Up From Facebook

For the past year, I’ve often encountered Sue, a local from Pawtucket, on my walks to Slater Park. She walks fast, takes pictures with her cell phone and can be very chatty. Over time, I learned that she has a pet conure and that she’s into fad diets. Yesterday, she asked why I’d been AWOL on the 10 Mile River Greenway and said she had been worried about me. Yesterday, I learned far more about Sue than I cared to. She informed me that we’re all born perfect, and that our subsequent lives—diet, culture, etc.—are what causes all the evils we see. She doesn’t believe vaccines prevent disease, claiming that in her job as a hospital phlebotomist, she never once got sick. In re: we’re born perfect, I asked her whether she thought Hitler and Stalin were born perfect. She informed me that Hitler was guiltless, never killed anyone and was “tricked” by Stalin*. In re: vaccines and disease, I asked her if she knew anyone who had smallpox. When she acknowledged that she didn’t, I pointed out that ...

Toddlers will sometimes cover their eyes, thinking they are hiding. They think if they can’t see you, you’re not there. Using that toddler logic at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, the Trump administration at the time tried to curtail reporting of infections and death, on the toddler-tested premise that if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Now Trump 2.0 has wheeled out toddler theory to deal with research on DEI: “In an unprecedented move, the National Institutes of Health   is abruptly terminating millions of dollars in research awards to scientists in Massachusetts and around the country, citing the Trump administration’s new restrictions on funding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, or research that could potentially benefit universities in China.” *snip* “Among those whose research funding was terminated is Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her letter said she would no...

What does one do if they possess valuable skills and lose their job? Well, intelligent, ambitious and entrepreneurial Americans market their skills to other employers looking to hire talent. But the  NIH Office of Defensive Counterintelligence and Personnel Security thinks the people they fired shouldn’t hire themselves out to the highest bidder in a free market: “ “As the Federal Government undergoes workforce modifications,” the memo begins, “staff must remain vigilant against those who will seek to exploit this period of transition.” Apparently foreign governments are recruiting and there are also insider threat concerns. A bit later: “Employees and fellows must be cautious of unsolicited job offers and suspicious collaboration requests …”   “And why would that be? Well, we hear, continues the all-staff memo, that “some foreign government and talent programs are attempting to recruit current or former NIH employees who were either dismissed or accepted the early retirement ...

HHS Secretary Kennedy wrote some comments about Vitamin A (e.g., cod liver oil) therapy for measles in a Fox News column about the measles outbreak in Texas. As we have come to expect from the anti-vaxxer RFK Jr, his medical advice was misleading: “But they lack important context, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine expert at the Baylor College of Medicine. Hotez worries the missing context might mean people put their faith in vitamin A over vaccination—a decision that could cost lives. “The thing that I worry about is by (Kennedy) playing this up and others playing this up, it sends a false equivalency message, that somehow treating with vitamin A is equivalent to getting vaccinated, which is clearly not the case,” Hotez said. “There is evidence that vitamin A can help support some people’s bodies as they fight off an existing measles infection, particularly for children who were already malnourished. But vitamin A is not actually a measles treatment in itself. “Plus, vitamin A can’t stop...

  I openly acknowledge that my gift for prophecy has been mixed. One prediction that I got badly wrong was that the internet would be an unalloyed good for society. Making facts and evidence easily available would, I wrongly believed, make for an informed electorate that would make wiser decisions as a result. Instead what has happened is that the internet has spawned and fostered an expanding cesspool of lies and misinformation. While lies and information in media are not new--indeed go back centuries--the ability to distinguish fake from real is not widely distributed, nor is the willingness to use that power by many who possess it. The internet has been a boon for me, not only as a scientist to quickly locate scientific facts and evidence, but as a citizen to challenge and evaluate stuff I read online. An important skill in making this work is to recognize and avoid confirmation bias, the human tendency to only seek out evidence for things we already believe. Being wrong isn't f...

These days, the term “conservative,” like the terms “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” have mutated beyond recognition. But I’m old enough to remember what conservatives used to be. Not the Bill Buckley brand of “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling stop” (a fool’s errand), but data-driven conservatism familiar to any research scientist. Accordingly, I’m a real conservative because: • I believe the nanny state needs to stay out of reproductive choice; • I believe the nanny state should get out of the marriage business and simply mediate the legal issues associated with civil unions regardless of the sex of the couples; • I believe there is a state interest in an informed and educated electorate, so I support public schools, universities and libraries; • I believe that the scientific method offers the most reliable path to understanding our world, so I oppose creationism and climate change denialism; • I believe that immigration is what made this country strong; • I believe the 2 nd...

I’m a big fan of history. History can teach us lessons and help us avoid the pitfalls that trapped our ancestors. But I’m always wary when people invoke historical antecedents to justify their reactions to the present. That’s particularly true when Hitler or the Nazis are invoked. Keeping that caution in mind: During the presidential elections of March and April 1932, Hitler’s paramilitary Brownshirts formed “emergency squads” to intimidate voters. On the night of the Reichstag election on July 31, 1932, Brownshirts unleashed a wave of violence, including the murders of local officials and communist politicians. When five Brownshirts were sentenced to death for these murders, Hitler condemned the sentences as “a most outrageous blood verdict” and declared that “from now on, your freedom is a question of honor for all of us, and to fight against the government which made possible such a verdict is our duty.” These words bear a disturbing resemblance to a statement made by Donald Trump d...

Candidate Donald Trump promised not to touch Social Security if elected. But President Musk made no such promise, and is already spouting the usual lies to justify cutting Social Security benefits and privatizing the program: “The billionaire argued Friday on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that the United States government is “one big pyramid scheme” before blasting Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” “When asked to clarify, Musk said, “Well, people pay into Social Security and the money goes out of Social Security immediately, but the obligation for Social Security is your entire retirement career. If you look at the future obligations of Social Security, it far exceeds the tax revenue.” While President Musk is right that Social Security has always been a pay-as-you-go system and that when the trust fund runs out, it will only be able to pay ca. 78% of current benefits, that doesn’t make it a Ponzi scheme.  What President Musk is doing is engaging i...

Trump posted on his pseudo-twitter site:  “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”  He announced something he calls a US crypto strategic reserve.  What, exactly, is a crypto reserve? Look, I get it. Money is whatever people use as a medium of exchange and a store of value. And crypto is used as a medium of exchange, albeit mostly by  wholesale drug dealers, money launderers and extortionists . But crypto as a store of value? Please. It would be more accurate to describe cryptocurrencies as a tool for pump-and-dump. Gold is rare on the earth’s surface, so it might make sense to have a gold reserve. It certainly did when the dollar was on the gold standard. But the US dollar went off the gold standard in 1971, so one might wonder what the purpose of a gold reserve is anymore. And a crypto reserve is a reserve of what . . . electrons? The disturbing possibility is that  this is about destroying Treasuries as the reserve currency. From the di...

Even as the MSM moves further and further to the right, it’s not enough for MAGA Republicans: “ Conservatives have spent the past 30 years setting up an alternate mediaverse—ranging from Fox News to Breitbart to Mark Levin—whose explicit goal has been to persuade Republicans that only they can be trusted. This is why it's nearly impossible to even converse with MAGAnauts: there's no common ground. If all you can do is point to facts and figures from the   New York Times   or the Department of Labor, you've lost already. The MAGA crowd doesn't believe that stuff anymore, and therefore they don't believe you either. ” I’d quibble with the word “conservatives” in that comment. These are right-wing extremists. Nothing conservative about them. Using facts and evidence as a guide to action is a deeply conservative value, one that has guided me successfully in a highly competitive and fast-moving scientific research career. A big problem with political discourse in 21 st  ...

When I was growing up, our vacations involved camping each night. With five kids, it was a way to maximize vacation travel while minimizing costs. We would often camp at national parks. And of course, having grown up in East Tennessee, I visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park many times. Our national parks are treasures, and I’ve always found the visitors centers well-staffed and informative. Now, the Trump/Musk Administration wants to destroy these civic gems: “ In addition, a federal hiring freeze announced shortly after Trump took office halted the annual process of adding more than 100 seasonal employees at area parks, they said, raising the possibility that popular sites might be forced to reduce opening hours, eliminate programming, and close visitor centers. “All the parks in the region have lost someone, and all without cause. It was, ‘We can fire you, and so we did,’” said one person with years of experience working on the Freedom Trail. “We’re running scared, and we’...

I grew up in Oak Ridge TN in the 1960s. It would have been hard to find any city in the world more pro-nuclear at that time*. Since then, nuclear power plant building went into decline in the US, partly because of concerns over safety.  But any serious effort to decarbonize the world’s energy will require nuclear power**. To make that practical, the problem of safety must be solved. While thorium molten salt reactors are inherently safe, they have never been made on commercial scale since they were abandoned in the 1970s over corrosion issues. Last year, it appears that a pebble-bed module reactor met the safety concerns of an unscheduled shutdown: “ The world’s first demonstration plant of a high-temperature reactor with a pebble-bed module (HTR-PM) entered its commercial operation on December 6, 2023. Two safety tests were conducted on the two reactor modules of the HTR-PM plant, each at a power of 200 MWt. During the tests, the active power supply was totally switched off to see...

Back in the early 80s, Marshall and Warren made the link between gastric ulcers and Helicobacter pylori infections. Suddenly, a painful chronic condition that increased the risk of stomach cancer was curable with antibiotics. A major public health scourge today in America is dementia, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. There’s growing evidence that periodontitis is linked to Alzheimer’s disease-related dementia (ADRD). A recent study extended that linkage: “To date, there are few reports that analyzed features of periodontitis and brain imaging findings associated with impaired cognition and ADRD. In this study, we examined the association of clinical, microbiological, and serological markers of periodontitis with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) markers of atrophy and cerebrovascular disease in a tri-ethnic cohort of individuals over the age of 65 years.” There is no treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. There are effective treatments for periodontitis. If treating periodontitis reduces t...