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
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 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 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
- 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 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!"
- 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
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
- 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,
- 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