Go ahead, call me a quack

By: | January 29, 2018

I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works.

My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot reader with his own small business for clients who have questions about love, money, and other volatile, mysterious indulgences. For him, reading people’s cards is different from stage magic. In one he wows the audience with gentlemanly distraction, and in the other, he believes he is accessing an invisible realm of order and prediction where each card holds symbolic information relevant to the viewer’s life.

Besides reading cards, Angus might have you reach into a bag to dig out a rune stone marked with one of 25 symbols, or colored marbles for the I Ching, a Chinese divination technique dating back 3,000 years.

“Sometimes you need the extra umph of a miracle to listen to what is being said,” Angus tells me.

Angus has a scientific mind. He’s a land surveyor by trade and makes the bulk of his living writing papers for the infrastructure industry, studying and writing about materials and engineering techniques for bridges, manhole covers, sewer drains, and skyscrapers around the world. He reads fortunes on the side.

Does he honestly think it’s real?

“I regularly experience synchronicities or intuitive predictions at a rate that argues against simple chance,” Angus says. “It becomes fatuous to insist there is not a spiritual component.” Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | January 27, 2018

loose-talk-billboardJanuary 22-26, 2018

Emma has sage advice for ditching your phone, which may be one of many things that’s making you miserable. Give your phone to your children and ask them to hide it. A fun game for the whole family! Tell them they can’t tell you where it is, even if you start to cry or begin to murmur the word “Mueller” over and over in a weird whispery voice.

Michelle interviews author Juli Berwald about her new book, Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone. “Jellyfish are also an amazing muse, because they live in this fascinating space between angelic and demonic. They’re gorgeous, and yet some of them are lethal. “

Erik revisits a post about one of his favorite placebo experiments, the one by Fields and Levine.  They get mentioned so much in the small world of placebo research that I started to think of them as some kind of mythical creature – the Fieldsnlevine. Just a little smaller than the Watsonncrick. It never occurred to me that they might be real people who put their pants on every day and occasionally pick up phones.

Cassie reduxes a post about a woman with chronic myelogenous leukemia who struggles to afford the drug that helps her survive. I could end the story here. . , A tale about a new drug fixing a dread disease makes for a snappy headline. The story is optimistic. It’s clear cut. But Elliott’s story doesn’t end with a prescription. That’s where it begins.

Rebecca ends the week in the company of curious tourists visiting old nuclear relics—but, she says, nuclear weapons aren’t retro anymore. Inside this huge wall of rods, neutrons split apart atoms in a controlled chain reaction, ultimately producing the fuel that powered the bomb we dropped on Nagasaki. One woman described it as looking like a giant wine rack.

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Image: A billboard at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. US Department of Energy archives

 

 

Pilgrims At the Factory That Could Destroy the World

By: | January 26, 2018

women-workers-walking

On the first Monday of the month, at 11 a.m. sharp, my community fires up the tornado sirens. Their wailing echoes down the streets, screams among the trees, bounces off the granite side of the church on the corner, and annoys the hell out of my dog. After about 45 seconds — that is a long time, considering how loud it is — a recorded voice starts speaking.

This. Has. Been. A. Test.

The person who made the recording spoke at a glacial pace, ensuring the words are spaced far enough apart to accommodate two housetop reverbs. I’ve counted.

Continue reading →

Redux: A Disease, A Miracle Drug, and a Tale of Uncertain Survival

By: | January 25, 2018

Five years ago I wrote a post about Pat Elliott, a woman with chronic leukemia. She was trying to figure out how to pay for her medication. At the time, Gleevec cost about $5,000 a month. A generic version of Gleevec went on the market in 2016, but it still costs more than $4,000 a month. In Canada, however, a month’s supply of generic Gleevec costs less than $800 a month. President Trump has accused the pharmaceutical industry of “getting away with murder.” But yesterday the Senate confirmed Alex Azar, Trump’s pick to run Health and Human Services. Azar served as president of Eli Lilly USA. The price of their insulin tripled under his tenure. 

Phoenix is scorching in the summer, and Pat Elliott had been standing for hours. So she wasn’t alarmed one August day in 2009 to find her feet swollen. “It must be the weather,” Elliott thought. But they also ached. The pain was horrendous. So she called her doctor, and he told her to come in. Reluctantly she went.

Several blood tests and a bone marrow biopsy later, Elliott learned she had a type of blood cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Her white cell count was sky high, her spleen was swollen, and her kidneys were failing.

All cancer is the result of genetic abnormalities. In the case of CML, the problem is a genetic swap. The tip of chromosome 22 breaks off and attaches itself to chromosome 9, and a chunk of 9 fuses with 22. This swap results in the formation of a new gene, a chimera called BCR-ABL. The gene codes for an enzyme that drives cells to incessantly divide.

Two decades ago, the best treatment for CML was a bone marrow transplant, a dangerous procedure with only limited success. Back then just 30% of patients diagnosed with CML could expect to live five years. In 2001, however, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug, Gleevec. The medicine disables the defective Bcr-Abl enzyme, halting the rampant cell division. Today, the five-year survival of CML patients taking Gleevec is 89%.

In his masterful cancer tome Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee recalls seeing the astounding effects of Gleevec for the first time: When he looked at the patient’s blood smear, he could find no evidence of the immature blast cells that characterize the disease. The cells were completely normal. “It was hard to reconcile this field of blood cells in front of my eyes with the diagnosis; not a single leukemic blast was to be seen,” he writes. “If this man had CML, he was in a remission so deep that the disease had virtually vanished from sight.” Continue reading →

Redux: The Really Big, Astounding Experiment That Changed Everything But Kinda Happened By Accident

By: | January 24, 2018

I published this story at the beginning of 2017, ostensibly as a way to promote my book. But I keep coming back to read it because the study is just so astounding. It’s one of those wonderful moments in science where the tiniest tweak unlocks a whole new world. If you read science magazines – and certainly if you read this blog – you know by now that lots of people are talking about placebos these days. They are real, they are scientifically important, they are distracting, they are good, they have something to do with chakras, they are bad, they are the next big thing, they are a bunch of BS.

In my recent book, Suggestible You, I spend a fair amount of time talking about them and meeting with the luminaries of an emerging field within psychology and neuroscience that focuses almost totally on placebos and the expectations that create them. And yes, they are all of those things and more.

Over the past five (oh, who am I kidding – ten) years working on this project, I’ve tried to draw together a number of themes that all the scientists studying placebos have in common – belief, expectation, pain relief, and the power of subconscious cues. But there’s one thing that ties almost all the modern furor over placebos that I totally missed: Fields and Levine.

Howard Fields and Jon Levine were a couple scientists who, back in the 1970s, showed that the placebo effect for pain was triggered by a flood of internal opioids, similar to the endorphins that give us a runners high, among many other pleasurable experiences.

Almost every scientist I talked to who studies placebos mentioned their seminal 1978 paper. They get mentioned so much in the small world of placebo research that I started to think of them as some kind of mythical creature – the Fieldsnlevine. Just a little smaller than the Watsonncrick. It never occurred to me that they might be real people who put their pants on every day and occasionally pick up phones. Continue reading →

Juli Berwald on the Art of Growing a Backbone

By: | January 23, 2018

The lovely and absorbing new book Spineless: The Science of Jellyfish and the Art of Growing a Backbone, began when author Juli Berwald, a marine scientist turned technical writer, was factchecking an article about ocean acidification for National Geographic. She was asked to confirm a seemingly simple claim, made in a graphic, that jellyfish would be among the “winners” in an acidifying ocean. Berwald found herself in a sea of intriguing unknowns, and she eventually embarked on a years-long jellyfish odyssey that took her to Japan, Israel, and elsewhere.

This past weekend, her book tour brought her to Powells Books in Portland, Oregon, where we had a chance to talk about what she’s learned about jellyfish—and how much remains unknown. Continue reading →

Phone Hell

By: | January 22, 2018

Today marks the publication of yet another study telling us that our screens are making us miserable. Psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University looked at survey results from more than a million U.S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders and found that those who spent more than an hour a day gazing into the rectangular abyss were unhappier and that gloom levels were correlated with screen time. The study also reports that teenagers are more miserable than they were in 2012 when apparently fewer of them had smartphones.

Now, I’d just like to point out some possible additional variables here. In 2012 Barack Obama won the presidency for the second time and as Atlantic journalist Molly Ball wrote, “his embrace of liberal stances on social issues, and the simultaneous victories for causes like same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization seemed to herald the dawn of a new, more liberal America.” So yeah…it might be possible that it isn’t the screen that is making us miserable, but what we see through it. Trump. Climate change. Men being horrible. Nazis. Rising inequality. Trump. Continue reading →