Seth's Blog

At UC Berkeley several years ago, I learned about an introductory epidemiology class. I knew the professor. I phoned him. “Are you going to discuss factors that make the immune system work better or worse?” I asked. “No,” he said. I wasn’t surprised. In my experience, epidemiologists completely ignore this question. As if the immune system had never been discovered. It sounds absurd, but there it is.

Epidemiologists aren’t the only ones. All well-publicized attempts to “battle” or “combat” or “defeat” or “beat” viruses, such as cold or flu viruses, neglect this possibility, in my experience. Whole books on the subject do not mention the immune system. The latest example of the blindness is an article by Michael Specter at the New Yorker website about fear caused by discovery of how to make a bird flu virus spread more easily. Maybe the knowledge could be used by terrorists. Specter writes as if the immune system doesn’t exist. He doesn’t mention it and ignores the possibility of defending against new viruses by improving immune function. For example, he writes:

Instead of focussing so heavily on human terrorists, we ought to take this opportunity to defeat a natural pathogen—one we can now recognize and manipulate with all the sophistication of molecular biology.

There are three conditions necessary for a flu outbreak to become a deadly pandemic, like the one in in 1918 that killed between fifty and a hundred million people. Those conditions rarely converge. First, a new virus—one that has never before infected humans and to which nobody would have protective antibodies—must emerge from the animal reservoirs where they originate. That virus has to make people sick. (The vast majority do not.) Finally, it must be able to spread rapidly and efficiently—through a cough, a handshake, or a kiss.

Thorstein Veblen might have gloated that this 2011 article — about the uselessness of law schools and legal scholarship — so thoroughly supports what he wrote in a book published in 1899 (see the last chapter of The Theory of the Leisure Class). Why are law schools useless? Because law professors feel compelled to imitate the rest of academia, which glorifies uselessness:

“Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of the Cornell University Law School, a professor who has written about landing a law school teaching job. “People who teach at law school are part of a profession and part of a university. So we’re always worried that other parts of the academy are going to look down on us and say: ‘You’re just a trade school, like those schools that advertise on late-night TV. You don’t write dissertations. You don’t write articles that nobody reads.’ And the response of law school professors is to say: ‘That’s not true. We do all of that. We’re scholars [i.e., useless], just like you.’ ”

Yeah. As I’ve said, there’s a reason for the term ivory tower. And seemingly useless research has value. Glorifying useless research has the useful result of diversifying research, causing a wider range of research directions to be explored. Many of my highly-useful self-experimental findings started or received a big boost from apparently useless research.

The pendulum can swing too far, however, and it has. A large fraction of health researchers, especially medical school researchers, have spent their entire careers refusing to admit, at least in public, the uselessness of what they do. Biology professors have some justification for useless research; medical school professors have none, especially given all the public money they get. Like law professors, they prefer prestige and conformity. The rest of us pay an enormous price for their self-satisfaction (“I’m scientific!” they tell themselves) and peace of mind. The price we pay is stagnation in the understanding of health. Like clockwork, every year the Nobel Prize in Medicine is given to research that has done nothing or very close to nothing to improve our health. And every year, like clockwork, science journalists (all of them!) fail to notice this. If someone can write the article I just quoted about law schools, why can’t even one science journalist write the same thing about medical schools — where it matters far more? What’s their excuse?

• Super-old Ashkenazi Jews. Did they live to be more than a hundred “in spite of” their “bad habits” (eating steak & pork chops, smoking, refusal of Lipitor) or because of those habits? Small amounts of smoking could easily be beneficial due to (or illustrating) hormesis.
• Does Hollywood have a sense of humor? In the new movie about  noted anti-Communist J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover’s love interest is played by Armie Hammer, grandson of Armand Hammer, who worked for the Soviet Union as a money launderer. Edward Jay Epstein writes about Hammer and the Soviet Union in this excellent Kindle book.
• An advantage of ebooks, not yet realized, is easy updates. When the book is improved — for example, mistakes fixed — you get a new copy. In an even better Kindle book, Epstein writes about the diamond industry. The vast difference between the purchase price of a diamond and its resale value may be the advertising industry’s greatest achievement. Recent events caused Epstein to add a new chapter. The book was easy for Epstein to update but unfortunately earlier purchasers did not get the new version.
• Michel Cabanac, who did some of the research behind the Shangri-La Diet, has written a book about his life’s work: how we self-regulate via pleasure. During a meal, for example, exactly the same food becomes less pleasant. When it becomes unpleasant, we stop eating. When we are hot, cold water is more pleasant than when we are cold. The secret to weight loss, Cabanac realized, is making exactly the same food less pleasant — an insight few weight-loss writers understand.

• In 1910, Abraham Flexnor anticipated my complaint that modern health care is sick profiteering. “The overwhelming importance of preventive medicine.” Flexnor, who was not a medical doctor, had a big effect on American medical schools.
• Vitamin E supplements linked to prostate cancer.
• A website of home remedies. Apple cider vinegar = poor man’s kombucha.
• You mean a messy room doesn’t make people aggressive?  Dutch academic fraud.

Thanks to Brent Pottenger, Phil Alexander, dearime, and Casey Manion.

• Interview with me on Jimmy Moore’s Livin’ La Vida Locarb
• This article about natto helped its author win a prize for best newspaper food column
• great QS talk about self-measurement by John Sumser. “It all started when I quit smoking. Bad idea. Since I quit smoking in 2004, every quarter for 7 years it has rained shit on me.”
• In a QS talk, I compare the Quantified Self movement and the paleo movement.
• Chinese high-school students in America: Not what was promised. Lack of “rigor” has benefits, as I have blogged: “Dismayed by the school’s [poor] college placement record, Chen considered transferring. Instead, he began to enjoy himself. Because his courses were undemanding, he had time for friends and outside interests. He took four Advanced Placement tests on his own.“I’ve developed my personality a lot,” Chen said. “Everything turned out for the best.””
• If you read The China Study by T. Colin Campbell, a pro-vegetarian book, you may remember the big role played by some casein experiments with rats. Rats that ate a low-casein (= low animal-protein) diet were supposedly in better health than rats that ate a high-casein (= high animal-protein) diet. In this article Chris Masterjohn shows how misleading that was. “One thing is certain: low-protein diets depressed normal growth, increased the susceptibility to many toxins, killed toxin-exposed animals earlier, induced fatty liver, and increased the development of pre-cancerous lesions when fed during the initiation period of chemical carcinogenesis.”

Thanks to Janet Chang.