The Last Word

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Cancer has students. One could argue they brought it on themselves, but ...

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

I like that

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

And C. relishes it!

[Tim]

Re: The Last Word

 

Cancer puts Relish on his students? Don't they object?

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

To no avail!

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

optimist = hope addict

pessimist = anti-hope addict

realist = blue/red pill addict (I don't know which one is whcih)

surrealist = purple fish addict

 

any others?

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

"Keratinized squamous epithelium" isn't on the list.

 

With good reason.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

But grading is done by histology' date=' isn't it? Why does those get different entries?[/quote']

At least for ovarian cancer, there are several different tissue types which can go cancerous, so in this case the histology is specifying which of those several different tissues has gone bad. (The bins we used are serous, endometrioid, clear cell, mucinous, and unspecified.) Grade (as we used the term) is how strongly aberrant in appearance the tumor cells are; that's just a numerical assessment, 1 through 4 with 1 being near-normal and 4 being most strange.

 

Most ovarian cancers in the US are high-grade serous tumors.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

So it would come down to a scoping issue, looking only at the teeth and not the rest of the organism.

 

If you know x chemical is bad, scope out the good part and focus on that. Then publish.

 

I also recall a James Bond film where the villain wanted to put fluoride in the water supply. This you-know, didn't tip people off?

 

Well, when you create a study like that, you aren't in it to monitor the total health of the subjects, or at least not usually. To do more requires a longer, more involved, more expensive study. There are trade-offs to everything in study design, and it isn't trivial to do.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

So that would explain why science comes up and says X has this beneficial health effect that gets plastered all over the news all the time*.

 

The scientists are in it for the funding, not looking at it from a whole quantum system perspective.

 

*If this is true, it would explain why I tend to ignore their advice.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

I read a magazine article about that effect recently; I'll see if I can track it down.

 

I will say that for most of the scientists I know, press releases aren't on their agenda. They have to publish, but the only publications that count are those in peer-reviewed journals. There are times when you know you've got something that might be found interesting by a journalist, but that angle tends to be thrown about by your institution's press office. Yes, I know some publicity hound scientists, but in general you don't go into science to get famous. You do your study, get the results published, and then use that as proof you do good science and deserve the funding to keep doing more. Yes, I know more than a few egomaniacal scientists, but they're nothing like any TV figure.

 

I would need a specific case of "X has this beneficial health effect that gets plastered all over the news all the time" to examine in detail. That is usually some corp's advertising department misquoting a peer-reviewed paper for its own advantage. They'll get some Bunsen Honeydew type to look sagacious for the advert copy. And that you should ignore.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

While the Beaker types suffer in the background.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Well, everyone knows that grad students walk point through the jungles of science.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

"Too bad, he was a nice guy -- but the fight for science and huge research grants must continue!"

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Heck, I'm more interested in fighting for modest research grants.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

Whereabouts is that in your business? Hundred thousands? Millions?

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Within a factor of 2 of $100k.

[Tim]

Re: The Last Word

 

Wow your research only generates $1000 in grants???

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

I read a magazine article about that effect recently; I'll see if I can track it down.

 

I will say that for most of the scientists I know, press releases aren't on their agenda. They have to publish, but the only publications that count are those in peer-reviewed journals. There are times when you know you've got something that might be found interesting by a journalist, but that angle tends to be thrown about by your institution's press office. Yes, I know some publicity hound scientists, but in general you don't go into science to get famous. You do your study, get the results published, and then use that as proof you do good science and deserve the funding to keep doing more. Yes, I know more than a few egomaniacal scientists, but they're nothing like any TV figure.

 

I would need a specific case of "X has this beneficial health effect that gets plastered all over the news all the time" to examine in detail. That is usually some corp's advertising department misquoting a peer-reviewed paper for its own advantage. They'll get some Bunsen Honeydew type to look sagacious for the advert copy. And that you should ignore.

The day before easter this year: eating chocolate is good for you.

 

a glass of red wine a day is good for you.

 

two I can remember of the top of my head.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

The red wine one is fairly easy to track down. But you have to be willing to follow things back to the original scientific literature, and then watch the abstractions of the actual scientific studies made back through to the popular media.

 

There are studies that indicate that for metazoans (that is, multi-celled life forms, i.e., not bacteria or archaeans) "caloric restriction" ... that is, a reduced calorie intake that is not accompanied by malnutrition ... is associated with longer lifespan. It seems to slow the aging process, which is itself a complex thing, where chromosome replication starts failing in cell division, DNA repairs stop happening in the cells, certain genes stop being expressed to the detriment of the organism, and so on. Obviously there is a lot of research effort put into figuring out what actually is going on at the cellular and/or tissue level that makes for that aging process, with the clear goal of halting or reversing it if desired.

 

{I am paraphrasing/editorializing from a specific paper in Nature by Wood et al, vol 430, pp 686-689, 5 Aug 2004 issue.}

 

There exists a type of proteins, called sirtuins, which seem to have an important role in some of these aging process mechanisms. The paper is about STAC's, sirtuin activating compounds, which seem to stimulate or activate the operation of sirtuins in three different species: yeast, C. elegans (a nematode), and lab fruit flies. One of these STAC's is resveratrol, and that seems to do extend the lifetime of all three of the test organisms. The wide differences between the three organisms -- no two in the same phylum, one even in a different kingdom depending on the classification scheme -- suggest a common mechanism that might still operate in mammals and (in particular) humans. There is no direct evidence in any sense about humans, mammals, or even vertebrates in this paper, however. (The three organisms in the study are all long-standing lab subjects with very well-studied physiologies and short lifetimes, both of which are very helpful in lifetime effects studies, among other things. Also, they are "low enough" organisms that the rules set up in response to animal-rights issues don't apply to them.)

 

Resveratrol is produced in plants, it is found in grape skins, and is present in red wine.

 

Now, that's a 2004 paper. I would have to do a literature search to see what has been done with mammals and resveratrol since that time. If I had to guess, there might a mouse or rat study done, but nothing more; mammals have such long lifetimes that there almost isn't enough time since 2004 to have completed a valid lifetime study. And there certainly hasn't been enough time to do a proper human-subjects study of any sort.

 

So there's some extrapolation from that result to "red wine is good for you", obviously. Who first made that extrapolation and got it into the popular media, I'd have to do more study that I'm unwilling to burn time on now. For all I know, it might have been the authors of that paper toasting people at a press conference, but I have no reason to think that, either.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

Mr Science Guy

 

can you check these claims (another) relating to Phi. I find it interesting, but the veracity of them is beyond me.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

The Golden Means crop up just about everywhere in nature -- the arrangement of sun flower seeds and pine cone scales are just two off the top of my head.

[Bazza]

Re: The Last Word

 

The Golden Means crop up just about everywhere in nature -- the arrangement of sun flower seeds and pine cone scales are just two off the top of my head.

 

I realise that, but colour, the Bible, many references in the human body, the universe itself, all this I find quite fascinating, but like anything, need to have it checked for veritable truth. If Mr Science Guy gives it the nod of approval then it is hunky dory.

[L. Marcus]

Re: The Last Word

 

You can crunch the numbers yourself, if you like. It's not like the data are secret, or anything.

[Cancer]

Re: The Last Word

 

Just beware: many patterns are in the eye of the beholder. Evolution has generated very strong pattern-finding mechanisms in humans' neural engines.