Science & Health – dr cedar

The Roman Empire, Christianity, Colonialism and Ecology

I have just given a paper at a conference on Ecotheology.

Not a term many people have heard of, perhaps. The premise was: what does religion, by which they actually, it turned out, meant Christianity, say about caring for the planet. Well, folks, Christianity itself says absolutely nothing.

I put in an abstract and then presented a paper on what the Bible says about ecology and our role on the planet. They had a keynote speaker doing the same thing. All of her quotes were from the Bible. I went to other sessions where the Christian speakers explained John the Baptists idea of immersing in water (I asked where he got that idea from) and appreciation of nature. And I heard some young women talk eloquently about Black Lives Matter (BLM) and being activists for change. But none of them addressed the elephant in the room: Christianity. So I did. I think that maybe is our role; to talk truth to power. Against the colonialization by the Romans on one side and the Ottomans and their predecessors on another side, my tiny place has not given in. We did not convert. We could not stand up against the medias of the days and their lies, fake news, conspiracy theories and insults because the Christian and Muslim colonialists owned everything, but still we persisted. We were dispersed from our homeland and still we persisted. How annoying.

And then our texts are taken, plagiarised (and this was a supposedly academic conference) and used to give legitimacy and to de-legitimise us. They are renamed, something you do to slaves. Supercessionists and supremacists call them theirs. They take them and misread them and misappropriate their contents and call them by new names: The Christian Bible (I kid not) and The Old Testament (akin to Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe) some quaint writings which have been superseded by Romans and Arabs. Thanks boys.

There is nothing in the Christian texts about ecology or care for the planet. All of it is in the Hebrew texts, the TaNaKh (Torah, the Five Books of Moses; Nevim, the Prophets and Khetuvim, the writings such as Psalms and Proverbs). Do take a look!

Used and abused

So my talk swung it round, but of course I am not sure they were ready to hear it; really hear it rather than merely listen in that polite White Western Supremacist way. How they loved the People of Colour (about 5 of them in the 225 attendees) at the conference. Look how inclusive we are, seemed to be on their lips. But the angry Jew, insulted and abused for 2000 years and still here was a definite no no. The angry Jew who stood up and said get off my culture, get off my texts, get off my land and get off my neck was a real no no.

And in their talks about how Christianity is aligned with nature they quote Psalms, written by that shepherd David. They take my culture and texts and exclude me by their supremacy. It is not White Western Supremacy that is the problem folks. It is Roman-Christianity.

So here is the problem and the solution to our ecotheological crisis because you cannot make the planet better without a belief that the planet deserves better.

The Problem

Colonialisation. It has been an ecological disaster. You have grown your needs (foods, energy) on other peoples lands. Some of those crops should not have been there anyway. You are looking all the time for Growth rather than Enough. You are seeking Surplus. Treating all land as if it is there just for your needs with a total disregard for the environment.

Imperialism: Forcing your ideas onto others. Proselytising and forcing conversions to your beliefs and having no regard for others opinions and beliefs. Mission and ministry.

All of this results in pollution, deforestation, destruction through this culture of colonial claims. Much of this is Christian culture, but unfortunately it is seeping into Islamic culture too, perhaps merely as a reaction to Christian Imperialism, but still, not good.

The claim that this is Judeo-Christianity is total bunk. It is Roman-Christianity.

Over 50 years ago (!) in 1967 Lynn White Jnr wrote a paper in the eminent journal Science (155; 1203-7) on ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’. The ecological crisis is based on “the orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature”. The Christian doctrine of creation sets the human apart from nature, advocates human control of nature and implies that the natural world was created solely for our use (Gen 1:28). In the Christian Middle Ages, according to White, we already encounter evidence of attempts at the technological mastery of nature and incipient exploitative tendencies that come to full flower in scientific and technological revolutions of later eras. Christianity, White concludes, “bears a huge burden of guilt for environmental deterioration”

It starts with the Greeks, continues with the Romans, with a pushback by the Ottomans.

And it continues to this day :

Now I have seen the Monty Python Film ‘The Life of Brian’ so I know what the Romans did for us, underfloor heating, roads and transport etc. I am a scientist so I appreciate the Academy to a limited extent. The Sciences have improved the lives of many. I am grateful for clean water and aseptic techniques. My Desert Island luxury would be a flush lavatory. But this has come at a price. We are alienated from each other and from nature. We think everything can be man made (even the weather) and everything has to be subject to man-made evidence. The Humanities have gone down that route too, measuring the unmeasurable. Due to this, Arrogance prevails. Christianity has arisen in the midst of the Roman Empire. Indeed it is a Roman Religion. It has Romans gods and Roman sacrifices of a human and has that human elevated to a god (just like the Emperors) and then his flesh is eaten and his blood drank each week in a re-enaction of human sacrifice. This is all totally abhorrent to Judaism.

Death and the Afterlife have become more important than life. Meekness, which is easier to rule over than a stiff-necked Israelite, is promoted. A disregard of the material world which is reduced to one of Sin and Shame results in this ecological disaster. How can you care for the planet if you have these attitudes?

There seems to be a love of suffering, especially other peoples in Christianity. A victim culture. This is not the view from the Bible. Poverty does not make you virtuous, it makes you poor. There is nothing noble is poverty or suffering. We are not trying to hold you there, so why should anybody think it fine to hold other people in this bad place? Suffering and poverty are not where we are meant to be. The Divine does not want that even if humans force it on others. We vote for Joy, please.

The Romans were a clever bunch. They were very worried about Judaism and the possibility of it infiltrating the West. So they took some bits of it (Jesus) and changed it, making the Jews the butt of the joke. And that is how it has remained.

Our books have been claimed, misread, misappropriated and merely used to give authenticity to a supremacist reading (no longer the Israelites, now Jesus and now Mohammed). The people whose book is it have been oppressed, insulted, lied about, fake news items told, conspiracy theories invented, racially stereotyped and their land claimed by all and sundry. The people we share this with are other indigenous peoples, not the West or the East. And yet we persist. Unlike many invaded peoples we kept telling our story, the real story of creation, why the world is , why we humans are here and how to heal the planet. Listen and hear this small voice in the desert.

So I am at a conference where none of them have actually read the Torah but keep quoting from it. A bit like reading Romeo and Juliet and thinking the story is about Verona.

In Judaism, before the world/universe was created Wisdom and Repentance were created. Now if you are completely righteous you are already wise and do not need repentance. But we are not completely righteous (although there seems to be a lot of smug self-righteousness around) so we need wisdom and repentance to exist otherwise we cannot stand. The Divine then looks into the Torah (Chumash; Five Books of Moses) and creates the world. We are meant to be in a relation with the Divine; a partnership, not a domination. Ecology is Holy. We are meant to be completing creation. Of course, we never succeed in this work, but we are still meant to do it.

The Solution

So let’s start at the very beginning (apparently, it is a very good place to start). Beresheit bara – In a beginning created— Yes, A beginning not The beginning. Perhaps the Divine had a few attempts at this experiment. In some sources it is about 974 attempts (or some other very specific number which is rather wonderful). In some, I imagine, Adam and Eve did not eat from the forbidden tree and so there was a perfect Shabbat, Shalom, completion. But completion goes nowhere, or as the poet says, a completed garden is a dead garden. If you have Shalom, which means completion, you have perfection and that is that. In some versions perhaps Adam and Eve ate from the tree and in that day they did die. Do you want a Midrash that may help here (and you can look up Midrash, there is Prof Google on the planet now- do the work).

An example: Circumcision. Males are born spermless. They are not fully developed and have to complete this during maturity. Females are born with eggs. Males also have foreskins, a bit like webbed feet I suppose. Some people do not lose the webbing between their toes in utero and have to have it cut at birth. Well, we see the foreskin in that way. Get it? Removing it is part of the act of being in partnership with the Divine; pledging your child to that covenant. Covenants are partnerships. Each gets something from it otherwise it is merely domination or forced conversions. Think about it.

Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi and the Dalai Lama

Asks Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi ‘Why did the Divine make such a botch of things that he had to destroy most of creation and start again with Noah?’ Sideways Midrash reply:

In a phrase of Abrahams: ‘The Divine of my youth’ Can also be read : ‘The Divine in His youth’ . The Divine used to be younger and made mistakes. ‘When the Divine was younger’. The Divine learns from us, the Divine evolves, is evolving, creating. The Divine is the creator, the creating.

We are always beginning. All the time the Creator is Creating. We are meant to try to complete it (and fail) but at least try.

‘We are not obliged to finish the work, nor are we allowed to shirk from doing it’ (Pirkei Avot -Ethics of the Ancestors)

Having a Creator gives authenticity and authority to creation. Having a Righteous Creator where Justice and Mercy play equal parts gives morality compared to the Roman and Greek gods who are whimsical and cruel. But you have pretended that we have a different Divine to the one we have and that our Divine is cruel because bad things happen. We do not know the mind of the Divine (My ways are not your ways….) so we make up stupid things to fill the gaps. But most of us could not find our way round the Periodic Table of the Elements, yet we use the internal combustion engine and watch television and read from computers. Make the connection, please.

Our place in creation: we were created last. Why? Well says Tosefta Shanedrin 8:4 written around 189 CE (Before Darwin) so that you don’t get haughty (great word). A gnat preceded you in the act of creation and no, I do not really know the role of the gnat in the scheme of things. Also, of course, so that humans could eat. No trees and plants, no food. No Sunshine, no trees and plants.

All flesh is grass
(Isaiah 40. 8th Century BCE)

The Divine has created a place for us with everything we need as a gracious host. We need to be better behaved guests.

What is our role in the creative process? This is where colonial Roman-Christianity gets it all wrong.

Firstly, in Genesis 1, they are created together, male and female. Sort of back to back like a Janus figure, unaware of each other. The word Adam comes from Adamah, which means Earth. We are Earthlings. Our bodies come from the earth and our bodies shall return to it.

But it is the word Dominion that is a real problem for us on the receiving end of colonialism. It has been used to make the fittest into the meanest, cruelest, bullyish, scared nasty little boys.

There has been great progress in moving some social, political and economic areas forward recently with Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #metoo as leading examples. Unfortunately, most of them have been given impetus by appalling events such as the murder of George Floyd. Bullies, scared nasty boys, part of the Dominant culture.

Dominion

What have we done with the word, dominion? Well In Genesis Rabah 8:12, a commentary on Genesis written 2000 years ago, Rabbi Chanina and Rabbi Ya’akov of K’far Chanin discuss having dominion over the fish in the sea etc. Rashi, the brilliant explainer of text, writing in the Middle Ages makes this clear (Pashat) for the rest of us. The Hebrew ְיִרְדּוּ

This can be read (from right to left as in carving) as RDOO meaning to have dominion over, or it can be read YRD, to go down. If we merit we rule, if we do not merit we are ruled over by the beasts and cattle.

Our role becomes a Moral Code from a Moral Divine. The Divine looked into the Torah and creates from Wisdom.

Partnership

There is a second version of creation (no we did not miss it when we included it). It sums up the first days and then does a little explanation:

The second version that the Name (Ha Shem) speaks

Although everything has been created here in this version it is not growing or being. Rashi again: Creation is in a state of Terem (Not Yet). There is Not Yet life, because there has not yet been rain and there is no humanity to work the ground, to CARE for the plants etc. The plants and animals want humans to intercede between the vertical and the horizontal. The first prayer is for Rain. Only Humans Pray. Our prayers take creation from potential (terem) to actual.

Rab Judah said : To enjoy anything of this world without a blessing is like making personal use of things consecrated to heaven, since it says: ‘The earth belongs to HaShem and the fullness there of.’ Psalm 24

Rab Levi contrasted two texts. It is written: ‘The earth belongs to HaShem and the fullness thereof’, and it is also written, ‘The heavens are the heavens of HaShem, but the earth hath He given to the children of men!’

There is no contradiction: in the one case it is before a blessing has been said. •Berakhot 35a:21 Talmud (90BCE Mishnah redacted c 189CE, Gemera c 500 CE)

Our prays move the use of the material world from the Divines to us. Thank you.

This is a very different reading. We are needed to allow creation to proceed down here, in this universe. Not domination. Partnership with the living earth and with the Creator. Not sin, but creativity.

And while I am here I might as well go into the other contentious issue, Israel, on which everyone has an opinion.

The Land

Firstly, it is the other name of Jacob (Ya’akov) the grandson of Abraham (Avraham), the child of Isaac (Yitzak). After Jacob wrestles with the Divine he is given an additional name. This happens a lot in Genesis. The name is Israel- man who struggles with the Divine. Not meek and mild and full of fundamentalism, a mere distortion, but a human that is in partnership on that ladder. A name, a person, a place, a space.

Secondly, we have our prayers sited in Israel for 3000 years, before the exile. Everyday

The Shema is said twice a day including this part

The land of Israel, promised by the Divine to the children of Jacob is not like the surrounding lands. No big rivers like the Nile, Euphrates or Tigris. Just the tiny Jordan, more a stream than a river. The entire land of Israel is the size of Wales, which is why you can’t find it easily among those Red and Green blocks of colour on the map above. The land of Israel relies on rain and dew. So for 3000 years we pray for it. For the last 2000 years we have a prayer the Amidah, said three times a day which in summer says : Causes the dew to descend and in winter says: Causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall. Our spiritual practice is, like most indigenous peoples, connected to a land, a place and our place in creation. Of course the colonialists don’t know that, which is why the Chinese can throw the Buddhist Tibetans from their sacred land and the Western Christians can throw the Aborigines from their sacred lands and the Native Peoples of the Americas from their sacred lands. The Muslims tend not to throw people from their lands, but force conversion on them instead, removing the sacredness of a specific place to make it a universal adherence.

How can you care for the planet and for life if you do not appreciate your very small role in it and have disdain for the material world? You need to see the sacred in it.

‘Know that when a person prays in a field, every blade of grass enters into their prayer and helps them, giving strength to their prayer’ Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810) Likutei MohaRan 2:11

All festivals are tied to the land, to agriculture and to place. The section of Deuteronomy above ends with a very important Mitzvah (commandment) you shall eat and be satisfied and praise the Divine.

We make a prayer for everything, for waking up, for washing, for going to the lavatory, for food, for water, for bathing, for clothing, for praying!

Our festivals celebrate moments in our history, such as the Exodus from Egypt, our acceptance of the Torah, the first fruits from the land each year, the act of creation each week (Shabbat) the fragility of our lives, our gratitude for them and our attempt to improve ourselves each year. The Torah is a guidebook/self-improvement manual when read correctly. There are more than 10 commandments. There are 613 and about 26 of them apply only to the land of Israel. We have adapted to diaspora, but we cannot fully be ourselves on a foreign land. It is not about colonialism. Our colonialism is a field, two trees and a donkey, rather than Kashmir (huge), Tibet, chunks of India (Pakistan and Bangladesh) etc. And the West Bank is the size of the county of Dorset.

Palestine is the Roman (and later Christian) name for Israel. The Romans have acted as slave masters renaming places (and later the British Empire, Ceylon, for example) just as colonialists rename slaves. All Palestinians were Jews. There were no Christians at the time and no Muslims either. Nor does Jesus or Mohammed appear in the Bible- really, I have been asked that! Colonialism knows no bounds.

While many People of Colour (POC) have taken on the religions of their oppressor/invaders/ colonisers, we haven’t. How very annoying. But on this tiny land is the place where our seasons run with our prayers. It is not random.

Partnerships– what is all of our role here on Earth, all of our roles? You may not have realised this: Adam and Eve are not Jewish. They are not Christian or Muslim even if our creation story has been taken and distorted. Adam and Eve and ‘merely’ Human. They are created this way so that every one of us can say the universe was created for us, us human beings, each one of us human beings. It is why we think life, especially human life, is so precious. We can break most of the rules of Torah to save life, any life. Which is why you see Israelis going in to disaster areas. That, of course, gets distorted in a wicked evil way by colonial bullies who pretend we are going to harvest organs (three day old rotted organs, really? How stupid and cruel ) or that we are doing it for show. The media pretend that we are murderers, the people that brought you all these holy commandments. I see the IG and Tweets. But it is the trolls and conspiratorial greedy people out there, the bullies and cowards that are the problem. The colonialists, not us. All humans are from Adam and Eve and therefore have the same role.

The Role

Our role is to bring Holiness down here onto Earth. The heavens, by default, are holy. We, all of us, are meant to be in the Image and Likeness, to make holiness here. The Divine is Hosting us here and not only should we be good guests, caring for the place that has been created for us to enjoy, to live in, to eat in, to sleep in, but we should reciprocate. We should invite the Divine to our place. Host a dinner at the least. Stop being a Schnorer – a terrible thing to be. The Shnorer is the person who, if you are each paying for what you ate in the restaurant, eats meagerly, but if you are splitting the bill eats and drinks the most expensive and the most amount and then complains about the bill. You spend you life subsiding the schnorer. Don’t be one; be generous, there is enough for all of us. It is a good thing to be generous; it is righteous. I should add that there is a huge difference between being righteous and being self-righteous (holier than thou). Don’t fall into the latter smugness!

Ha Makom– this means the place, but it is also another word for the Divine. In fact, the whole Torah is the name of the Divine. We are meant to create a place for the Divine to visit. The Israelites did this in the desert of Sinai. They built the Mishkan (Tabernacles). The Mishkan is from the word Shekhinah, the in-dwelling presence of the Divine that is in all people, a presence that Jewish mystical tradition also imagine as the feminine aspect of the Divine. She came into exile with us when we left the Garden. Clean your homes. Clean your streets. Wash yourselves. Prepare for the visit. Put your own food on your own table, but please, stop putting my food on your table, or even on my table and then claiming the place as yours and throwing me out of my home.

Ecology and Holiness

You cannot have this unless you appreciate the planet as holy, not sinful, just to be endured. Did you really think the Divine created it for suffering? You have a very cruel G-d if that is the case. That is not the one we have. Treat this place with respect. Gratitude and appreciation. If you do not know your way around the Periodic Table of the Elements and have a grasp of atomic theory, then try prayer. We have written many you can use if you need. We have a prayer for everything. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. I do not like hearing about John the Baptist and his amazing idea of Baptism- wow where did he get that idea from? We have mikvehs. We still do. We still use them. We still celebrate the festivals. We still have a Sabbatical Year (yes, that is where that idea comes from) when we rest the land (Exodus 23). Do look.

Our particular role seems to be to tell you this and hope you will hear. We are all, every one of us, to do holy.

We are all meant to be stewards on the planet in partnership with creation, not in domination over each other. As we say in Mussar, which is a guide to developing good character (and yes, psychotherapy comes from it) “No less than my place; No more than my space.” Acknowledge mine and keep to yours.

Addendum- further help if interested

1 Etz Hayim Torah and Commentary- this is split into the weekly portions that are read along with their companion Haftorah (from Nivim or Khetuvim) published by JPS originally but now by the Rabbinical Assembly. It is in Hebrew and English with essays in English. Really worth a read

2 Before you say that the God of the Old Testament in fierce or whatever and tell me about original sin, which we don’t believe in, perhaps you should read Exodus 32:10 (just after the sin of the Golden Calf!).

We recite this quite a few times a year and we call this:

The 13 Attributes of Mercy:

– The Lord! (Adonai)–God is merciful before a person sins! Even though aware that future evil lies dormant within him.

– The Lord! (Adonai)–God is merciful after the sinner has gone astray.

– God (El)–a name that denotes power as ruler over nature and humankind, indicating that God’s mercy sometimes surpasses even the degree indicated by this name.

– Compassionate (rahum)–God is filled with loving sympathy for human frailty does not put people into situations of extreme temptation, and eases the punishment of the guilty.

– Gracious (v’hanun)–God shows mercy even to those who do not deserve it consoling the afflicted and raising up the oppressed.

– Slow to anger (ereh apayim)–God gives the sinner ample time to reflect, improve, and repent.

– Abundant in Kindness (v’rav hesed)–God is kind toward those who lack personal merits, providing more gifts and blessings than they deserve; if one’s personal behavior is evenly balanced between virtue and sin, God tips the scales of justice toward the good.

– Truth (v’emet)–God never reneges on His word to reward those who serve Him.

– Preserver of kindness for thousands of generations (notzeir hesed la-alafim)–God remembers the deeds of the righteous for thebenefit of their less virtuous generations of offspring (thus we constantly invoke the merit of the Patriarchs).

– Forgiver of iniquity (nosei avon)–God forgives intentional sin resulting from an evil disposition, as long as the sinner repents.

– Forgiver of willful sin (pesha)–God allows even those who commit a sin with the malicious intent of rebelling against and angering Him the opportunity to repent.

– Forgiver of error (v’hata’ah)–God forgives a sin committed out of carelessness, thoughtlessness, or apathy.

– Who cleanses (v’nakeh)–God is merciful, gracious, and forgiving, wiping away the sins of those who truly repent; however, if one does not repent, God does not cleanse.

3 Our God is the same one Jesus prayed to, but I don’t think it is the one Christians pray to (God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost). We are monotheists and do not do idolatry or images of God. We also do not pray to our prophets and they cannot be blasphemed as they are not God.

4 Blood Libel. If you read the Torah (our foundational text) you will see that we do not make human sacrifices. It is absolutely abhorrent. We also do not drink blood, any blood, and have a way of sacrificing animals for food that drains all the blood. Jesus would have known that.

Matzos, unleavened bread, were made first in the Exodus story, about 2000 years before Christians existed and 2500 years before Muslims existed, so I doubt Moses was making Matzos with the blood of Christian or Muslim children (just for the deeply stupid out there).

None of us make Matzos using blood as we don’t eat blood, any blood (black pudding is the most non-kosher of foods).

Christians, on the other hand, eat the flesh and drink the blood of their God each week, an idea most of us think is really yucky on many counts. Perhaps a Roman way of being and certainly not a Jewish one.

5 There are other commentators on the Tanakh (Bible) such as Heschel, Buber, Sacks, Steinslatz, Soloveitchik, R Nahmun, Rav Kook, Arthur Green, . Do try reading some of these before saying what is in the Tanakh and what it means.

6 There are many good websites such as My Jewish Learning. Don’t go to Christian ones or others before reading the people that practice it otherwise you are doing colonialism and bad Western anthropology.

Virus!

A lot of stupid and misinformation has come out lately.

Covid 19 is a virus.

Viruses can live outside the body on stuff. They can live a while on cardboard/paper; but less time on metal/plastic. So you need to clean stuff transferred from outside to inside. Soap/ washing up liquid and water work well against viruses and bacteria (it’s to do with osmosis!).
Testing people is not the same as Treating people. So just assume everybody is Carrying the virus even if they are not Affected by it. Stay Home so all of us cannot infect you! They cannot test the entire population nor find everybody you have met in the last few days so just act as if we all have it and stay home to prevent speading it.
It’s a virus- like many other viruses. Think about it. Some people get severe flu and some don’t. We cannot predict who. Assume you could get it badly and act carefully (see 1 and 2 above)
It’s affects the respiratory system (lungs, trachea) and therefore it is probably spread by aerosol- sneezing, coughing. Masks are a good idea (clinicicans are wearing them!) to stop you sneezing/coughing droplets out of your moist lungs (gas exchange needs your lungs moist) containing virus. If you sneeze onto your hands the virus will live on your hands (see 1 above!) and you can then spread it onto other surfaces.

Evidence: What Evidence?

You probably are aware of ‘Likes’ on places such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These ‘Likes’ are put into an algorithm and then advertisements come up due to what you apparently ‘Like’. I love to confuse and add in random ‘Likes’, bell-ringing, star-gazing, flower arranging, shoe repairing etc. My favourite response was from a computer scientist on an Open University programme about computers and statistics. He said that when he bought a book online a recommendation would come up telling him: ‘People like you like the following books…..’ To which he said to camera, ‘I don’t like people like me’!

My mother used to tell me that one day they will tell you that Salmonella is good for you. They will produce statistics to prove it. They will say that this is scientific proof. But statistics are not scientific proof. Statistics are mathematical proofs.

Statistics measure the correlation between two events. How likely they are to occur together. Statistics tries to remove confounding variables; things that also happen at the same time, but are not really correlated. But they do not prove cause and effect.

Science is interested in cause and effect. It is not empirical, another mistake made by non-scientists. Empiricism does not measure cause and effect.

Science measures the link between cause and effect. It does this by experiment. That is why most other disciplines are not scientific. They call themselves scientific (Social Sciences, rather than Sociology, for example) but they cannot do the experiment to test the theory. They can only do the stats.

Example A: If you want to prove that ‘watching violent television makes children violent’, you would need to

take two groups of children 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and
put those two groups of children in exactly the same environments (food, clothes, rooms, etc) and
let one group watch violent TV programmes and
not let other group watch violent TV programmes
for a number of days/weeks and
see if there is a difference in behaviour afterwards.

This experiment would never be allowed, it is unethical; so you cannot do the experiment to prove the link. You can do the stats on children that watch violent TV, but you cannot be sure other things have not had the effect.

Example B: If you want to say that the ‘killing of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo started the First World War‘ you would have to

travel back in time to Sarajevo 1914 and
‘un-shoot’ Archduke Ferdinand and
see if the First World War still happened.

Good luck getting the grant for that research!

A number of academic disciplines that say they are using scientific methodology are not doing so and a number that say they are using statistics are still not doing scientific methodology.

The example I give my students are two excellent papers by very good teams.

one paper says that feeding babies on breast milk makes them more intelligent and
one paper says that feeding babies on breast milk doesn’t make them more intelligent.

How do they find opposite results? By statistical analysis. There is no experimental proof to either claim. There are a lot of confounding variables which get in the way of the correlation between milk and intelligence.

All the scientific evidence points to Salmonella not being good for you, so whatever the stats say, please don’t try the Salmonella.

Mortality OR Cancer- the Boolean Algorithm of Life!

Not the easiest title to very contentious issues- preventing ageing, becoming immortal, regenerating ourselves and looking like 28 forever.

Cells in the human body come in a variety of types, there are about 206, such as skin cells, kidney cells, liver cells, bone cells and within these categories (skin, kidney, liver, bone) there are subgroups of cells.

For instance, in skin there are epithelial such as keratinocytes, melanocytes and connective cells such as fibroblasts. About 206 types of cells. Any of which can become aberrant and tumorous. That is part of the reason we do not have a one fix for cancer, which cell is cancerous has to be found, nor one check for cancer as each type of cancer appears in a different part of the body.

We cannot detect a cancer until there are about 1 gram of cells, which constitutes about 10⁹cells, which is a 1 with 9 zeros after it- a billion cells. There are 206 types of cells, but there are many cells of each of these types. We humans are composed of about 10¹³cells, a one with 13 zeros, 10 trillion cells. So finding the correct cancer and detecting it early is not easy. If it was, we would have cured it ages ago.

However, what most people do not know is that cancers are probably changes in stem cells. There are about 206 types of cells in the body. These tend to be functional cells, the cells that do something, move oxygen, filter, waste, pump blood, digest food. While they do the stuff of life, the activities that keep us in what is called homeostasis, they get worn out by their work (as do we!) and can go through one of two possibilities, regeneration or death. On the whole they die. They are replaced by their other cells. These cells develop into the type of cell they are replacing, do their job, get worn out and die. All over the body this is happening. While you are reading this about 40 million cells in your body have died (about 60 billion cells die per day). About 2,800,000 red blood cells die per second! They have to be replaced.

Stem cells are the cells that replace the worn out functional end cells, or terminal cells. Stem cells are the feeder cells. They don’t do the functions, the activities of the body. What they do is produce under-developed cells into the areas that need replacing. Blood stem cells (found in bone marrow) feed the appropriate number of cells into the various blood cell types. The cells develop through a number of cell divisions to become all the cell types of blood, red blood cells (erythrocytes), granulocytes (neutrophils, eosinophils, basophils), monocytes (macrophages), leukocytes (T cells and B cells) and platelets (thrombocytes). And that is just the cells of the blood. There are stem cells whose daughter cells make all the types of cells of the liver. There are stem cells whose daughters make most of the skin cells.

Stem cells live their lives as producers of cells that go on to produce more cells that actually do things. Stem cells are the producers of potential activities, but do nothing apart from produce cells that go on to realise their potential. Stem cells tend to have names such as Somatic Multipotent Cells or Embryonic Pluripotent Cells. These names describe the potential of the cells they give birth to.

Multipotent are stem cells such as the blood stem cells described above. They can give birth to daughter cells that can become different types of blood cells, but they don’t become muscle or skin or liver cells.

Pluripotent stem cells have more potential. The daughter cells can become all the types of cells of the body, all 206 types. But pluripotent cells are more primitive. They exist only in the first few days of life (days 5-14 post conception, post fertilisation). Very soon, the embryo pluripotent stem cells become more restricted. They become multipotent. They make daughters in one compartment of the body, the skin, the bone, the muscle, the liver.

This is the basis of life. Lots of potential and lots of realisation. Some cells have the potential, but do nothing much apart from give birth to cell that will do lots. Some cells do lots, but die.

Cancer is when the terminal cells, the functional cells, refuse to die and start to have the characteristics of earlier, less developed cells; lots of potential but no actualisation. In fact, we grade cancers by how ‘underdeveloped’ the cells are, how backwards they have gone in what they do. We call the development of mature features, the development of being functional ‘differentiation’. Stem cells and cancer cells are less differentiated, have become less different, undifferentiated.

We can live with potential, what we could have been, or we can live with realising our potential!

But being alive is being mortal.

‘And the clock waits so patiently on your song’.

At the moment there are some duff anti-ageing ‘research’. Some of it is being done by people who do not have much if any biology background (they are hiding that). They are the equivalent of an evangelical preacher who acts live The Prophet. There are a lot of them around talking nonsense, but saying what people want to hear. They have some rich backers. Because you have made a fortune in oil or tyre manufacture does not make you a genius.

We have a programme, ‘Dragon’s Den’ where people that have made money take a bet on other people’s money making ideas. It is a bet. They talk as if the people asking for cash input are stupid, but given that many of the panellists (the Dragons) have backed losers in their time, the crystal ball of predictions is as accurate for them as for the rest of us. Given that we have finally realised that economists are on the same level as crystal ball gazers, we might realise that rich people are not necessarily the font of all knowledge. As they have made money they wish to be immortal. Immortality, in humans, is a sign of primitiveness; lots of potential, but no differentiation, no actualisation.

Realise your potential and die. Please. Future generations do not want these people to live forever. They don’t want any of us around forever. They want vital alive people. People born with potential and realising it. Not people scared to move just in case they are run over by a truck or smile just in case they get a wrinkle.

Our job on this planet is to realise our own potential, the amazing things we can do. We can all do crap primitive stuff like killing people and destroying things. That is what children do. Destruction. Realising your potential is becoming adult, creative, growing up, caring. So please realise your potentials and help all people to realise theirs.

And then leave.

I want solar and other climate change issues!

You are reading a weblog right now, so a mobile phone is likely to be close to hand. That phone is probably the size of a small envelope. That phone makes calls, telephone calls, quite an old fashioned idea. It also sends text messages, receives and sends email; emails that you have written on it. It connects you to the internet. It can store music and play it to you. It can play films. It can take photographs and store them. It has a diary, a calculator, an alarm, a clock, a date time, ways of notifying you and countless silly apps. It also contains a battery that lasts about 2 days or more on a 2 hour charge.

I want solar. I want solar the size of your mobile phone. I want a panel that size that captures photons of light for electricity. I want a battery the size of your phone that stores about 24 hours worth of domestic electricity (I could buy two if they are small enough and cheap enough!). That is all I need it to do. Not phone anyone. Not take their picture. Not play a game or video. Just capture photons of light and make electricity. Simples!

Can someone fix that for me/us please?

Body-Snatchers: Did the Science and Ethics get a Bypass?

Your choice. sir? frankenstein

Wow-I just heard, on Radio 4 BBC, a whole programme featuring this Canavero person and his ideas for head transplants. It is also all over the newspapers.

They keep talking about the person with a terrible disease of the body wanting their head transplanted to a healthy body.

WHOSE HEALTHY BODY? WHOSE BODY ARE YOU GETTING?

Come on guys. Are you suggesting we kill healthy people so that somebody can have their head transplanted onto them?

Really?

Whose?

I know- let’s go abroad and get their bodies!

From some poor family or some criminal or some hitch-hiker!

Really?

There is a dreadful exhibition that has toured the world where somebody displays plasticated humans. Real humans. They call it an anatomy exhibition. It is completely disgraceful.

What it really is are Chinese prisoners that have been sentenced to death. If they agree to sell their bodies to the curator of the show (from, of course, a Western country) they will be shot by a bullet. If not, they have a slower painful death. Yippee. People murdered for your entertainment.

Please never complain about our ‘primitive’ ancestors when we go to things like this.

Please never complain about the visitors to Bedlam in the 18th century to watch the mentally ill for their entertainment. This ‘anatomy’ show is in the 21st century. All over Europe. Perhaps elsewhere too.

Now the proposal is that people are murdered so some old wealthy person, or some rich ill person can have their healthy body.

Oh this is so bad.

And what is really sick is that the said ‘scientist’ (I use the term, liberally) is bringing some man along who has a really awful physical illness as his side-kick. The said scientist is so deluded that he thinks he is being kind and ethical trying to relieve this man’s suffering when in fact he is promoting something so vile and rotten I cannot believe he is allowed at a science conference.

It is also CRAP science- but nobody seems to care.

Canavero is so upset that the American public have not taken to his stupid vile ideas that he is taking his bat and ball in a hissy fit and going elsewhere.

Be careful where your children go on holiday.

The body snatchers are back.

See my blog below from March 2015:

In a recent report :

‘First human head transplant now possible’,

‘In 1970 Robert White successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto the body of a second rhesus.

Dr Sergio Canavero, a member of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, has proposed using a similar method with humans.

He believes that it a team of 100 could perform the operation in 36 hours — at a cost of £8.5million. Both heads would have to be removed at the same time, and reconnected within an hour’ (The Telegraph Newspaper):

Now let’s have a little think about this, using our own heads.

First- I am going to pretend to take this seriously and do the science:

Transplants are difficult things for two reasons:

1) immunological problems– where the recipient (host) rejects the donor (graft) tissue because they are incompatible.

Transplants require matching donor to recipient as immunologically close as possible, but the recipient (host) needs to take immuno-suppressive drugs (drugs that suppress the immune system) for life. This makes the recipient susceptible to infections.

Stem cell science gets funding because it does fundamental research that has applications that benefit this clinical area. One area is ‘Regenerative Medicine’. This is getting your own stem cells to grow new tissue, the tissues that have degenerated. If you grow your own tissues you avoid the problems of immunological rejection of a donor transplant.

2) surgical problems- connecting the organ correctly so that it functions

Being able to re-connect broken nerve cells (neurons) would be of great benefit and the surgery that this claim invokes would be very useful in doing this for patients with spinal cord injuries.

We are having problems connecting the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The central nervous system (CNS) is even more problematic, probably due to the glial cell support, but we are not sure yet.

So all of this points to Canavero’s claim as CRAP SCIENCE!

Now let’s look at the ethics:

You know those ads for gyms and beauty parlours that tell you that you can ‘get the body you want’?

Well the body I want belongs to someone else (I can’t decide between Brad’s or Angelina’s as I would be happy with either attached to my head!).

So who is about to donate their body so you can have your ugly mug on it?

We can’t even get enough kidneys for transplants and each of us has two kidneys and can survive on one.

Heart transplants rely on someone dying as you cannot survive without your one heart and most of us are a bit reticent about being a donor.

Getting an entire (healthy) body is even more unlikely. If it is a healthy body why are they dying?

This is all so stupid that I wonder if Canavero doesn’t, in fact, need a brain transplant. Any donors?

Peace on Earth- Solar Power and Power Games

I am watching Bitter Lake a film by Adam Curtis on the BBC iplayer. It is about a deal made by Roosevelt and Abdulaziz in the 1950s guaranteeing Saudi oil for letting Saudi Arabia play caliphate with the Wahhabi regime. We are seeing the consequences of these deals all over the world now.

For a long time I have wondered why we have not invested in Solar Power. There is the sun, powering up this planet, keeping it warm, sending photons of light that all living things rely on. Plants use this light energy to make matter (materials), transforming energy into chemicals. We eat plants or animals that have ate plants to release, from the chemicals, the energy we need to fuel our lives, our metabolic processes. So why can’t we work out a way of using light energy to fuel our homes and cars?

By this I don’t mean those primitive black boxes spread over acres of fields or roofs to make enough energy to fuel a kettle? I mean sophisticated small boxes that capture energy. We have small computers and phones. Why not solar panels? Cheap, small, easily manufactured, linked to small, quiet generators or capacitors? Why, after all this technology are we still making fire to fuel our lives, whether the fire is from wood, coal, gas or oil, it is still fire?

Seeing that film I realise there is too much vested interest in not coming up with cheap, small, solar panels. These would free everybody and liberate us from power companies, so of course they don’t want them, and from countries sitting on oil and gas reserves, so of course they don’t want them. Fracking is not the solution.

A bright entrepreneur should put up a vast sum of money for a reward to the person that comes up with this. That would fuel the research.

The busine$$ of health

We are coming up for elections in the UK and the National Health Service (NHS) is always on the political agenda. However, nobody has the real discussion. They get bogged down in waiting lists and costs and rationing. But none of us has really decided what the NHS is and what we want. We confuse medicine and health and we put them into a strange administrative stricture called ‘business’.

We have taken on a ‘business model’ for health and health provision. (We have taken on a business model for everything it seems and money is the root of all decisions rather than what it is that we want; our values and aspirations). This business model has probably come from the USA where health is a very big, private business with large vested interests that want to keep it that way.

In a naïve, at best, and daft, at worst, way we have fallen for this model while having an NHS which was set up with a completely different, and in many peoples’ mind better, aspirations. We are in danger of losing the NHS. I have nothing against business. I have a lot against turning everything into currency. You know the definition of a cynic: ‘a person that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing’. I do not want health to become a mere cost, rather than a true value.

Let me explain what I think business is for those who spend years and lots of money doing business degrees and ending up as Business Administrators- which is not the same as being a business man or woman.

Business has one model really:

Buy cheap, sell dear.

In other words, business is about making a profit. It of course looks at getting customers in to spend their money and be loyal to your brand, but the real ethos is, buy cheap, sell dear.

Point number 1: For the NHS to take on this model is deeply and profoundly stupid. The NHS is not set up to make a profit. It is about curing people of an illness (the medical model). That is what it was set up to do: treat people.

The NHS is not free. All the people that work in it are paid. It is given money by the tax-payer to do that. It is a good use of taxes. Those people that are paid to work in the NHS then in turn pay their taxes.

There is a problem in that the NHS is generally used by people who do not pay taxes: children and older people, but the families of the children and the older people themselves have paid taxes into the system. In fact, there is a separate tax for Health and Welfare called National Insurance. The major problem with all British Governments is that they do not ring-fence that money and use it for the purpose it was set up for. It has become just another form of tax, when in fact it is meant to be a public insurance for health care.

Point number 2: The whole point of hospitals and doctors is to repair you and hope you don’t come back. The one thing the NHS doesn’t want is customers. It does not offer a loyalty card for frequent users! It should not offer a card for those that don’t use it to get some sort of discount. It is there for when we need it. If we were all healthy we would not be using the NHS and that is really the goal. So the NHS is only there for when we are not healthy and is not touting for business.

Businesses need people to buy their products so that they can make a profit. They spend money advertising their goods to attract people to buy their brand and then hope they like it so much they will come back and buy more of it, that they will feel it value for money, while the business also makes a profit. That is not the medical model.

Of course that is the medical model for which the NHS was set up. The health model needs each individual to take responsibility for their health. The NHS is a safety net for when things go wrong, rather than promoting its services, touting for clients.

Some businesses think they must diversify. This is usually a big mistake. Because you had a good idea and made it work does not mean you are the source of all knowledge and ideas. If your idea was a food product, it does not mean that you should go into fashion or home furniture. This is the big mistake of many an entrepreneur. We see it on programmes such as Dragon’s Den where successful entrepreneurs forget themselves. They had one good idea and maybe some luck. This does not make them the world’s expert on other ideas (or politics, education or health).

Point number 3: We need to decide what Health is and what Medicine is and what Social Care is and what Care is and then act on our findings and aspirations.

Our NHS is really for healing those who have become ill. It is good at acute care. It patches you up and then you are meant to be able to take care of yourself as a grown up individual. You are meant to be able to maintain your own health, that is called homeostasis and is the root of all our health, our ability to carry out our lives, our Activities of Daily Living (ADL) such as breathing, walking, feeding, excreting, communicating.

Some of us cannot do all these things and need constant help. That is care.

Some of us lead unhealthy lives and put ourselves at risk. We are repeat offenders/customers in the NHS. But that is our choice and entitlement.

We need to decide about the NHS at a fundamental level as we have some great things about it and some very poor things about it.

We keep blaming it for the poor health of the nation, but firstly, it was set up for acute care and secondly, the British are just culturally not very good at health. We are very good at medicine and clinical care. We do have public health and health promotion, but it is very badly done. We are good at epidemiology, the causes of a disease upon a people, a population. But we are not good at being healthy. We do try to promote health, but we tend to do it in patronising and infantilising ways, merely irritating those we are aiming our good intentions at. It is often carried out by people who do not really understand what they are saying, grasping at the latest poor research findings of a rather weak correlation, such as more people in the summer drown than in the winter and then ending up with some profoundly stupid proposal (should we ban summer or swimming?).

We train our doctors and increasingly our nurses in what is called the Medical Model. It is very successful at diagnosis, finding out what is wrong with somebody by inventing tests and investigations to see which part of us is not performing well, say our haemoglobin or our pulmonary circulation. By investigation we diagnose and then we treat, medically, with pharmacological drugs or by surgery. That’s it. It does not cure your life. It fixes the part that is wrong. The NHS was set up to do that. It should not be accused of being bad at other models as that was not its point.

In the UK we have not decided what health is and who should care about it and who should care about us so we do not know what it is and what we want and what we are willing to do as a nation.

In France they have. So perhaps we can look across the channel to them. The difference between France and Britain, according to the presenter Melvin Bragg is that ‘France is cultured and Britain is civilised’. I think he has made an important point there.

The French have a philosophy of health and of hospitals. They build them differently. They look at health differently. They have a different education to us. All school children study philosophy. They are not embarrassed about having discussions about meaning and context. We are.

The population of France cares about its food. We don’t. We will eat any old crap so long as it is cheap. They care about many of the basic things that we don’t care about. They have a culture of beauty. To have a care service run by people who don’t care about how things are is never going to work.

So while patching people up is done very well by the NHS, caring isn’t. We are civilised people in the UK, so we care about people, but we are not cultured so we are a bit careless about how we care, what care we offer. We don’t have a great culture of care. How can you be taught to care by someone that doesn’t care for themselves or others?

When I was young I had school cookery lessons by a woman who taught us to cook food that was really nutritionally poor and had no flavour to it. I got the impression she had never eaten sumptuous food or been exposed to a variety of cookery books and had her imagination stimulated. How could she teach us to eat well if she had not experienced what that was? She lacked food culture.

We need to learn how to improve the health of the nation. That is a philosophical debate about personhood, independence, community, tax, care, identity, homeostasis, ADLs, ethics and values. It includes funding. It does not include business. Health should not be a business. It should be an ethic. How we care about ourselves and each other. What we want and how to achieve those aspirations and values.

We were told, when we privatised everything, that we would have better services. All we have seen is larger profits for share-holders. A country that does not own its own infrastructure is not really a country. Why would you fight to defend Thames Water, Eon, Glaxo’s, Pfizer’s or Virgin Trains?

We were told that efficiency is the model for business (profit is, actually). Efficiency is a method of getting maximum profit. Speed to get to the end is the goal of many businesses. There is a cookery programme on TV where chefs compete to see who can make the fastest omelette. Really? Why would you want to eat the fastest omelette rather than the best? We have made many valuable commodities into puerile entertainment to generate money. But we must put our values and aspirations back on the agenda.

Point number 4: We must stop the internal market in the NHS competing for money on false objectives. How fast you can do something is not the root of medical practice or care. Time and motion studies should not be the ethos of the NHS. Competition among health care providers has not been shown to provide better care.

The NHS is fabulous at treating illness. It is not fabulous at caring. It is very poor at holistic care. It has the right ethos, but needs better training for caring. We do not have a culture of health and that is what we need in our population and in our NHS. But we must not throw out the NHS because it does not do what it was not set up to do. It was set up to cure. It does that very well. We may want to extend it to care and health, but we need a debate about who should be doing that and what it is we want. It may need a separate structure for health care or it may need a cultural shift, an educational change. We need to keep business out. Health should not be conflated with business, nor should the NHS.

For the sake of the children- 3 parent families

I have spent my laboratory working life in stem cell research. I am interested in ageing and stem cells seem a good place to start.

I have spent a lot of time around the regenerative medicine network and around people involved in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) and In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF).

I have written papers in this field and in the ethics of this field. So I am not saying any of this without having thought about it.

In the UK we have been lucky to have the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority which regulates what is allowed. Because something is possible does not mean it should be done. It is possible for you to murder, but you should not do that.

We have medical interventions that can save our lives, which is to the good, but we also have medical interventions creating lives that could not exist otherwise, and that is where a lot of contention comes in. I know that there are many opinions and feelings on this and I am not convinced who knows best.

We hear about people that cannot have babies, usually from women that cannot have babies, are infertile for some reason. They feel their lives are blighted, Now for me, I think that is a psychological problem as well as a medical one. I think they have focussed on the one thing they can’t do to the detriment of anything else. There are people with an illness that become that illness, they lose all sense of themselves, their identity becomes their illness. The Disability Lobbies have been stalwarts at altering that image. People with a disability are not the disability; that is merely a part of them and they are also able; able to be themselves. They are more than their disability. The same with disease or illness.

We also hear about people wanting babies that cannot have them for other reasons, such as being male.

And now we have people that do not accept this and so want to have babies somehow. Medical interventions and surrogacy have implemented this supply to those that demand it.

Surrogacy is basically renting a womb. There may not be a large payment, but the surrogate mother provides the uterus for the growth of the embryo. The embryo may be from the surrogate’s egg mixed with donor sperm from a man that wants a biological baby or it may be a donated egg from a woman that wants a biological baby, but cannot manage a pregnancy.

The problem of course is who really are the baby’s biological parents? I ask this as I imagine that when the child grows up it will want to know. Never mind the parents wishes. I want to know how the child feels.

We are more than our genetic material, but it plays a large part. Most of our genetic material, DNA, is held in the nucleus of the cell and codes for the genes that make the proteins that make us.

The mitochondria are little organs, organelles, inside each cell in our body. They are responsible for energy conversion. Glucose comes from our food and oxygen from the air that enters our lungs. Both glucose and oxygen cross into our blood and our blood transports the glucose and oxygen to every cell in our body. There insulin helps glucose to be taken into the cell (hence the problem for those with insulin deficits, diabetes) and both glucose and oxygen enter the cell. The glucose and oxygen combine in a similar way that petrol and oxygen combine in a car, burning up to release the energy contained in the glucose molecule, in the atomic bonds. However, in us it is done at a much lower temperature than in a car, with the help of enzymes which are protein molecules and proteins are coded for by DNA.

The glucose and oxygen combine to form ATP (the molecule on my front page) which is used as an energy store to fuel all the reactions of the body. Most of this is done inside mitochondria, so mitochondria are vital for our lives.

Mitochondria are unusual organelles. They contain their own genetic material, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Like any DNA it can have mutations and these get passed on in the maternal line as the mother makes eggs which have mitochondria in, her mitochondria. Each parent also donates nuclear genetic material to the embryo, but only the mother donates mtDNA. We can trace people back to ‘Eve’ by their maternal mitochondria. Many of us are interested in where we come from.

Mitochondria only contain about 37 genes while nuclear DNA (nDNA) contains about 30,000 genes. But the mitochondrial genes are vital and any mutations can lead to serious and very deadly diseases.

If a woman is carrying mutated mitochondrial genes she will pass them on to her offspring regardless of whether her nuclear genes and the father’s nuclear genes are fine.

To circumvent this, women with mitochondrial diseases need three biological donors:

one giving an egg with healthy mitochondria ( a donor female) but with the nucleus removed so there is no nuclear genetic material,
one giving nuclear genetic material (the ‘mother’ with the faulty mitochondria) but not donating the egg and
one giving sperm (the male donor) containing nuclear genetic material. Three partners/donors/parents.

The egg may then be brought through pregnancy by the ‘mother’ if it is only her mitochondrial genetic material that is at fault. In other-words, her nucleus with nuclear genes can be put into the egg with no nucleus but healthy mitochondria and fertilised by sperm. The problem is, you have just cloned a baby.

Again, how do the children feel when they grow up?

I imagine in the first case that the child of a surrogate would want to know the egg donor or the womb donor. In some cultures and religions it is the womb donor who is the mother, not the egg donor. I know of people who have used this method to have children because they wanted children. I am not sure how their children will react to finding out that their mother was rent-a-womb and that their parents have no further interest in her once she has done her bit.

For the mitochondrial child, there may only have been an egg with mitochondrial DNA genetic material donated and the pregnancy might have been in the mother. Not just the social mother, but the biological one.

I think we need to stop thinking about parents rights as there are no real inalienable rights to have children. Who do you blame if you can’t have children? Who do you sue; yourself? We need to start thinking about how we use women as just another commodity in our individual choices, in our buying power, in the way we treat each other and the planet as one big shop. We need to start thinking about how the children will feel and what they will want when they grow up. And most of us want to know where we came from, who our biological parents are, what their culture and customs are and how come they sold/gave us to another.

Cancer and Blame

Most of us probably want to believe that we get what we deserve! However, we were not really put on this earth to make these judgements. We cannot tell how other people really live, what they face each day, and what they deserve let alone blame them for all that happens to them.

A lot of money has been spent on bad science, pseudo science and bad public health. Most epidemiology looks backwards, what has happened, and from that tries to predict what will happen. But we don’t have a crystal ball and no event reoccurs in human populations exactly the same way twice. Yes, we can learn from history, but we cannot copy it or predict how things will turn out in the future. Hence economic prophecies based on pseudo scientific principles. What a lot of twaddle we hear from economists.

Public health initiatives are often based on very poor ideas. You read those ridiculous articles such as eating salt increases your chance of heart attack. The chance they are talking about is usually very small and the amount of salt that had to be consumed to increase this small chance was very, very large. But then a public health official will spend a lot of your money on an anti-salt campaign.

You cannot live without salt. All of your reactions in your body (your metabolism) occur in a salty liquid, a plasma-type substance, which exists both within the cell and between the cells of your body. You are about 80% water and a lot of salt. You are salty. Your kidneys filter water and salt keeping them in balance to meet your body’s needs. In fact where water goes so does salt. One cannot travel without the other. It is to do with osmotic pressure, keeping your cells at the correct salt-water balance. Too much water (i.e. too little salt) and your cells would swell up and burst. Too little water (i.e. too much salt) and your cells will shrivel and die. It is in balance. There can be too much or too little of everything. Life needs a balance. So campaigns that reduce salt too much also do you harm. If you live in a hot country where you sweat to cool yourself down (too much heat in your body kills you) then you are losing water AND salt. You need to replace BOTH.

A lot of bad science and pseudo science has been done on cancer. Why? Because it gets funding is the simple answer. Unfortunately, if you put in a proposal about cancer (or include education as an outcome!) you tend to stand a better chance of funding. While basic research, the science of cancer cells for example, is needed, a whole load of others get funding on the back of this. So we get the poor results and the silly links between things that aren’t linked at all.

I can invent some silly links myself such as ‘watching tv after 6pm gives you cancer’ or ‘reading gossip magazines gives you cancer’. I can prove these while sitting in my armchair. I would bet that nearly everybody that has died of cancer has watched TV after 6pm. There may be a few exceptions, but they would be brushed aside as exceptions. As to the gossip magazine, if you haven’t read one, you still probably read some gossip in a newspaper or heard it on the radio or TV or from a neighbour so I could still justify my arbitary claim somehow. This is because correlation does not prove causation.

Correlation is when two things occur together. The best example I was given to explain this was by a psychologist colleague. This is it:

In summer more people eat ice cream than in winter

In summer more people drown than in winter

Therefore (stupid correlation bit) eating ice cream causes you to drown.

No it doesn’t. More people eat ice cream in summer because they are hot and it may cool them down. More people swim in summer also to cool them down rather than go swimming when it is freezing outside. You could say that cooling down causes you to drown, but you don’t tend to drown from eating ice cream or sweating, which also cools you down. To drown you need to be trying to swim. In water or another liquid. If more people swim in summer than in winter than there are increased numbers of people at risk of not being able to swim in the water they are in and therefore drowning. We could probably argue that fewer people are watching TV in the summer as they are out doors swimming so watching TV prevents you from drowning. I guess it does as most of us don’t watch it while swimming (or even bathing in our bathrooms, although I have stayed in an hotel with a TV in the bathroom). Still, I would not say that watching TV prevents people from drowning. Now I hope you see that two things may occur together, ice cream eating and swimming, but they don’t necessarily cause the effect, drowning. Swimming doesn’t cause drowning either, if you think about it. It is the inability to swim at that moment in time that may cause you to drown. That may be due to a number of reasons: your general inability to swim, sudden changes in conditions, freak accidents.

Most of the bad pseudo science you hear is this sort of statistical analysis of populations done by people that say they are doing science, but they aren’t.

Well you must have heard a lot about cancer if you are over 20 years old. The most obvious one is ‘smoking causes cancer, particularly lung cancer’. I have a colleague who has never smoked or lived with smokers or lived in smoking areas and died of lung cancer. That would be impossible if smoking causes lung cancer. It increases your risk of getting lung cancer. The problem is that we are very bad at thinking about risk. Risk is to do with probability and we humans are not good at that, hence so many of us gamble. I hear people say that they make a living out of gambling. The only people that really make a living at gambling are the bookies and betting shops, the people behind the counter, not the people in front of it. We all have a flutter. But the flutter has been calculated so that we generally lose. The bookies are better at probability than we are.

Richard Doyle is the epidemiologist that came up with the link between smoking and cancer. He was good at his job. What he also said, that people have chosen to ignore is that if you give up smoking by the age of 30 you will, within about 10 years, have lungs as if you have never smoked. All those campaigns wasting money on getting teenagers to quit. It is the older (parents) that need to quit, the 30+ year olds. All that wasted money because they did not read the rest of the article!

How many of you have been asked by the doctor if you have ever smoked and if you were to say yes, 25 years ago, they would write you down as a smoker and blame all your problems on that. My father gave up smoking 40 years before he died. Still, any pulmonary (lung) condition he had they tried to blame on his having smoked. I would think that being a ‘Bevan Boy’ (sent down the coal mines) in World War 2 at a young age would have been more detrimental to his pulmonary health. Living 40 years after smoking and not having lung cancer may have been a bit of a give away in diagnostic terms; but why go with intelligence when you can go with poor science? There is a lot of stupid on the planet and wow, am I fed up of hearing it.

Coal tar has a detrimental effect on genes. It has carcinogenic chemicals, ones that can alter genetic material, ie cause mutations. That is what a mutation is. A change in one letter in your genetic code. You have three billion letters so finding a change in one of them is a tad difficult. Coupled to that you have 10 trillion cells. Each cell has that 3 billion letter dictionary. So you are looking for one letter change amongst 3 billion x 10 trillion. That is a one in a 30 billion, trillion letter. Now do you see the problem?

When daft pseudo-gerontologists (I have one in mind) come up with ways to live longer, which basically boil down to the need to diagnose people earlier with any disease potential (and we all have that) so they can live longer they aren’t really gerontologists. They aren’t biologists. They are popularists. They are talking for the sake of hearing their own voices. Where do you look? Which one of the 10 trillion cells? Which one of the 3 billion letters in one of those cells? Do you think people haven’t been trying to diagnose cancer before it kills you? Not just treat it, but spot it as early as possible?

We have always known that diagnosing cancer is problematic. By the time we can see it there needs to be about a gram of cells. A gram is a very small amount. A teaspoon of sugar (which may ‘help the medicine go down’!) has about 5 grams on it. A gram of cells contains about a billion cells. That’s a lot of cells. Cancerous cells.

The problem with bad science is the lack of understanding of the biology of us.

Cancer has two things going on; one is genetic, the other is cell growth. The genetic bit is that there needs to be a mutation and they occur randomly. A mutation can hit a gene that has no effect on cancerous growth. But it can hit a gene that does. However, one gene in one cell won’t kill you. What you need is for the cell to grow and grow.

Most cells only grow, make new cells, to replace old cells that have worn out and died. Most of your bodily activities are carried out by ‘terminally differentiated cells’ functional end cells which do not grow and make new cells. For instance oxygen is carried in your blood by red blood cells (erythrocytes). They are terminally differentiated. They have completed their growth and development and have become restricted in what they can do (differentiated). They can only be red blood cells. When they get worn out they get replaced by cells further back in development, growing cells that are quite undeveloped. They form pools of new cells that then go on to differentiate (become different) and highly specialised, such as red blood cells that only really carry out one function, carry oxygen in the blood. It is a bit like any manufacturing process. You take a sheet of metal, It could be made into anything. If is made into the front driver side of a car door. It does not then become a car roof.

The early, underdeveloped cells that provide later cells are the Stem Cells.

If you have a mutation in a cell that is about to become a red blood cell (a reticulocyte) it may not have much effect. Some red blood cells may lack a certain protein (genes code for proteins). If the mutation is in a gene for the protein that carries oxygen (haemoglobin) then there is a problem, the red cell is inefficient. If it is in a gene for cell growth it has no effect as red cells don’t grow. To get a cancer in blood cell you need to affect the cells that grow, the stem cells. There are not many of them and they are hard to find. Why would you look for them unless you already knew there was a blood cancer?

So predicting cancer and finding cancer is very difficult. If it was easy those pseudo-scientists could do it too.

Cristian Tomasetti and cancer geneticist Bert Vogelstein of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine have just released results showing that it is bad luck getting cancer, a matter of random chance. Which gene and which cell is not predictable.

Some cancers are more common than others. Cancers occur more often in tissues that are replaced often such as the linings of tubes (stomach tubes, gut tubes, urinary tubes) and the linings of us, our skin. These are from epithelial tissues and the cancers they give rise to are called carcinomas.

Cells involved in support and transport are also replaced due to wear and tear. Each time a cell is replaced it may cause a mutation to be made in its genetic material ( a misreading of the code). Tissue such as blood, bone, cartilage and dermal tissue is replaced often. This sort of tissue, connective tissue can therefore become cancerous causing cancers called sarcomas.

Cells that seldom grow and divide, muscle and nerves, seldom pass on mistakes so muscle and neural cancers are very rare. The neural tissue that supports nerve cells, glial tissue, does grow and that can become cancerous. Any tissue that grows is thus vulnerable. Tissue that doesn’t grow is less vulnerable. That’s it. Most of the other populist stuff about cancer is not worth the funding or the TV time. Hopefully this latest finding, which is what we all knew anyway, will stop some of the dreadful nonsense and false hope. Even more importantly, it may stop the blame.