, their families, and the public who pays for this research.

I just hope that one day Dr. Hwang will tell everyone why he felt that it was okay to betray the trust of millions of people around the world.

Addendum:  It is a little late, but I recently found a interesting podcast done on Feb 8, 2006 by the good people over at Scientific American that discusses the Stem Cell/Korean debacle.  I'm linking it here in case you want to have a listen. 

Technorati tags: scientific misconduct, Hwang Woo-suk, research