Mike Williams, in Bioworld, on the popping of the genome bubble.
[The idea was that once] the new targets associated with a disease… were identified, it would be relatively easy to find active compounds and turn them into drugs … And voila – the pharma and biotech industries would be ever more productive… [But] it appears likely that much of the complexity of the human species is… in cellular events that lie beyond the genome, in the more complex epigenetic world… [T]he genome is now widely viewed as the ‘preloaded software’ of the cell…
[S]ome of the root causes of [pharma’s] productivity problems are being increasingly well-understood by industry outsiders, resulting in a perception that some of the sound bites from the Emperors running biopharma R&D reflect an absence of clothing. Optimistic declarations that a ‘golden age’ of drug discovery is with us have little basis in reality as the industry continues to consolidate and only contribute further to the ‘toxic mix of science of economics’ currently reflective of ‘an industry ripe for disruption.’
You probably already know that, in response to an Iranian cleric’s assertion that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes, Jennifer McCreight, a Purdue University student, organized tens of thousands of women yesterday to bare or semi-bare their breasts at the same exact moment to see what would happen.
The Boobquake Facebook page announces the results.
Nada.
Still…
Obviously this study had its flaws. We didn’t have a large sample size, and we didn’t have a control planet where women were only wearing burkas. We didn’t have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what’s the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?). Maybe women did dress immodestly, but we didn’t lead men astray enough. [The cleric says there’s a causal connection between inflamed men and plate tectonics.] Maybe God really was pissed, but he couldn’t increase earthquakes for us because that would provide proof for his existence (or maybe it’s his existence that’s the problem).
A psychiatrist writes a letter to the Psychiatric Times about the ongoing preparation of the latest edition of the DSM-V, the humongous – and always getting more humongous – reference book on which insurance company payment for mental illness treatment is based:
[T]here are a bunch of pre-conditions for DSM revision, which include among others, that the new version must not be a radical departure, and must be consistent and compatible with the existing DSM, thus guaranteeing continuity and preventing disruptions in the diagnosis and treatment of existing patients, assuring continuity in education and training for residents in psychiatry and existing practitioners, and in managed care and insurance coverage, and Treatment Guidelines and in psychiatric record-keeping, as well as research, unless we start labeling our diagnoses with vintage-like DSM numbers, like we label wines.
It is clear from the above pre-condition of continuity that there will be no significant departure from the established DSM path, and we can scratch the answer to our query, ie, “One psychiatrist” no matter how much he or she really wants to change the DSM [will be able to do so].
However, although they may consider introducing criteria to add dimensionality to designate severity, or the course of an illness, or degrees of impairment of symptoms, etc, for field-testing in accordance with the already existing studies on DSM defects, there will be no move in the direction of incorporating a brain-based, neurophysiologic paradigm, although there is a growing consensus which indicates that is the way to the future of psychiatric diagnosis. We are still impeded by our attachment to the scientific studies of the past. We appear to be rowing into the science of the future backwards, while anchored to the science of the past.
Background here.
Complete list of this year’s Ig Nobels, from BBC News:
Veterinary medicine: Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson of Newcastle University, UK, for showing that cows with names give more milk than cows that are nameless.
Peace: Stephan Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael Thali and Beat Kneubuehl of the University of Bern, Switzerland, for determining whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle.
Biology: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant pandas.
Medicine: Donald L Unger of Thousand Oaks, California, US, for investigating a possible cause of arthritis of the fingers, by diligently cracking the knuckles of his left hand but not his right hand every day for more than 60 years.
Economics: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa (and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy).
Physics: Katherine K Whitcome of the University of Cincinnati, Daniel E Lieberman of Harvard University and Liza J. Shapiro of the University of Texas, all in the US, for analytically determining why pregnant women do not tip over.
Chemistry: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from tequila.
Literature: Ireland’s police service for writing and presenting more than 50 traffic tickets to the most frequent driving offender in the country – Prawo Jazdy – whose name in Polish means “Driving Licence”.
Public Health: Elena N Bodnar, Raphael C Lee, and Sandra Marijan of Chicago, US, for inventing a bra that can be quickly converted into a pair of gas masks – one for the wearer and one to be given to a needy bystander.
Mathematics: Gideon Gono, governor of Zimbabwe’s Reserve Bank, for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers by having his bank print notes with denominations ranging from one cent to one hundred trillion dollars.
From a review of Prescriptions for the Mind: A Critical View of Contemporary Psychiatry, by Joel Paris:
Psychiatry’s handbook of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM ), is an obvious locus for skepticism. On the one hand, given the confusion about terminology before 1980, the DSM-III and DSM-IV at least provide a common language so that psychiatrists can better communicate with each other and with insurance companies. On the other hand, diagnostic categories are so “irredeemably fuzzy” and broadly defined that psychiatrists end up confusing “the human condition” with pathology. Consequently, prevalence rates have at times risen absurdly. Here is Paris at his best: “Perhaps the main reason for the large number of diagnoses in psychiatry is that we do not understand any of them.”
As psychiatrists gather to enlarge the profession’s enormous diagnostic manual (bitterness, shyness, apathy, being online too much, having been traumatized in some way or other — all of these, and many more, are about to be billable), let’s consider once again the work of Leszek Kolakowski, the Polish philosopher who died a few days ago.
In a 1967 essay, “The Psychoanalytic Theory of Culture,” Kolakowski attacks what I’ll call psych-medicine (this term will cover the complex meld of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychotherapy).
Psych-medicine teaches, writes Kolakowski, that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” It “aims first and foremost at securing spiritual comfort, conditions of peace and forbearance, at protection from traumatic experiences, and, in particular, at removing … stresses.” The result, for the education of children, he continues, is disastrous: “An education thus planned leads them to expect that others will endlessly satisfy all their whims, thus exposing them to a considerably greater amount of frustration, trauma, and suffering in later life. [Psych-medicine] is effective, if one wants to deprive people of their sense of the responsibility for thinking about their own lives; it always recommends the path of least resistance, and it teaches one to be afraid of risk, chance, and competition. [Society] is [thus] exposed to the growing pressure of people who preserve the characteristics of capricious pre-school children – cowardly, selfish, and irresponsible.”
Kolakowski concludes: “A doctrine which teaches that we cannot truly be subjects is… discouraging – it teaches acquiescence in treating oneself and others as objects. And such acquiescence is what is helping to put civilization to sleep.”
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Why is the man of the American hour, maybe the man of the American century — to get at this point another way — Michael Jackson, a person who spent years scoring hospital-strength opioids so he didn’t have to exist?
Talk about putting civilization to sleep…
Half in love with easeful death?
The American dream is no longer to be Fuck-You Rich.
The dream is I’m-Dead-and-You’re-Not Rich.
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The ever-ramifying Diagnostic Manual is the bound meta-narrative of all the reasons we opiated ourselves.
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“I am only afraid,” wrote Goethe, “that the world will [eventually turn] into one huge hospital where everyone is everybody else’s humane nurse.”
Not too sure, though, about the humane. This blog — and many other blogs — has followed the shocking inhumanity of psychiatrists who routinely give powerful drugs to three-year-olds.
“[G]iving major tranquilizers to children,” writes David Healy, “is little different from giving children cancer chemotherapy when they have a cold.”
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Anyway, can’t say Kolakowski didn’t warn us. Yet so sickening and out of our control is the situation that our only revenge is art, as Terrence Rafferty noted recently in the New York Times.
Decades ago, he points out, in talking about the portrayal of psych-medicine people in film (he could have added novels, like the postmodern classic Crying of Lot 49, whose character Dr Hilarius is a violently demented psychiatrist), psych-med people
were accorded a certain respect, as most doctors were: they were expected to perform miracles, and their patients were duly grateful. Not any more. Hollywood’s familiarity with psychiatrists — and our filmmakers are no strangers to the couch — has bred something more like contempt, to the point where a mumbling, depressive wreck like the hero of [the new film] “Shrink” seems more the norm than the exception.
Now the psychiatrists themselves — the mumbling depressive wreck is a wildly successful Los Angeles psychiatrist — number among the dead. Having helped put civilization to sleep, they’re self-sedating.
[The film’s psychiatrist is] pretty much permanently stoned on pot (sometimes enhanced with substantial quantities of alcohol). The blank stare he trains on his patients is not a therapeutic technique, a pose of studied indifference — it’s actual indifference. [His patients consider him] an eccentric genius, using his own emotional dishevelment and brazen boredom as a radical, innovative approach to the treatment of their neuroses.
Rafferty wonders about the many contemptuous representations of the contemporary psychiatrist.
… It’s tempting to speculate, at times, on filmmakers’ motives for treating psychiatrists so rudely, to suspect that there might be just the hint of a desire for revenge on the perpetrators of their own failed, ruinously expensive adventures in self-knowledge.
And again:
… You have to wonder, really, why psychiatrists come in for so much abuse in the movies these days. Is it merely a kind of natural resentment of people who presume to understand us?
This is Kolakowski’s point, isn’t it? Psych-medicine convinces us that “the individual is organically incapable of self-understanding and can achieve it only with the aid of an analyst.” Having created this dependency, having assured us that we cannot live an autonomous examined life, the profession both shows itself actually incapable of understanding us, and at the same time capable of drugging us out of the distress our epistemological misery prompts. Those drugs are where the money is. Andrew Scull quotes Healy:
With an ever-expanding array of problems being medicalized and added to psychiatry’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, “diseases have all but become commodities and are as subject to fashions as other commodities, with the main determinant of the fashion cycle being the patent life of a drug”.
The shrink at the center of “Shrink” is really a kind of model for us, for his patients. Fuck the adventure of insight. It’ll make you sad and anxious, like Woody Allen. Just calm yourself.
… shares the results of his study on how to motivate employees to work hard.
First, a description of his method:
The study involved giving a group of students small gifts when they came to a training session, and playing music during breaks to perk up their moods. A second group of workers, a control group run for comparison purposes, received their gifts at the end of the day and heard no music.
And now the results:
What he found was that people who were naturally upbeat and positive reacted positively to the gifts and music, and their moods became more positive. However, those who were not naturally positive actually reacted negatively to the gifts and music. Brown suspects this is because the less positive individuals are skeptical and question the motives of the experimenter.
There are thus two kinds of employees:
1.) Morons. Morons tiptap along to whatever (What did the trainer choose? Say he chose this, and some subjects began screaming. This indicates their lack of natural positiveness.). This group will also droolingly accept a keychain.
2.) Others. Others display skepticism and a tendency to analyze their surroundings. These traits point to their lack of natural positiveness.
Conclusion: Non-natural positives would have to be, I guess, subjected to more aggressive motivational procedures than natural positives. They cannot even be reached until their inclination toward critical thought has been broken down.
… said my aunt, “became more and more preoccupied with Big Bang-type questions as he got older. Why is there something? What is nothing? A colleague of his at NIH was a religious Jew, and your father respected this man, and they had long conversations about belief…”
For most of his life, I guess my father had, along with his faith in science, what Richard Rorty means by a religion of art. My father’s two cultures were empirical clarity and aesthetic mystery.
Friedrich von Schelling calls beauty “infinity represented in a finite way.” I suppose my father’s yearnings toward the infinite were no different from anyone else’s. They might have been more intense than other people’s. After all, if he were here he’d probably remind me that the realm of science contains its own soul-enthralling depths.
Given his family background, though, science would always be the great liberation for him, making it impossible for him to invest his yearnings in any creed.
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Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton’s book about religion, and he quotes Eagleton:
What other symbolic form has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women? … [Religion’s] subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.
Like Christopher Lasch toward the end of his life, Eagleton represents a man of the left for whom one particular symbolic form — progress, liberal enlightenment — has failed in its promise to encompass human yearnings. What Fish calls “the tragedy and pain of the human condition,” and humanity’s yearning for “a transfigured future” (the phrase is Eagleton’s), is far more compelling to Eagleton at this point than political, as well as scientific, efforts to relieve our pain.
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Update, correction:
A blog is a beautiful thing. I just received an email from a reader in response to my tale of the Czech Torah. The email’s titled They Weren’t Unburied Torahs, and it includes an attachment titled Memorial Scrolls Trust, Westminster Synagogue, Kent House, Rutland Gardens, London.
… Fearful that the deserted synagogues and community buildings would be at the mercy of looters and plunderers, a group of Jews at the Jewish Museum in occupied Prague submitted a plan to the Nazis to save the Jewish ritual and cultural treasures in the vulnerable buildings by bringing them to the museum in Prague so that they could be catalogued and preserved. Why their Nazi overseers accepted the plan is not known. The result was that the Nazi controlled Prague Jewish Community sent out the orders that implemented the plan and permitted the transport companies to carry Jewish goods. With a few exceptions, the Torah Scrolls, other liturgical treasures in gold and silver and ritual textiles were sent to Prague, along with historic archives and thousands of books. The remaining Jews were deported in 1943, 1944 and 1945, and quite a number of these late deportees survived.
… [I]n 1956, the Michle Synagogue, in the suburbs of Prague, became the warehouse at which the hundreds of Torah Scrolls were consolidated from various locations. They had come from the large Prague Jewish community and from the many smaller communities that were scattered across what was left of Bohemia and Moravia, after the Sudetenland had been detached. The Scrolls in the Michle Synagogue did not include Scrolls from Slovakia, which was under a separate administration.
… Eric Estorick, an American art dealer living in London, paid many visits to Prague on business in the early 1960’s and got to know Prague artists, whose work he sold at his Grosvenor Gallery. Being a frequent visitor to Prague, he came to the attention of the authorities, and, on a visit in 1963 he expressed some interest in a catalogue of Hebraica. He was approached by officials from Artia, the state corporation responsible for trade in works of art, and asked if he would be interested in buying some Torah Scrolls.
Unknown to him, the Israelis had been approached previously with a similar offer, but the negotiations had come to nothing. Estorick was taken to the Michle Synagogue were he was faced with wooden racks holding about 1800 Scrolls, in seriously damp conditions. He was asked if he wanted to make an offer. He replied that he knew certain parties in London who might be interested.
On his return to London, he contacted a fellow American, Rabbi Harold Reinhart, of the Westminster Synagogue, one of whose congregants, Ralph Yablon, offered to put up the money to buy the Scrolls. First, Chimen Abramsky, who was to become Professor of Hebrew Studies at the University of London, was asked to go to Prague for twelve days in November 1963 to examine the Scrolls and to report on their authenticity and condition. On his return to London, it was decided that Estorick should go to Prague and negotiate a deal, which he did. Two trucks laden with 1564 Scrolls arrived at the Westminster Synagogue in February and March 1964.
After months of sorting, examining and cataloguing each Scroll, the task of distributing them began, with the aim of getting the Scrolls back into the life of Jewish congregations across the world. The Memorial Scrolls Trust was established to carry out this task.
UD‘s enormously grateful to her reader for this information.
… that today’s the fiftieth anniversity of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures essay, she thinks first about her father.
An immunologist at the National Institutes of Health, a first-generation American embarrassed by the peasant religion his Jewish father brought from Minsk, Herbert Rapp was a belligerent empiricist.
While UD‘s mother – herself the daughter of secular Jews in the same generationally rebellious mode as UD‘s father – retained enough faith to send her children to a Reform temple in Bethesda for a few years, UD‘s father was much the stronger influence on UD.
This was in part because of his clear, principled world view, in contrast to his wife’s vague sentimentalism, but it also had to do with the soullessness of that particular temple, a hip epicenter of social justice. (I called my mother’s sister and asked her about it. “That place? The rabbi didn’t believe in God.”)
Once, my mother and my aunt, in memory of their father, decided to buy a Torah for the synagogue. The rabbi told them about some recently unearthed Czech Torahs that had been buried for safekeeping during the war.
“Your mother,” said my aunt, “went to the airport to pick it up when it came in. The next day we took it to the rabbi. He said ‘You didn’t have to bring it in so fast. You could have kept it in your home for awhile.’ Your mother said, ‘No. I didn’t like the ghosts.’ The rabbi looked at both of us and said ‘You’re pagans.'”
I have a memory – who knows if the memory is real – of my father, with great reluctance, attending the installation ceremony at the temple. As the new Torah was carried joyously through the congregation, the person holding it stopped in front of my father, assuming he in particular — after all, his family bought it — would want to kiss it. My father stood stolid and unmoving. (“I don’t remember the ceremony,” says my aunt.)
Yet he didn’t have the materialist disposition you’d think might accompany all this. He was mad for the Romantic poets, and he liked to recite T.S. Eliot. My mother says she fell in love with him because of the classical music she heard pouring out of his frat room at Johns Hopkins. He was a serious and emotional pianist who spent much of his time playing and replaying the Sonata Pathétique. He loved nature intensely — in particular, the Chesapeake Bay, where he had a house and a boat.
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End of first half. Must walk dog. It’s high noon, and even though it’s dreary out there, I guess this is as light and warm as it’s going to get. Ne quittez pas.
The profoundly corrupt University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (read UD‘s many posts about it here) has lost track of some mice.
The frozen remains of two lab mice infected with deadly strains of plague were lost at a bioterror research facility at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark — the same high-security lab where three infected mice went missing four years ago.
The latest incident, which led to an FBI investigation, occurred in December but was never disclosed to the public.
University officials said there was no health threat.
The remains of the dead mice were contained in a red hazardous waste bag being stored in a locked freezer, according to the researchers. But an animal care supervisor could not account for them while preparing to sterilize and incinerate them.
In September 2005, the same lab discovered three live mice infected with plague missing from multiple cages. Officials then said the animals had likely died.
University officials yesterday said they immediately contacted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI and state health officials in December upon learning of the missing remains, but withheld information from the public until The Star-Ledger began asking questions. They subsequently released a report about the matter in a mass e-mailing to the university community, saying they did not want employees, students and professors to read about the incident in the newspaper.
FBI officials confirmed the December incident.
“As a matter of protocol in this type of matter, the FBI was called in to investigate and we determined there was no nexus to terrorism or risk to public health,” said Bryan Travers, a spokesman for the FBI office in Newark.
The state Department of Health and Senior Services said it had also been notified of the situation, “and we are very confident that the appropriate authorities are investigating,” said spokeswoman Donna Leusner.
University officials defended their decision to keep the matter confidential.
… … Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who has been a critic of the government’s rapid expansion of bioterrorism labs, said while the likelihood is that someone made an accounting error, it was a potentially embarrassing situation for UMDNJ.
