Isegoria

Does drinking alcohol protect against the common cold?

To examine whether intakes of wine, beer, spirits, and total alcohol are associated with the risk of common cold, in 1998–1999 the authors analyzed data from a cohort study carried out in a population of 4,272 faculty and staff of five Spanish universities.

Usual alcohol intake was assessed at baseline by means of a standardized frequency questionnaire that was validated in a random sample of the population. The authors detected 1,353 cases of common cold.

Total alcohol intake and beer and spirits consumption were not related to the occurrence of common cold, whereas consumption of wine was inversely associated with the risk of common cold. When drinkers of >14 glasses of wine per week were compared with teetotalers, the relative risk was 0.6 (95% confidence interval: 0.4, 0.8) after adjustment for age, sex, and faculty/staff status. The association was stronger for red wine.

These results remained unaltered after adjustment for total alcohol intake and for other potential risk factors for common cold. Findings suggest that wine intake, especially red wine, may have a protective effect against common cold. Beer, spirits, and total alcohol intakes do not seem to affect the incidence of common cold.

Gregory Cochran is (darkly) optimistic about how much low-hanging fruit is out there in the world of medical research:

If we look at cases where an innovation or discovery was possible — even easy — for a long time before it was actually developed, we might be able to find patterns that would help us detect the low-hanging fruit dangling right in front of us today.

For now, one example.  We know that gastric and duodenal ulcer, and most cases of stomach cancer, are caused by an infectious organism, Helicobacter pylori.  It apparently causes amnesia as well. This organism was first seen in 1875 — nobody paid any attention.

Letulle showed that it induced gastritis in guinea pigs, 1888. Walery Jaworski rediscovered it in 1889, and suspected that it might cause gastric disease. Nobody paid any attention.  Krienitz associated it with gastric cancer in 1906.  Who cares?

Around 1940, some American researchers rediscovered it, found it more common in ulcerated stomachs,  and published their results.  Some of them thought that this might be the cause of ulcers — but Palmer, a famous pathologist,  couldn’t find it when he looked in the early 50s, so it officially disappeared again. He had used the wrong stain.  John Lykoudis, a Greek country doctor noticed that a heavy dose of antibiotics coincided with his ulcer’s disappearance, and started treating patients with antibiotics — successfully.   He tried to interest pharmaceutical companies — wrote to Geigy, Hoechst, Bayer, etc.  No joy.   JAMA rejected his article. The local medical society referred him for disciplinary action and fined him

The Chinese noticed that antibiotics could cure ulcers in the early 70s, but they were Commies, so it didn’t count.

Think about it: peptic and duodenal ulcer were fairly common, and so were effective antibiotics, starting in the mid-40s. Every internist in the world — every surgeon — every GP was accidentally curing ulcers  — not just one or twice,  but again and again.  For decades. Almost none of them noticed it, even though it was happening over and over, right in front of their eyes.  Those who did notice were ignored until the mid-80s, when Robin Warren and Barry Marshall finally made the discovery stick. Even then,  it took something like 10 years for antibiotic treatment of ulcers to become common, even though it was cheap and effective. Or perhaps because it was cheap and effective.

This illustrates an important point: doctors are lousy scientists, lousy researchers.  They’re memorizers, not puzzle solvers.  Considering that Western medicine was an ineffective pseudoscience — actually, closer to a malignant pseudoscience  — for its first two thousand years, we shouldn’t be surprised.    Since we’re looking for low-hanging fruit,  this is good news.  It means that the great discoveries in medicine are probably not mined out. From our point of view, past incompetence predicts future progress.  The worse, the better!

Why do Bedouins wear black in the desert?

The question so intrigued four scientists — all non-Bedouins — that they ran an experiment. Their study, called Why Do Bedouins Wear Black Robes in Hot Deserts?, was published in the journal Nature in 1980.

“It seems likely,” the scientists wrote, “that the present inhabitants of the Sinai, the Bedouins, would have optimised their solutions for desert survival during their long tenure in this desert. Yet one may have doubts on first encountering Bedouins wearing black robes and herding black goats. We have therefore investigated whether black robes help the Bedouins to minimise solar heat loads in a hot desert.”

The research team — C Richard Taylor and Virginia Finch of Harvard University and Amiram Shkolnik and Arieh Borut of Tel Aviv University — quickly discovered that, as you might suspect, a black robe does convey more heat inward than a white robe does. But they doubted that this was the whole story.

Taylor, Finch, Shkolnik, and Borut measured the overall heat gain and loss suffered by a brave volunteer. They described the volunteer as “a man standing facing the sun in the desert at midday while he wore: 1) a black Bedouin robe; 2) a similar robe that was white; 3) a tan army uniform; and 4) shorts (that is, he was semi-nude)”.

Each of the test sessions (black-robed, white-robed, uniformed and half-naked) lasted 30 minutes. They took place in the Negev desert at the bottom of the rift valley between the Dead Sea and the Gulf of Eilat. The volunteer stood in temperatures that ranged from a just-semi-sultry 35°C (95°F) to a character-building 46°C (115°F). Though he is now nameless, this was his day in the sun.

The results were clear. As the report puts it: “The amount of heat gained by a Bedouin exposed to the hot desert is the same whether he wears a black or a white robe. The additional heat absorbed by the black robe was lost before it reached the skin.”

Bedouins’ robes, the scientists noted, are worn loose. Inside, the cooling happens by convection — either through a bellows action, as the robes flow in the wind, or by a chimney sort of effect, as air rises between robe and skin. Thus it was conclusively demonstrated that, at least for Bedouin robes, black is as cool as any other colour.

The vampire is consumption in human form:

“Peter Plogojowitz…died…and had been buried…within a week, nine people, both old and young, died also…while they were yet alive…Plogojowitz…(came) to them in their sleep, laid himself on them…so that they would give up the ghost… They exhumed…(his) body…which was completely fresh…hair…nails…had grown on him; the old skin…had peeled …a fresh new one had emerged under it…I saw some fresh blood in his mouth…he had sucked from the people killed by him…(we) sharpened a stake…as he was pierced…much blood, completely fresh, flowed… through his…mouth.” (1725)

Tuberculosis was a disease of antiquity with a unique nom de guerre — consumption — and helped give impetus to the vampire myth. The ancient and universal presence of “bloodsuckers” will be chronicled from early times of recorded human existence.

In Western culture, ancient Greeks called their mythological bloodsuckers Lamia. The Libyan princess Lamia had an illicit love affair with Zeus. Hera, the wife whom Zeus spurned, killed all of Lamia’s children and drove Lamia into exile. The tale — told by Aristophanes (446–386 B.C.E.) and Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) — described how Lamia sought revenge by sucking the lifeblood of babies. In the second century B.C.E., a manuscript fragment by Titinus suggested garlic hung around the neck of children would protect them from Lamia.

After the arrival of Christianity, undead demons were accommodated by the new religion and were renamed Vrykolakas, roaming undead beings afflicting humanity. Many cultures followed with Albanians, Montenegrins, Bulgarians, Croatians, Hungarians, Serbians, and Russians naming their ethnic vampires. In fact, it was the Walachian prince, Vlad Tepes (the Impaler, 1431–1476), who was Bram Stokers’ model for Dracula. The German schrattl, or shroud-eater, was thought to rise from the grave spreading disease. The presence of mythic undead creatures populated Native North and South American cultures. In the 13th and 14th centuries undead Icelandic beings were added to other myths and called Grettirs.

Although it has been opined that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” the vampire myth brought cultural extremes together. Chinese jiangshi were corpses of those drowned, hung, or victims of suicide returning to drain humans of their life force. The Japanese and culture of India described similar undead blood suckers. As fatal communicable diseases and death were universal — and otherwise inexplicable — so were naïve myths of vampires. Myths would evolve into metaphors as well.

“…the body swells…Discoloured natural fluids and liquefied tissues are made frothy by gas and some exude from the natural orifices, forced out by the increasing pressure in the body cavities… eyes bulge… little wonder that Bacon was convinced that purposeful dynamic spirits wrought this awful change.”

“Blood migrates…in the course of decomposition…the gases in the abdomen increase in pressure…and are forced upwards and decomposing blood escapes from the mouth and nostrils.”

In 1739, Austrians occupying Serbia and Walachia investigated reports of a gruesome local custom: Exhuming dead bodies and re-killing them. The practice was a consequence of their ignorance of natural processes of bodily decomposition. During decomposition intestinal bacterial gas flows through blood vessels and tissues pushing blood stained fluids through the nose and mouth. Seven days after death, cadaveric skin loosens, the top layer sheds off in sheets in a process called skin slippage.

At a 1732 exhumation it was written, “They dug up Arnod Paole forty days after his death…and they found…fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth and ears; that the shirt (was) completely bloody…the skin, had fallen off…he was a true vampire, they drove a stake through his heart.” The presence of blood after death was interpreted as a sign of reanimated life — albeit at someone else’s expense. In the context of consumption, the visible confluence of paleness and hemoptysis lent credence to postmortem appearances suggesting life after death. That perception would be further fueled by ignorance regarding the transmission of infectious diseases.

“The Vampire is consumption in human form, embodying an evil that slowly and secretly drains the life from its victims.”

“For as long as what caused tuberculosis was not understood…tuberculosis was thought to be an insidious, implacable theft of a life…Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acute enough to be feared will be felt to be morally…contagious.”

– Susan Sontag

Prior to the Germ Theory, from the time of Aristotle, miasmas — or currents of contaminated air circulated by winds — were considered the cause of communicable diseases. As a result, continued connections between consumption and the vampire myth persisted into the late Nineteenth Century.

“Mercy died, apparently of tuberculosis, in January 1892…Mercy was a vampire…Mercy’s brother Edwin was a strapping young man of 18…in 1891 Mercy and Edwin both became ill… the boy went off to Colorado, where he recovered. His sister (Mercy) eventually was carried to her grave by the illness…Edwin returned still in weak health…why was such a strong man’s life draining away? Why had the same thing happened to Mercy only a few months before…nothing less terrible than a vampire was sucking their children’s blood and taking their lives with it…to their infinite horror, Mercy’s body, which had blood and seemed unnaturally preserved, with color still in the cheeks…(They) removed the corpse’s heart and burned it on a rock.”

Consumption — the captain of all these men of death — was chosen and persisted as a metaphor for vampirism. Charles Dickens wrote, that for individuals with tuberculosis, “life and death are so strangely blended that death takes the “glow and hue of life, and life the gaunt and grisly form of death” (Nicholas Nickleby). Dickens and others who witnessed victims of consumption — precariously hovering between life and death — recognized the stigma:

“The emaciated figure strikes one with terror; the forehead covered with drops of sweat; the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk; the little fat that raised them in their orbits entirely wasted; the pulse quick and tremulous; the nails long, bending over the ends of the fingers; the palms of the hands dry and painfully hot to the touch; the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as scarce to allow the wretched sufferer time to tell his complaints.”

Science, ascendant in the late Nineteenth, early twentieth century identified Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the agent of tuberculosis. Science also shed light on bodily decomposition after death. The cure of tuberculosis would follow and the myth and metaphors surrounding tuberculosis would disappear.

Plants convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, but this process involves a glitch — and an “expensive” fix, called photorespiration:

Researchers from the University of Illinois and U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service report in the journal Science that crops engineered with a photorespiratory shortcut are 40 percent more productive in real-world agronomic conditions.

[...]

Photosynthesis uses the enzyme Rubisco — the planet’s most abundant protein — and sunlight energy to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugars that fuel plant growth and yield. Over millennia, Rubisco has become a victim of its own success, creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Unable to reliably distinguish between the two molecules, Rubisco grabs oxygen instead of carbon dioxide about 20 percent of the time, resulting in a plant-toxic compound that must be recycled through the process of photorespiration.

“Photorespiration is anti-photosynthesis,” said lead author Paul South, a research molecular biologist with the Agricultural Research Service, who works on the RIPE project at Illinois. “It costs the plant precious energy and resources that it could have invested in photosynthesis to produce more growth and yield.”
Photorespiration normally takes a complicated route through three compartments in the plant cell. Scientists engineered alternate pathways to reroute the process, drastically shortening the trip and saving enough resources to boost plant growth by 40 percent. This is the first time that an engineered photorespiration fix has been tested in real-world agronomic conditions.

[...]

The team engineered three alternate routes to replace the circuitous native pathway. To optimize the new routes, they designed genetic constructs using different sets of promoters and genes, essentially creating a suite of unique roadmaps. They stress tested these roadmaps in 1,700 plants to winnow down the top performers.

Over two years of replicated field studies, they found that these engineered plants developed faster, grew taller, and produced about 40 percent more biomass, most of which was found in 50-percent-larger stems.

The team tested their hypotheses in tobacco: an ideal model plant for crop research because it is easier to modify and test than food crops, yet unlike alternative plant models, it develops a leaf canopy and can be tested in the field. Now, the team is translating these findings to boost the yield of soybean, cowpea, rice, potato, tomato, and eggplant.

An enterprising evil grad student could weaponize kudzu and then hold the world ransom for…one million dollars!