Seth's Blog

• fermented shark, an Icelandic delicacy
• Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides (may be gated). Found a correlation between ADHD scores and pesticide exposure. “The present study adds to the accumulating evidence linking higher levels of pesticide exposure to adverse developmental outcomes.”
• Does God see everything? (see comments). “The pent-up pain and frustration of current and former ABC News employees has finally boiled over.” Follow-up.

In 2007 I got an email from Preston Estep, a gerontologist and former Chief Scientific Officer of Longenity, Inc., offering me a place in an informal trial of the benefits of resveratrol that he was organizing. Recently I wrote him to find out what happened. Here’s his reply:

We got a few people to volunteer but not enough for an organized trial to be worth the effort, partly because initial reported benefits evaporated under scrutiny and we couldn’t decide what variables/bio-markers to test. There are a couple of efforts that have taken off since then to try to collect data on therapeutic modalities, including resveratrol. The largest-scale effort I know of is CureTogether but it isn’t very useful because the vast majority of reports appear to be subjective and unreliable (e.g. “I feel that resveratrol has slowed my aging …” and so forth). Such a web-based approach would be much more useful if objective tests like those you have done could be implemented but I’m skeptical you could get many people to produce and report data in an unbiased fashion. I have found that the desire to believe whatever you’re doing is good is incredibly strong and can be rationalized ad infinitum.

Interestingly, it looks like professional scientists and even big pharma might have gotten caught up in that mindset. Many of the reported benefits of resveratrol have been controversial from the beginning and recent reports suggest that neither scientists nor pharma can reproduce key results. Matt Kaeberlen, one of the first discoverers that sirtuin overexpression extends lifespan and co-founder of a biotech company with me in the early 2000s, returned to academia and has raised some red flags about the resveratrol research. He showed that the key assay used to discover resveratrol in a drug screen seems to depend on a biochemical artifact. Sirtris, a biotech company specializing in sirtuin research and that was bought by Glaxo for $720M, developed some resveratrol analogs that were reported to have multiple benefits, including control of type 2 diabetes. But recently Pfizer and Amgen have published studies saying they cannot reproduce Sirtris’s results. You can read many reports of this mess on the web but here are good, recent accounts of the controversy:

http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2010/05/17/cambridge_biotechs_work_on_resveratrol_cuts_to_basics_of_biology/
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v28/n3/full/nbt0310-185.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18396-stay-young-on-red-wine-drugs-think-again.html
http://seekingalpha.com/article/182123-what-did-glaxosmithkline-get-in-return-for-buying-sirtris
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/03/09/a_gsksirtris_wrapup.php

If Adam Wheeler, a former Harvard student, hadn’t applied for a Rhodes Fellowship, it appears he would have gotten away with four years of academic dishonesty. While at Harvard, he won several prizes. On his Rhodes application, he listed “numerous books he had co-authored, lectures he had given, and courses he had taught”. “Numerous books”? Yet this is how he was caught:

A Harvard professor first became suspicious of Wheeler while reviewing his application for the Rhodes scholarship. He discovered that Wheeler had plagiarized his piece almost completely from the work of another professor.

His “piece”? What’s that? When you apply for a Rhodes fellowship you don’t submit an academic article as part of your application. Why didn’t the reviewer check if the “numerous books” that a college senior claimed to have written actually existed? What’s next, a sixth-grader says she’s won a Nobel Prize and a Harvard prof doesn’t notice a problem?

Like Wheeler, Ranjit Chandra was caught toward the very end of his academic career. My impression with Chandra is that, as he repeatedly escaped detection, the falsifications became more extreme.

A recent study in Finland found that cheese with added lactic acid bacteria (sold commercially) stimulated the immune systems of elderly subjects. Earlier studies had found similar effects when the bacteria were put in milk or yogurt. To me, the most interesting result was that the cheese alone (Gouda, a fermented cheese) had no detectable effect. I take that to mean that some fermented foods contain too little bacteria to make a difference. I’m going to have to stop using my umami hypothesis as an excuse to eat cheese — although cheese may also be good for the fat it contains.

Thanks to Anne Weiss.

Gary Wolf and I have a post on Boing Boing today about how Dennis Mangan cured his mom’s Restless Legs Syndrome. I mentioned this accomplishment earlier. Mangan’s story is an example of what I call personal science — doing science yourself about something you care about.

More One comment on Boing Boing is that niacin is also known as Vitamin B3 and if we searched “restless legs syndrome AND Vitamin B3″ we’d get lots of hits. I tried that search and got zero hits.