Seth's Blog

I’ve said it before but it is worth repeating: Science and job don’t mix very well. Career demands can make it hard to tell the truth as you see it. A scientist named Norman Rogers put it like this in relation to global warming:

Mainstream climate scientists are asking for trouble if they become skeptics [about man-made global warming]. They may lose their jobs, their papers may not be published and they may lose their grants. Thatʼs why most skeptics are older or retired or from outside of the mainstream – they are less vulnerable to retaliation.

He could have added that global-warming skeptics will have difficulty recruiting others, such as graduate students, to work with them and will face disdain from their colleagues.

I saw this in relation to the work of Ranjit Chandra. At Berkeley, when I told other professors about my doubts, one of them replied: Talk to X. He’s had doubts about Chandra for 30 years. I spoke to X. This was correct. I didn’t ask X why he’d never said anything publicly about it because the reason was obvious: He feared retaliation.

In August, at a Quantified Self meeting in San Jose, I told how butter apparently improved my brain function. When I started eating a half-stick of butter every day, I suddenly got faster at arithmetic. During the question period, Greg Biggers of genomera.com proposed a study to see if what I’d found was true for other people.

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My friends know I like examples. My mother has complained I like them too much. Here, via Jonathan Schwarz, is a good example of why I like examples. From a long article by Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times:

I’m the first to admit that news organizations, including this one, sometimes get things wrong. We can be overly credulous (as in some of the prewar reporting about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction) or overly cynical about official claims and motives.

Emphasis added. The lack of an example of being “overly cynical about official claims and motives” speaks volumes about the New York Times’ relationship to those in power.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) — basically, recurrent pain during digestion — is common. A new study by Italian pediatricians asked if a probiotic would help. They randomized children into two groups: active and placebo. Children in the active group were given pills with a lot of lactobacillus bacteria, which they took twice per day. The placebo was made by the same manufacturer, so it looked identical. During the study, the researchers did not know who was in each group.

There was a big difference between the groups, which took about four weeks to emerge. The active group had painful episodes less than half as often as the placebo group, and the episodes they did have were less painful.

Overall this supports my broad point that we need to eat plenty of fermented foods to be healthy. That’s not what the authors of the study concluded. They concluded:

Demonstration of the efficacy of a given probiotic for a specific therapeutic target will help clinicians choose which probiotic to use when dealing with a specific disease. We are entering the era of targeted probiotic use.

Which reveals a bad case of gatekeeper syndrome. I wouldn’t expect them to say their results support the idea that everyone should eat fermented foods — that’s an “alternative” (and therefore “crazy”) idea. But they could have said their results imply that kids with IBS should eat yogurt.

The first Quantified Self conference will be held in San Jose May 28-29! Robin Barooah and I plan to lead a break-out session about self-experimentation.