Aug 2008: Resveratrol increases cancer risk?

Yes, Red Wine Holds Answer. Check Dosage is a relatively sober summary of a study claiming a 20% increase in mouse longevity with megadoses of resveratrol - a substance found in Pinot Noir wine. I am reminded, however, of a recent study suggesting a genetic balancing act between cancer risk and aging rate. Humans that age more slowly seem more prone to cancer, humans that age more quickly are less prone. The two groups have about the same lifespan but die of different causes (cancer vs. heart disease perhaps).

So my suspicion would be that resveratrol tips the scales towards slower aging ... but leads to more cancer. Look for the headline in August 2008 ...

Update Jan 31, 2009: It's past August 2008 now, and I was wrong on this one. The academic literature is looking for anti-cancer benefits of resveratrol.

Larry Summers calls for smart populism

Larry Summers, formerly a treasury secretary and more recently of Harvard fame, now writes for the Financial times (emphasis mine):

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - The global middle cries out for reassurance

... Let us be frank. What the anxious global middle is told often feels like pretty thin gruel. The twin arguments that globalisation is inevitable and protectionism is counterproductive have the great virtue of being correct, but do not provide much consolation for the losers. Nor can they rally support for policies that maintain, let alone promote, international integration.

Economists rightly emphasise that trade, like other forms of progress, makes everyone richer by enabling them to buy goods at lower prices. But this offers small solace to those who fear their jobs will vanish.

Education is central to any economic strategy, but there is a limit to what it can do for workers in their 40s and beyond. Nor can education be a complete answer at a time when skilled computer programmers in India are paid less than $2,000 a month.

John Kenneth Galbraith was right when he observed: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.” Meeting the needs of the anxious global middle is the economic challenge of our time.

In the US, the political pendulum is swinging left. The best parts of the progressive tradition do not oppose the market system; they improve on the outcomes it naturally produces. That is what we need today.

There are no easy answers. The economic logic of free, globalised, technologically sophisticated capitalism may well be to shift more wealth to the very richest and some of the very poorest in the world, while squeezing people in the middle.

Just as the Federal Housing Administration’s effort to make owner-occupied housing more available after the second world war was a crucial part of the policy approach that permitted the Marshall Plan to go forward, so also our success in advancing international integration will depend on what can be done for the great global middle.

Our response will affect not just the livelihoods of millions of our fellow citizens but also the prospects for continuing global integration, with all the prosperity and stability it has the potential to bring.

Summers is effectively echoing Krugman's call for the "smart populist" -- the heir to Teddy and Franklin. I have no ability to predict how the US electorate will respond. I would not have favored a populist six years ago, but Bush has broken me. If populism is the only other option, bring it on.

PS. Kudos for Summers for pointing out the obvious. Education is not a complete solution -- or even much of a partial solution.

GCH1 and chronic pain

This is not a gene you want your insurance company to know about:

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: New Gene May Help Predict and Treat Chronic Pain:

... The gch1 gene turns up in human pain, too. In a study of surgical disk removal for back pain, those with one copy of a gch1 variant--30 percent of the total--reported less frequent pain after surgery, the group found. Three percent of those studied had two copies of the variant and were at even lower risk for chronic pain. Similarly, in studies of temporary pain, people were less sensitive to pinches, heat and pressure if they possessed one or two copies of the gch1 variant. The protective variant becomes more active when chemically stimulated, suggesting that it kicks in after nerve damage and inflammation, and seems to work by influencing nitric oxide synthesis, the researchers report. 'We really think we've uncovered a completely novel pathway with a novel regulator of pain,' says Woolf, who founded a biotech to find inhibitors of the GCH1 enzyme. About 30 percent of people overall have the variant gene, he notes.

I suspect this won't pan out -- too simple. Even so, it's one bit of genetic information that might be best kept secret.

Why does evolution allow gay and lesbian humans?

Scientific American.com: Most Desirable Mates May Not Sire Prolific Offspring suggests evolutionary paradoxes like gay males may be related to gene-gender competition. A gene that helps one gender compete for mates may be "injurious" (in terms of reproductive output) to offspring of the opposite gender.

The phenomena has been demonstrated in fruit flies, now evolutionary biologists will be looking for examples in other animals, including (of course) humans.

I'll be watching to see if they're able to tie this into the peculiarity of the 'demographic transition' in which wealthy humans have fewer offspring than less wealthy humans. (Yes, I've read all the old economic explanations. I don't believe them.)

If this mechanism is in place it may contribute, says Pitnick, to maintaining a great deal of variation in the genome, opposing the conformity sexual selection seems to produce.

Curing data libels by poisoning the well

Our alleged sins and misdemeanors are widely available; worse yet, some of the sins are untrue. (Schneier on Security). Banks, airlines, marketers and Homeland Security don't care about the untruths -- as long as they are not too widespread. A few casualties can be ignored.

There is little hope of rescue from government, our rulers are hopelessly corrupt. Is there a way out?

There may be lessons in the techniques of spammers. They are increasingly adept at "poisoning the well"; feeding spam detectors messages that reduce their specificity. The spam detectors begin rejecting too many non-spam messages. The only quick fix is to make the detectors less sensitive, so more spam slips through.

Imagine if a group of mercenary black hats were to insert vast amounts of false data into huge numbers of credit records. If the error rate becomes too high, the information becomes worthless. There are then two options; either the industry gives up on reputation management (unlikely) or they invest in ensuring information is correct and verified. Either option is better than the current situation.

Berners-Lee on the future of HTML

The other day I asked my HINF studens who Tim Berners-Lee is. Nobody knew. I was tempted to fail everybody, but in addition to lacking that power I knew I was simply being an old curmudgeon. The world moves on, and Berners-Lee is an anti-celebrity. Even his blog doesn't identify him, save by the letters "timbl". I guess that's the way he wants it.

Today TBL affirmed what I've read elsewhere -- the XML version of HTML was stillborn.

Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

... Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world...

This is gracefully conceding to the inevitable. Guided evolution will be the future ...

Spolsky's guide to interviewing and hiring - version 3

Spolsky has rewritten his hiring guide: The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0) - Joel on Software.

These guides can be somewhat uncomfortable reading for the insecure; I don't feel I'd meet Joel's rigorous standards. On the other hand, allowing for the fact that most of the world is less perfect that Joel's planet, it's a concise and well written reference for your next candidate interview. Even if that candidate wouldn't get hired by Joel.

Family Medicine Notes and Pycnogenol: Is Jacob testing me?

Jacob wrote:

Family Medicine Notes

Pycnogenol for ADHD?
Not clear what's up with this .. here's a placeholder for more review ..

I tried to reply, but his comment system is broken. (Requires TypeKey authentication but doesn't support it ...). So, Jacob, here's the comment:

Uh, Jacob - you are testing to see if I'm reading, right?

This substance has never been screened for toxicity, drug interactions, side-effects, etc. If it actually has enough pharmaceutical activity to rival Ritalin it scares the pants off me. Ritalin is an unreasonably safe medication, almost nothing of like effectiveness is that non-toxic.

Interesting from a drug development perspective.

Terrifying from the viewpoint of an rationalist and ethical clinician.

The Retreat in detail: An emerging plan

A lead editorial in the Guardian lays out, in some detail, the expected retreat from Iraq. UK forces will leave, no matter the conditions, by the end of 2007. It's a reasonable outline, with no guarantee of avoiding civil war or anarchic genocide. The key is to pay for an arab speaking army to help secure Baghdad. That idea has turned up in a few places and seems to be the best possible outcome at this time.

Time to be very nice to Turkey and Egypt ...

Cheney: a breath of foul stench

There's something refreshing about Cheney's honesty. It's like the cold breeze out of freshly opened crypt. Then the stench hits ...

Cheney Doesn't Back Waterboarding

HENNEN : I’ve had people call and say, ‘Please, let the vice president know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we’re all for it, if it saves American lives.’ Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

CHENEY: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation. Khalid Sheik Mohammed provided us with enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth—we’ve learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that. . . .

HENNEN: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

CHENEY: Well, it’s a no-brainer for me, but for a while there I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we’re involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we’re party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.

Simulated drowning is not torture, therefore we don't torture. Wow, what a stroke of brilliance. It works for everything. I'll try it the next time I get a speeding ticket. "Officer, driving 110 mph in a 55 mph zone is not speeding, therefore I do not speed."

An excellent Mankiw discussion on Gas taxes and other externality taxes

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Alternatives to the Pigou Club is a serious dialog around a recent WSJ article he wrote. I suspect the WSJ article drove the WSP editorial page into a blinding rage, note how Mankiw doesn't even bother to address whatever blather they produced. Instead he lays out all the alternatives and does a persuasive job of ruling them out.

We need a big carbon tax.

Note Mankiw is a Libertarian by leaning.

Read the comments too.

What we've learned from torture

More information is coming out about the use of torture and physical abuse in US secret prisons on German soil. An article in Stern led this comment:

Shrillblog: Tim F. Joins Us!

Tim F: The only positive thing that I can draw from this sad period of American history, now we know who are the closet sadists and the authoritarian followers waiting for the right regime under whose thumb to subsume their will. Smile for the camera, guys.

It's a good statement. Now we know. All of that "never again", "not here" stuff -- it's finally gone from the American dialog. It didn't take much -- barely a shove knocked us off our Potemkin pedestal.

I suppose the bright side is that every country now knows they will spared annoying lectures about virtuous behavior. If any American official tries it, the hilarity will be genuine. Nice to know there's a silver lining.

Research for Alaskan FP residents: Vitamin C and hand infections in Fishermen

A colleague of mine is a serious fisherman. He spends weeks in remote Alaska, hanging out with professional and insane amateur fisherfolk. The fish are big and sharp, and hand cuts are routine. He tells me the cuts develop quite an array of persistent local infections, presumably due to the exotic bacteria -- but there's a preventive therapy. A routine megadose of vitamin C will prevent the local infections.

I wasn't able to find any Google references to this, and we have pretty good evidence that vitamin C does nothing for colds or any other form of infection, so it seems a longshot. On the other hand, it's also easy to study and it appears to be a genuine folk practice (like copper bracelets for arthritis -- which also do nothing). It seems like it could be a nice research product for an Alaskan family practice resident, or for an interested local physician. Persuade some fishermen to join a randomized double-blinded trial of vitamin C vs. placebo and study their hand infections. The truly intrepid could experiment on themselves of course, which would get around the informed consent issues.

If you do the study, let me know!

Journalists matter: Gina Kolata on CT scans and lung cancer screening

I was amazed to read Gina Kolata's NY Times article on CT scans and lung cancer screening. Why the surprise? It's very good. Sober, measured, informative. I'm not accustomed to good reporting on this type of story. Journlists matter, and Kolata is one of the very best writing on healthcare topics.

Oh, the conclusion? Looks interesting, probably insurers will pay, risk and benefit is not yet known, better studies will have results in 1-2 years. I'd say 65% probability this will turn out to be a weak screening test.

The future of the manager

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Post-Managerial Capitalism?

Worth reading for anyone thinking about where capitalism is going next.