Diff for "PandorasLab"

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Pandora's Lab

Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

• Paul A. Offit, M.D. . 2017 . 500 OFFIT 2017 . Hillsboro Library

• p001 Introduction

• p015 Chapter 1 - God's Own Medicine

• p016 alpha-narcotine papaverine thebaine

• p022 Alexander Wood invented first hypodermic needle 1853 to administer morphine (rather than orally), believed that injection would "cure the appetite" for morphine addiction.

  • "Pandora" repeats myth that morphine overdose injection killed his wife, who actually outlived him by 10 years.

• p024 Heinrich Dreser responsible for aspirin and heroin and codeine at Bayer AG

• p025 Eli Lilly "safe" heroin distributed over-the-counter without prescription in the US in 1900, JAMA "standard of care" in 1906

• p025 1906 JAMA: heroin standard of care for many respiratory ailments; by 1910 doctors aware of addiction, use declined

• p027 next, thebaine a different opium compound. oxycodone the synthetic form in 1916,

• p028 Purdue OxyContin time release tablet releases immediate addictive dose if chewed

• p041 Chapter 2 - The Great Margarine Mistake

• p043 Ancel Keys urged fat restriction

• po44 1977 McGovern report food guidelines authored by Nick Mottern non-scientist reporter

• p048 The 1977 report confla ted unhealthy saturated fats with healthy, essential unsaturated fats (some double bonds between carbons)

• p050 margarine unhealthy trans-fats

  • Monounsaturated fat healthiest; olive oil, algal oil, and omega-3 fatty acids

• p051 Cis-unsaturated fats (two adjacent "missing" hydrogens at a double carbon bond) are liquids because the molecules bend and don't stack into a solid

• p052 Trans fat molecules straight and unhealthy

• p053 Crisco Crystalized cottonseed oil, hydrogenated

• p054 CSPI Center for Science in the Public Interest

• p054 and NHSA(?) pushed trans-fats as a healthy alternative
• p055 replacing trans-fats with other unsaturated fats reduced heart disease by 33% (or 53%)

• p056 vLDL worse than LDL, HDL best

• p056 Food and Additives Amendment grandfathered pre-1958 foods, Institute of Medicine petitioned transfat removal in 1994

• p057 Harvard nutritionist Walter Willett recommended margarine in 1980s, "sending them to their graves prematurely"

• p057 2006 FDA required trans-fats on nutrition labels
• p058 products with less than 0.5g transfat can claim 0g transfat on the nutrition label
• p058 avoid "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil on nutrition label
• p059 "Welsh study showed exactly the opposite" (that trans-fat was bad)

• p061 Chapter 3 - Blood From Air

• p062 farming without artificial fertilizer feeds less than 4 billion people.

• p063 Fritz Haber 1868-1934

• p066 1912 Germany imported 900,000 tonnes of nitrates, mohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIVstly from Chile, potential naval blockade

• p067 University of Karlsruhe and BASF, more German Nobel Prizes

• p068 N₂ triple bond "strongest in nature" 945 kJ/mol (natural carbon monoxide 1072 kJ/mol is 50-100 ppb)

• p070 Robert Le Rossignol engineered first tabletop "Haber" process

• p071 Output increase from 0.005% to 8% "logarithmically better" oopsie, should be "exponentially better"

• p071 Industrial scaleup by Carl Bosch, founder of IG Farben

• p072 by 1911, 8000 pounds of ammonia per day

• p072 1913 Oppau plant produced 60,000 tons of ammonia per year

• p073 "Today" 130 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer

• p074 Ammonia Production Plants—A Review

• p074 M.W. Kellogg 1960s most efficient ammonia manufacturing

• p074 Chinese obesity, 30% of Beijing overweight
• p075 Donaldson Louisiana largest nitrogen producing plant, 8 million tonnes per year

• p075 dead zone in Gulf of Mexico larger than New Jersey

• p076 excess nitrogen also from food animal manure
• p077 1914 Germany invaded neutral Belgium, Haber and 90+ other German scientists signed manifesto defending the war
• p078 1915 Haber produces 150 T/day ammonium nitrate explosive

• p078 1917 Leuna plant produced 240,000 T/y

• p079 Speer: If Allies had focused on destroying Leuna plant, WWII could have ended in eight weeks

• p081 1916, Haber chief of Chemical Warfare Service, 2000 scientists
• p081 chlorine gas, immediate death, heavier than air and spreads down into trenches

• p081 violation of 1907 Hague Convention, signed by Germany

• p082 Haber releases 150 tonnes of chlorine near 1915 Ypres, witnessed by future Nobel Prize winners Otto Hahn, Gustav Hertz, Jhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIVames Franck, and Hans Geiger

• p083 Haber's chemist wife Clara, first Phd for German woman, suicide 1915 after Fritz superv ises chemical weapon attack

• p084 Haber's son Hermann 1946 Nov 9 suicide in Watertown NY age 44. Hermann's daughter Claire researched antidote for chlorine gas, also committed suicide

• p085 Fritz Haber also produced phosgene and mustard gas for warfare

• p086 more than 1M disabled and 26K killed by WW1 chemical weapons

• p086 Treaty of Versailles also forbid chemical weapons

• p087 Haber exported them, calling his production "oil and refinery plants"
• p088 Jewish ancestry Haber forced to resign after Hitler
• p090 Carl Bosch died 1940, depression and alcoholism

• p091 Chaim Weizmann meets exiled Haber in Switzerland

• p092 Haber dies 1934, buried in Basel Switzerland

• p093 Haber also developed Zyklon as a pesticide

• p094 Several Haber relatives murdered with Zyklon B at Auschwitz and Treblinka

• p097 Chapter 4 America's Master Race

• p097 contra Trump, first generation Mexican immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans

• p098 immigrants come to work, stay out of trouble to avoid deportation

• p098 anti-immigrant Ted Cruz son of 1957 Cuban immigrant

• p100 Francis Galton 1869 book Hereditary Genius, called his plan eugenics

• p101 Charles Davenport Cold Springs Harbor

• p103 antisocial traits not determined by genetics

• p104 Eugenics Record Office supported by (p104) Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller Institute, Mrs E. H. Harriman, and George Eastman

• p105 Margaret Sanger connected woman's right to choose with eugenics, "human weeds to be exterminated"

• p105 also John Harvey Kellogg and George Bernard Shaw

• p107 US banned marriages: Alcoholics 4 states, epileptics 17, mentally ill 41, most in world until declared unconstitutional in 1967

• p107 1917 film The Black Stork about "defective" baby allowed to die

• p108 Carrie Buck b1906

• p109 forcibly sterilized 1927 for promiscuity and feeble mind

• p111 Madison Grant 1916 pseudoscience book Passing of the Great Race

• p112 Grant also conservationist; designed zoos, 8 million acres of national parks incl. Redwood National Park

• p116 Grant claimed a.ll great men were Nordics, even King David and Jesus

• p118 geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan 1933 Nobel Prize, said only one "human" race.

• p121 Marcus Garvey also preached against assimilation, back to Africa

• p121 "... Great Race" and other American eugenics books inspired Hitler
• p122 listed as essential Nazi Party reading

• p122 Davenport, Grant, Francis Galton, Harry Laughlin, and Hitler all believed only Nordics should procreate, all were childless

• p123 1935 ]]edia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws praised by Eugenics Records Office

• p124 Editorials in JAMA American Journal of Public Health, and NEJM supported Hitler's eugenics efforts

• p124 anthropologist Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Vershuer

• p125 protege Dr. Josef Mengele

• p125 500 pairs of twins, Mengele's children
• p127 Only 200 of 3000 children survived Mengele, no recognizable information was obtained

• p128 Hational Park director Donald Murphy:

  • "Harmony among peoples comes from true principles and attitudes of the present, not from purging the past."

• p129 Lillian Hellman: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."

• p131 Chapter 5 - Turning the Mind Inside Out

• p132 Jeffrey Dahmer 1992 guilty of 15 counts of murder, 1994 beaten to death by fellow inmate

• p132 Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz 1935 lobotomy

• p134 20 more patients and many elsewhere

• p135 Phineas Gage 1848 frontal lobe destroyed, behavior and personality damaged

• p136 Moniz 1949 Nobel Prize, despite objections
• p146 Lobotomies survived through early 1970s because (1) desperation (2) full mental hospitals (3) hospitals hideous
• p147 Lobotomies weren't much worse than treatments like electroshock

• p147 Julius Wagner 1917 malaria therapy

• p148 syphilis spirochetes killed by high temperatures of fever

• p148 some Americans go to Mexico for malaria therapy to cure (imaginary) chronic Lyme disease

• p148 Manfred Sakel insulin shock therapy

• p148 Typical comas one or two months, many died
• p149 lobotomies "the therapies of despair"

• p150 Walter Freeman "drive through lobotomies"

• p151 Weston State Hospital 228 patients in 12 days, 22 operations in 135 minutes

• p152 25% of patients "surgically induced childhood", permanently institutionalized,some had 2nd and 3rd lobotomies
• p152 patients "adjusting to level of domestic invalid or household pet"
• p153 3% died of bleeding, 3% permanent seizures, 2 of 11 children died from cerebral hemmorrhages

• p153 Yale's John Fulton "Why not use a shotgun? It would be quicker!"

• p153 AMA and APA silent, media misinformed public

• p154 without the press (Saturday Evening Post, New Your Times) lobotomies wouldn't be widely accepted

• p155 Rosemary Kennedy lobotomized age 23

• p155 attending nurse quit the profession
• p156 John Kennedy secretly visited Rosemary once, no other family visited in 25 years

• p156 1959 movie Suddenly Last Summer "lobotomy positive"

• p156 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest negative

• p157 Asylum American horror film

• p157 Thorazine

• p157 1955 Tofranil antidepressant and Miltown anti-anxiety mind-numbing drugs

• p159 72yo Freeman's last lobotomy 1967, patient died of cerebral hemorrhage, license lost
• p159 Freeman died of colon cancer in 1972 at age of 77. Now regarded by many as a monster, and American Mengele
• p160 Joseph Kennedy never looked at a lobotomy patient before Rosemary's disabling operation

• p161 Chapter 6 - The Mosquito Liberation Front

• p161 Rachel Carson alerted by newspaper editor Olga Huckins about DDT bird kill

• p162 Rachel Carson shown nature's wonders by mother Maria
• p163 1929 attended Johns Hopkins, masters thesis 1932, not allowed to continue PhD program
• p164 1937 September Atlantic Monthly article Undersea

• p164 Under the Sea Wind 1941

• p165 The Sea Around Us 1951

• p166 1.3 million copies in 32 languages
• p167 believed Oxford Press did not do enough to promote the book

• p167 The Edge of the Sea 1955

• p167 Silent Spring 1962

• p169 led to DDT ban

• p172 1963 Carson asked Department of Commerce for a "Pesticide Commission", led to Environmental Protection Agency in 1970

• p174 Carson inspired Clean Water Action and Natural Resources Defense Council

• p175 Time Magazine: "Many scary generalizations are patently unsound"

• p175 Pesticide manufacturer Velsicol threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin

• p175 Velsicol ]]al_Corporation#Endrin spill killed 5 million fish in lower Mississipi river 1963-4

• p182 Bird populations increased during heaviest DDT use years: fewer insect-borne diseases, more food to eat
• p183 Carson must have known this, but never wrote about it

• p183 Donald Roberts author The Excellent Powder: DDT's Political and Scientific History Multco Central 668.65 R6437e 2010

• p184 EPA 1982 DDT hearing: not mutagenic, teratogenic, no detleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife.

• p184 EPA William Ruckelshaus didn't attend meeting, read the report, unilaterally banned DDT in 1972

• p186 Carson "Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems"

• p191 Chapter 7 - Nobel Prize Disease

• Linus Pauling

• p191 The Nature of the Chemical Bond 1931

• p192 1931 Langmuir Prize

• p192 1931 elected to National Academy of Sciences

• p192 1931 full professor at Caltech

• p192 sickle-cell disease abnormal hemoglobin protein "slightly different charge" [sic]

• p192 1949 Science "Sickle Cell Anemia: A Molecular Disease"

• p192 1951 PNAS "The Structure of Proteins", alpha helix

• p193 1953 PNAS "A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids", DNA triple helix.

  • one year before Watson and Crick

• p194 Irwin Stone 3g/d vitamin C

• p194 "300 times vitamin C RDA"
  • [[ RDA is 75mg/day adult female, 90mg/day adult male. 300 times is 22.5g/day female, 27g/day male
• p194 recommended dietary supplements for virtually every known disease

• p195 with Irwin Stone, two years at College of the City of New York, degree from Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and a bogus mail-order PhD

• p195 1942 study in JAMA by Cowan, 980 people with colds, vitamin C did not lessen symptoms

• Vitamins for the Prevention of Colds

• 2000 i.u. of vitamin C, 50 micrograms per i.u., hence 100 milligrams

• RDA is 90 mg/day for adult men, 75 mg/day for women, so the C owan study did NOT test "megadoses" or even double doses

• p195 Researchers at U.Md., U.Toronto and "in the Netherlands" (CITATION NEEDED) tested 2g, 3g, and 3.5g

• p196 found to be useless by Charles Moertel at Mayo Clinic

• p196 Pauling considered suing Mortel for "deliberate fraud and misrepresentation", his lawyers said no
• p196 Pauling wrote vitamin-C-cures-everything books, then vitamin-C only works WITHOUT chemotherapy

• p197 colleague Max Perutz said Pauling reputation spoiled

• p197 Pauling's vanity was his greatest failing; Einstein delighted by valid correction
  • my note: Pauling also proposed triple-helix DNA in 1953, silly charged phosphate backbone, astonished by his mistake

  • Pauling was 52yo in 1953, 72yo when he founded the Institute of Orthomolecular Medicine in 1973, and 93yo when he died.

• p198 Cofounder Arthur B. Robinson

  • Showed that megadose vitamin C (10g human equivalent) increased cancer risk in mice

  • Robinson now runs the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine in Cave Junction, Oregon

  • Robinson also writes Access To Energy newsletter after Petr Beckmann died in 1993

• p199 Ava Pauling took 10g megadose C (mutagenic), died of hemorrhaging from stomach cancer in 1981 at age 77

• p200 2008 review study of 230,000 people taking megavitamins found increase risk of cancer and heart disease

• 2013 The Vitamin Myth

• p201 2008 Cochrane Collaboration review of 67 studies found antioxidant supplements significantly increased mortality

• p201 Oxidation is also required to kill cancer cells and clear clogged arteries

• p202 Catherine Price Vitamania BVTN lib 613.286 PRI

• p204 AIDS in 1982, HIV identified by Gallo et. al. in 1984

• p206 In 1987, Peter Duesberg claimed AIDS not caused by HIV

  • convinced South African president Thabo Mbeki that anti-HIV drugs were poison, 300,000 extra deaths resulted

• p208 discoverer of HIV Luc Montagnier 2009 teleporting DNA . homeopathy . antibiotics for autism

• p212 All scientists should have unassailable supporting data. Personality, awards, and poetic writing are not proof.

• p213 Chapter 8 - Learning From the Past

• p213 4000 papers per day, bell curve results; some awful, some excellent, most mediocre

• p214 supposedly Mark Twain: "The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, its that they know so many things that ain't so"

  • Actual creator and original statement unidentified, according to Mark Twain Center at Elmira College

• p214 what matters is reproducibility. MMR causes autism? Ten million dollar studies of hundreds of thousands of children found no greater risk.

• p215 Hygiene hypothesis NEMJ "Eat Dirt" Developing world children more diseases, fewer allergies

• p216 e-cigarette nicotine still highly addictive and harms fetuses

• p217 Book prediction e-cigarettes displacing tobacco; no, in 2024 US Adults: 7% use e-cigarettes, 18.8% use tobacco
• p218 in 2005 21% of US adults smoked cigarettes, in 2014, 17% did
• p219 People smoke for the nicotine but die from the tar
• p221 2015 "New York Assembly Bill A1706 sought to ban GMO vaccines" ... enacting clause stricken 2015 March 18

• p223 BPA fed to rats at 4000x human exposure remained healthy. Problem studies injected BPA, bypassing liver, which inactivates BPA in 5 minutes

  • exceeding FDA limits requires ingesting 10,000 times typical daily intake

• p224 saccharine caused bladder cancer in rodents; rodent urine highly acidic, forms microcrystals. Not in humans.

• p224 David Weiner: "Mice lie and monkeys exaggerate"

• p225 desperate parent therapies for autism

• p226 Jim Humble claims intestinal worms cause AIDs, malaria, cancer, and Alzheimer's disease and sells Miracle Mineral Supplement as a cure

• p227 In desperation, fake "cures" punish the afflicted
• p228 Eliminating DDT restored mosquitoes, millions of children died from malaria.

• p228 thimerosal vaccine preservative metabolizes into ethylmercury

  • prevents stoppers of multiple-use vials from transferring bacteria
• p228 eliminating thimerosal infected children with hepatitis B virus
• p229 more mercury in breast milk and infant formula than vaccines with thimerosal
• p230 The precautionary principle assumes no harm from exercising caution.
• p231 When we detect nonfatal cancers, we probably do more harm than good.
• p234 60,000 diagnosed with thyroid cancer annually,

• p234 Thyroidectomy benefits and risks

• p235 men are more likely to die with prostate cancer than from it

• p235 Prostate cancer screening; unclear that early detection reduces mortality rates. Biopsies painful and risky, therapies brutal.

• p235 PSA tests cost $3B/year in 2010, cannot detect prostate cancer or measure lethality. "Profit-driven public health disaster"

• p235 Mammography saves lives, but how many and at what cost?

• p236 Screening mammography breast cancer diagnoses doubled from .112% to .234% , late stage breast cancer deaths deaths decreased from .102% to .094%, mostly due to better treatment, not better screening
  • Screening has little or no effect
• p237 formerly, biennial screening between age 40 to 74, now age 50 to 74, fewer false positives, less suffering

• p237 journalist Christie Ashwanden 2015 editorial in JAMA concluded the chance of a mammogram would save her life was 0.16%

  • 13 mammograms from age 50 to 74, 13 mammograms is 2.88% chance of saving her life, 30 years life expectancy at 50, 13 years of life expectancy at age 74, so somewhere between 300 and 135 extra days saved.
  • maybe worthwhile, but probably much more worthwhile if family history and genetic priors factored in. Screening may help teach us what to look for.

• p238 Andrew Wakefield 1998 MMR vaccine autism nonsense. Thousands of UK patients withheld vaccination, hundreds of children hospitalized, at least four died from measles.

• p239 Wakefield claimed thousands of professionals were bribed; Wakefield planned to earn $43M per year selling test kits.

• p239 When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither are on your side, attack the witness.

• p240 Mathematician and debunker Norman Levitt "While Galileo was a rebel, not all rebels are Galileo."

  • Norman Levitt essay: Why professors believe weird things

• p241 Epilogue
• p241 Every advance has come with a price, often easy to calculate, but sometimes difficult.
  • for opiates and synthetic fertilizers, short term gains may be much smaller than long term losses.
  • learn from our mistakes, don't be paralyzed by them.

• p243 Acknowledgements

• p245 Selected Bibliography

• p245 John Grant 2006 Bogus Science

• p246 CDS 2012 Prescription Painkiller Overdoses In the US

• p247 NYT 2014 Aug 4 Dealing With Opioid Abuse Would Pay for Itself

• p249 Felix Hoffman

• p253 L. F. Haber, 1986 The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War at PSU

  • L. F. Haber (1921-2004) was a British economic historian and the son of the Nobel laureate chemist Fritz Haber

• p254 Michelle Ye He Lee 2015 Donald Trump's False Comments Connecting Mexican Immigrants and Crime

• p255 Timothy Naftali Unlike Ike New York Times Book Review, 2015 September 26 ???

• p258 Arthur Allen 2014 The Fantastic Laboratory of Dr. Weigl Hillsboro Brookwood 614.5262 ALLEN 2014

• p259 Gwen Pearson Setting the Record Straight on Rachel Carson

• p260 Paul Offit Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine

• p261 Algis Valiunas The Man Who Thought of Everything The New Atlantis, Spring 2015

• p261 Jon Cohen Duesberg and Critics Agree: Hemophilia is the Best Test Science 266 (1994): 1642-1644

• p264 Scott Weiss Eat Dirt - The Hygiene Hypothesis and Allergic Diseases New England Journal of Medicine 157 (2002): 390-391

• p266 K. E. Farsalinos R. Poisa Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of Electronic Cigarettes as Tobacco Substitutes: A Systematic Review Therapeutic Advances in Drug Safety 5 (2014): 67-86

• p269 Gina Kolata Study Points to Overdiagnosis of Thyroid Cancer New York Times, April 14, 2016.

• p273 About the Author https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Offit

• p275 Index