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polsci-080724-dogmatism-in-science.vtt
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WEBVTT
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.440
The following episode of Politics and Science features an interview with Dr. Raymond Peat,
00:00:06.440 --> 00:00:10.360
endocrinologist and physiologist from Eugene, Oregon.
00:00:10.360 --> 00:00:15.680
It was recorded on July 24, 2008.
00:00:15.680 --> 00:00:20.680
At that time we were struggling with a, how shall I say, a not very well functioning phone
00:00:20.680 --> 00:00:25.480
interface machine at WMRWLP Warren.
00:00:25.480 --> 00:00:27.000
And so the sound is a little funky.
00:00:27.000 --> 00:00:33.400
I've put it through some sound modifying programs and it sounds a little echoey now, but the
00:00:33.400 --> 00:00:35.340
buzz is gone.
00:00:35.340 --> 00:00:38.220
And I hope it's listenable.
00:00:38.220 --> 00:00:47.440
More information about Dr. Raymond Peat can be found at RayPeat.com, that's spelled R-A-Y-P-E-A-T.com,
00:00:47.440 --> 00:00:51.280
where you'll find many fascinating articles.
00:00:51.280 --> 00:00:56.440
And if you enjoyed the show or didn't catch all of it and wanted to hear the rest, you
00:00:56.440 --> 00:01:02.560
can browse your way on a computer to radionumerall4all.net.
00:01:02.560 --> 00:01:06.280
That's radionumerall4all.net.
00:01:06.280 --> 00:01:13.000
And once you get there, search for Politics and Science and you'll find a number of episodes
00:01:13.000 --> 00:01:18.920
ready to download to your computer to listen to at your convenience.
00:01:18.920 --> 00:01:21.440
All right, and now to the interview itself.
00:01:21.440 --> 00:01:24.440
Raymond, can you hear me?
00:01:24.440 --> 00:01:25.440
Okay.
00:01:25.440 --> 00:01:29.440
Let me hang up the phone.
00:01:29.440 --> 00:01:34.440
All right, thanks for joining us again.
00:01:34.440 --> 00:01:38.440
Let's see if I can get my knobs adjusted here correctly.
00:01:38.440 --> 00:01:45.960
All right, you're on the air and we're speaking with Dr. Raymond Peat out in Eugene, Oregon.
00:01:45.960 --> 00:01:52.560
He's an endocrinologist and physiologist who's written a lot of books about health and nutrition
00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:57.360
and science and has a newsletter called Ray Peat's Newsletter and you can find him on
00:01:57.360 --> 00:01:58.360
the web at raypeat.com.
00:01:58.360 --> 00:02:02.360
Raymond, can you hear me?
00:02:02.360 --> 00:02:03.360
Oh, good.
00:02:03.360 --> 00:02:04.360
Okay.
00:02:04.360 --> 00:02:08.960
I thought I'd lost you for a minute.
00:02:08.960 --> 00:02:13.400
Just yesterday we were doing a sound check and we sort of picked up where we left off
00:02:13.400 --> 00:02:19.440
last week talking about fats, fats in our diet and the use of fats by humans over the
00:02:19.440 --> 00:02:22.840
years and also as animal feed.
00:02:22.840 --> 00:02:30.600
And yesterday you were talking about cholesterol and you mentioned a fellow named Chris Masterjohn
00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:35.240
and I thought perhaps we could -- one of the things you said yesterday that kind of shocked
00:02:35.240 --> 00:02:42.680
me was that for years we've heard that cholesterol is something you get from fat, from butter,
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from especially beef fat, any of those meats that are full of supposedly saturated fats
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and that's why we're being so poisoned by cholesterol and it turns out that perhaps
00:02:56.760 --> 00:02:59.360
cholesterol isn't the boogeyman we always thought it was.
00:02:59.360 --> 00:03:02.680
It's actually something we need to function.
00:03:02.680 --> 00:03:10.280
Yeah, but eating cholesterol, if you're healthy, you have to eat a tremendous amount like the
00:03:10.280 --> 00:03:19.400
experiment where they had healthy, I think they were young men, eat eggs until they could
00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:27.000
see an increase in blood cholesterol and that took 22 eggs before they saw a rise in the
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day's cholesterol and it does rise if you're very sick and can't compensate.
00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:42.880
But in a practical situation where a person might want to raise their cholesterol, you
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can usually do it just by eating lots of fruit because for several reasons.
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The minerals and sugar in the fruit give the liver the energy it needs to make adequate
00:03:57.240 --> 00:04:08.240
cholesterol and there's, they call it a U-shaped curve of mortality.
00:04:08.240 --> 00:04:16.880
You have an ideal range of cholesterol for a given age and when you're below that range,
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your mortality increases.
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What are those ranges?
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Oh, the published, the people who talk about the curve usually put the bottom of the U
00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:48.560
around 160 to 180, but when you look at the figures, the bottom really varies with age.
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Like one study looked at people in a nursing home situation and saw that the ones who had
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the highest cholesterol, I think in that group, those with 270 lived the longest.
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So you have to think about the relation of the cholesterol to the stress you're under
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and consider it an anti-stress hormone.
00:05:20.760 --> 00:05:26.440
My father recently was told that he has to start taking statins and a lot of people are
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on statins.
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What's your opinion?
00:05:29.720 --> 00:05:40.080
Years ago, they started seeing increased mortality as they used drugs to lower cholesterol and
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there was one, I think it was Hungarian in the 1980s that showed a great increase in
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cancer mortality as they lowered cholesterol and that somewhat accorded with a Veterans
00:05:58.680 --> 00:06:08.200
Administration study in the 1960s that they stopped when they saw that people on the so-called
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heart protective low-fat diet were dying at a higher rate from cancer.
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But there are still some lingering data showing that the statins might increase total mortality,
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but the marketing is so intense that they managed to place articles convincing people
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how good it is.
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A recent book by Melody Peterson, I think the title is Our Daily Meds, gives a lot of
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information about how the drug industry manipulates the culture, paying doctors, well, writing
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articles for doctors and just getting them to sign their names and then publishing them
00:07:05.380 --> 00:07:12.640
in prestigious journals promoting their products.
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It gives a little bit of the inside information about how they're actually buying the medical
00:07:21.240 --> 00:07:22.240
literature.
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And Marcia Angel, seeing it from an editor's viewpoint at the New England Journal of Medicine,
00:07:32.240 --> 00:07:44.680
emphasized that the editorial decisions can completely bias the results of a topic if
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people choose not to even submit their data because it doesn't support the efficacy of
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a drug or the safety.
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A lot of studies will simply not get submitted, and then if the editors introduce more bias,
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you might have 50 studies showing a drug is harmful and useless and one that gets published
00:08:09.700 --> 00:08:13.580
showing that it's beneficial.
00:08:13.580 --> 00:08:23.460
Increasingly, Melody Peterson shows how the drug industry is not only modifying the research
00:08:23.460 --> 00:08:33.580
that gets done and how the universities treat their research, but how the journals publish
00:08:33.580 --> 00:08:38.020
it and then finally how the doctors use it.
00:08:38.020 --> 00:08:42.740
So the system is pretty well sewed up.
00:08:42.740 --> 00:08:51.660
Now, anything relating to drug therapy, you just simply can't trust the Anglo-American
00:08:51.660 --> 00:09:04.820
literature, and increasingly it has spread into Italy, Chile, France, Japan, as the industries
00:09:04.820 --> 00:09:08.020
become influential in those countries.
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India and Russia were relatively outside the commercial pharmaceutical influence, but now
00:09:19.140 --> 00:09:22.820
they're moving in that direction, too.
00:09:22.820 --> 00:09:25.860
So it's an effect of globalization, I suppose, is it?
00:09:25.860 --> 00:09:26.860
Yeah.
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Same corporate policies.
00:09:27.860 --> 00:09:37.220
Yeah, still some of the more backward economies still manage to do some real research.
00:09:37.220 --> 00:09:43.740
So yeah, I've heard it said that we have one of the most effective propaganda systems in
00:09:43.740 --> 00:09:48.700
world history, basically, in this country at this time, with access to the media pretty
00:09:48.700 --> 00:09:57.140
much sewn up by the corporations and alternative voices only heard on stations like ours, which
00:09:57.140 --> 00:10:01.660
are community stations, which there's quite a few of them around the country, but there's
00:10:01.660 --> 00:10:03.060
a lot of space in between them.
00:10:03.060 --> 00:10:09.700
So how's the media situation out in Oregon?
00:10:09.700 --> 00:10:21.780
Oh, well, in my lifetime, the Pacific stations have been the outstanding exceptions, but
00:10:21.780 --> 00:10:33.180
the university public radio station, about, I guess, 10 years, 15 years ago, it changed
00:10:33.180 --> 00:10:39.660
its format so that students don't have the access they used to, and now it sounds like
00:10:39.660 --> 00:10:45.700
one of those big city furniture advertising classical music stations.
00:10:45.700 --> 00:10:48.780
It used to be more of a community station?
00:10:48.780 --> 00:10:58.420
Yeah, it used to be a really good station, but the donors made it sound like one of those
00:10:58.420 --> 00:11:01.980
upper class, nothing but classic music stations.
00:11:01.980 --> 00:11:08.060
Yeah, that's, we're having, we tried to, we have a pretty small range here, but we do
00:11:08.060 --> 00:11:11.780
have an affiliation with Pacifica and with other community stations around the country,
00:11:11.780 --> 00:11:18.180
so we try to network our programming and share it between us all.
00:11:18.180 --> 00:11:28.220
Well, getting back to cholesterol, and there was a guy, you said the last time you were
00:11:28.220 --> 00:11:31.020
on the air, you spoke about somebody named Chris Masterjohn.
00:11:31.020 --> 00:11:35.860
Yeah, I've read several of his articles that are very good.
00:11:35.860 --> 00:11:43.620
My only disagreement with him is that he persists in believing in essential fatty acids.
00:11:43.620 --> 00:11:51.660
Yeah, that's something a lot of alternative, quote, alternative health people believe in.
00:11:51.660 --> 00:11:57.980
And what's, in a nutshell, what's your view on the essential fatty acids, just so everybody
00:11:57.980 --> 00:11:58.980
knows?
00:11:58.980 --> 00:12:10.180
Well, the first claim was that it was linoleic acid, then maybe linoleic was added, but already
00:12:10.180 --> 00:12:20.180
after the Burr's studies of the late '20s and early '30s, by the 1940s, their disease
00:12:20.180 --> 00:12:25.380
was shown to be nothing but a vitamin B6 deficiency.
00:12:25.380 --> 00:12:34.180
And at just about the same time, the agricultural researchers were showing that linoleic and
00:12:34.180 --> 00:12:44.860
linoleic acid were the causes of brain degeneration, testicular degeneration and infertility, and
00:12:44.860 --> 00:12:54.500
muscle degeneration, and fish oils, about the same time, were causing mink degenerative
00:12:54.500 --> 00:12:55.500
disease.
00:12:55.500 --> 00:13:04.260
And then the yellow fat disease was showing up in more and more animals as they were fed
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fish waste because of an excess of the polyunsaturated fats in the fish fats.
00:13:13.180 --> 00:13:26.740
And so the linoleic acid finally was recognized to be essential for cancer, but not at all
00:13:26.740 --> 00:13:30.140
essential for nutrition.
00:13:30.140 --> 00:13:39.860
And the publicity coming out that the original essential fatty acids were essential for cancer
00:13:39.860 --> 00:13:47.860
kind of discouraged the marketing in that direction, and that's when it shifted to marketing
00:13:47.860 --> 00:13:54.260
fish oil as the new version of the essential fatty acids.
00:13:54.260 --> 00:14:03.700
And that's where we are now at pretty much the peak of the fish oil promotion as the
00:14:03.700 --> 00:14:16.620
new fatty acids that are being recommended at higher intake levels to actually function
00:14:16.620 --> 00:14:23.100
as drugs to supposedly cure a lot of diseases.
00:14:23.100 --> 00:14:32.260
But in fact, the old research going back 40, 50 years shows that it is simply a temporary
00:14:32.260 --> 00:14:40.980
suppression of inflammatory symptoms while in the long run increasing the inflammatory
00:14:40.980 --> 00:14:44.020
degenerative processes.
00:14:44.020 --> 00:14:49.660
So the reason people have a subsiding of their symptoms is just their immune system has been
00:14:49.660 --> 00:14:50.660
knocked down?
00:14:50.660 --> 00:14:51.660
Yeah.
00:14:51.660 --> 00:14:58.700
David Horobin, who was a big promoter of polyunsaturated fats and who died of brain cancer and was
00:14:58.700 --> 00:15:06.740
trying to treat himself with his own fats, he published work showing that fish oil is
00:15:06.740 --> 00:15:10.540
very immune suppressive.
00:15:10.540 --> 00:15:23.540
And others looking at why fish oil is anti-inflammatory found that it wasn't the original long chain
00:15:23.540 --> 00:15:30.900
polyunsaturated fats that are found in the fish, but when they are processed and hit
00:15:30.900 --> 00:15:41.380
the hot organs of a mammal, they break down and it's the breakdown products, the aldehydes
00:15:41.380 --> 00:15:48.820
and free radicals that are decomposed from the fish oils, which are actually the anti-inflammatory
00:15:48.820 --> 00:15:49.820
substances.
00:15:49.820 --> 00:16:01.100
So it's the deterioration of the material that produces temporary relief, but it's also
00:16:01.100 --> 00:16:08.180
those things which contribute to the serious long range problems such as brain damage and
00:16:08.180 --> 00:16:11.140
vascular damage and so on.
00:16:11.140 --> 00:16:15.740
And you were saying last week that fish oil does have some good properties about it.
00:16:15.740 --> 00:16:17.460
It has lots of vitamin A and D.
00:16:17.460 --> 00:16:27.380
Yeah, it depends on how it's made, but in its crude form, it does come with a lot of
00:16:27.380 --> 00:16:28.380
vitamin D and A.
00:16:28.380 --> 00:16:29.380
I see.
00:16:29.380 --> 00:16:33.140
So if there was some way to get those vitamins out without...
00:16:33.140 --> 00:16:42.620
Yeah, there have been a lot of products on the market extracted from fish liver oil in
00:16:42.620 --> 00:16:49.500
which they concentrate the vitamin D and A a lot so that you can get your daily dose
00:16:49.500 --> 00:16:53.340
in a couple of drops of the oil.
00:16:53.340 --> 00:16:55.980
And some people are taking fish oil for anti-depression.
00:16:55.980 --> 00:17:00.500
I think they're called omega brights or something, some such.
00:17:00.500 --> 00:17:06.580
Yeah, there have been studies even in the published literature.
00:17:06.580 --> 00:17:13.940
The ones I've seen were just about an equal number saying it isn't effective as say it
00:17:13.940 --> 00:17:15.340
is effective.
00:17:15.340 --> 00:17:21.260
Same with using it as a supplement to baby food.
00:17:21.260 --> 00:17:27.260
There are studies that show that it retards iron brain development even though they don't
00:17:27.260 --> 00:17:29.500
get discussed very much.
00:17:29.500 --> 00:17:30.500
Is that the DHA?
00:17:30.500 --> 00:17:31.500
Yeah.
00:17:31.500 --> 00:17:36.340
And they've started adding that to baby food?
00:17:36.340 --> 00:17:37.340
Yeah.
00:17:37.340 --> 00:17:38.340
Oh dear.
00:17:38.340 --> 00:17:42.020
How did we get on fish oil, Raymond?
00:17:42.020 --> 00:17:44.580
Do you remember?
00:17:44.580 --> 00:17:48.020
Well it's being promoted as an essential.
00:17:48.020 --> 00:17:49.020
Oh, that's right.
00:17:49.020 --> 00:17:50.540
Thank you.
00:17:50.540 --> 00:17:53.220
And so flaxseed oil has gone out of fashion.
00:17:53.220 --> 00:17:54.700
I didn't realize that.
00:17:54.700 --> 00:17:59.820
And now they're promoting mostly fish oil in the alternative medicine field?
00:17:59.820 --> 00:18:02.140
I think so, yeah.
00:18:02.140 --> 00:18:13.340
The literature in the 1980s just became overwhelming showing that linoleic acid in particular is
00:18:13.340 --> 00:18:18.420
really the basic motor for pushing cancer excess.
00:18:18.420 --> 00:18:21.820
And linoleic isn't quite as bad.
00:18:21.820 --> 00:18:28.180
So flax isn't as bad as some of the others.
00:18:28.180 --> 00:18:29.620
We're talking to Dr. Raymond Peat.
00:18:29.620 --> 00:18:34.620
If anybody would like to ask Dr. Peat a question, there's no other phone line here, but I can
00:18:34.620 --> 00:18:46.100
receive emails at info@wmrw.org.
00:18:46.100 --> 00:18:56.060
So if essential oils are only essential for creating disease, how is it that they're so
00:18:56.060 --> 00:18:58.420
heavily promoted by the government?
00:18:58.420 --> 00:19:05.820
Well, several years ago the FDA had a warning not to use more than, I think it was three
00:19:05.820 --> 00:19:12.940
grams a day of those one chain unsaturated fats from fish oil.
00:19:12.940 --> 00:19:16.300
And I think they've dropped that warning.
00:19:16.300 --> 00:19:20.700
At least it isn't prominent like it used to be.
00:19:20.700 --> 00:19:29.460
And I think right from its very beginning the FDA was captured by the food industry
00:19:29.460 --> 00:19:32.380
and then the drug industry.
00:19:32.380 --> 00:19:43.540
And now they really are working primarily as a corporate defense system.
00:19:43.540 --> 00:19:50.300
Yeah, it always seems like they absorb the liability for the corporations by if they
00:19:50.300 --> 00:19:52.380
approve it, then you can't sue the corporation.
00:19:52.380 --> 00:20:00.620
Yeah, the same thing as government protecting the nuclear industry by saying you can't collect
00:20:00.620 --> 00:20:07.620
more than a certain amount of damage if you have a reactor explode in your neighborhood.
00:20:07.620 --> 00:20:14.620
Right, so basically the oil industry is underwritten by the government.
00:20:14.620 --> 00:20:25.100
Yeah, the public health service has a worse record than the FDA itself.
00:20:25.100 --> 00:20:33.620
The FDA interfaces with the consumers and tries to keep them happy.
00:20:33.620 --> 00:20:47.100
But at higher levels the agencies of the government have been more defensive of the power structure
00:20:47.100 --> 00:20:53.020
and pretty much ignoring the consumer level.
00:20:53.020 --> 00:21:02.020
Like in the years of the fallout from atmospheric bomb testing, the public health service was
00:21:02.020 --> 00:21:09.300
destroying data and putting out false data about the safety of radiation.
00:21:09.300 --> 00:21:17.540
Yeah, that is very telling of how the government can work at its worst.
00:21:17.540 --> 00:21:23.860
Maybe you could talk about radiation for a minute and how the government's bias towards
00:21:23.860 --> 00:21:29.580
that has made it more widespread.
00:21:29.580 --> 00:21:40.020
Well for 50, I guess 60 years I've been hearing from dentists and doctors that the dose we
00:21:40.020 --> 00:21:45.140
give you in examining you is very small and harmless.
00:21:45.140 --> 00:21:52.300
And then they reduce it tenfold and they say exactly the same thing.
00:21:52.300 --> 00:22:01.900
And the words are the same in 1940 and 1950 right down to the current.
00:22:01.900 --> 00:22:06.100
They claim they have digitalized machines.
00:22:06.100 --> 00:22:13.780
People think it's just bits of information coming through their bodies, but it's still
00:22:13.780 --> 00:22:16.500
the same old x-rays.
00:22:16.500 --> 00:22:19.500
They're exciting their cells.
00:22:19.500 --> 00:22:31.300
And even Linus Pauling took a less than adequate biological view.
00:22:31.300 --> 00:22:38.380
He was the one warning about the dangers, but he was looking only at the DNA damage.
00:22:38.380 --> 00:22:47.460
But the damage is much subtler than breaking strands of DNA.
00:22:47.460 --> 00:22:58.980
The excited electrons cause chemical and physiological changes that linger completely distinct from
00:22:58.980 --> 00:23:06.620
the immediate reaction of radiation with the DNA.
00:23:06.620 --> 00:23:16.060
So that for example, you can give a dose of radiation to cells in a dish and then add
00:23:16.060 --> 00:23:24.140
new cells that weren't exposed to radiation to that dish and the new cells will start
00:23:24.140 --> 00:23:34.820
mutating a day or more later from something emitted by the exposed cells.
00:23:34.820 --> 00:23:44.060
And that process lingers in the tissues and the blood serum and it's called the bystander
00:23:44.060 --> 00:23:46.940
effect that you can demonstrate in the lab.
00:23:46.940 --> 00:23:53.380
Cells that weren't exposed start behaving as if they were exposed by contact with the
00:23:53.380 --> 00:23:55.660
damaged cells.
00:23:55.660 --> 00:24:03.820
And people exposed from the Hiroshima bomb have been studied 60 years later and they
00:24:03.820 --> 00:24:10.940
still showed essentially excited electronic states in their tissues.
00:24:10.940 --> 00:24:18.660
And the same with people, I guess about 20 years after the Chernobyl exposure, their
00:24:18.660 --> 00:24:21.300
serum is still toxic.
00:24:21.300 --> 00:24:30.340
It can be removed from their blood and added to healthy cells and the healthy cells begin
00:24:30.340 --> 00:24:31.340
mutating.
00:24:31.340 --> 00:24:42.420
So it's the bystander effect which lingers and might continue causing mutations but it's
00:24:42.420 --> 00:24:46.140
a completely separate process from mutation.
00:24:46.140 --> 00:24:58.740
And so the safety assumptions were based on the model of how a beam of radiation will
00:24:58.740 --> 00:25:01.860
affect a molecule.
00:25:01.860 --> 00:25:10.700
And so it was worked out in terms of direct interaction between a molecule and radiation
00:25:10.700 --> 00:25:16.340
but in the organism that simply isn't how it works.
00:25:16.340 --> 00:25:26.460
And the Russians way back in the 60s were showing that where the Western paradigm was
00:25:26.460 --> 00:25:37.940
that if you irradiated an animal's brain it would go into estrus causing supposedly something
00:25:37.940 --> 00:25:45.100
was altered in the pituitary causing the ovaries to produce more estrogen.
00:25:45.100 --> 00:25:52.660
The Russians did a control experiment in which they irradiated the animal's foot instead
00:25:52.660 --> 00:25:57.620
of its brain and it went into estrus.
00:25:57.620 --> 00:26:08.820
And so they called them some kind of radiation toxin that was emitted by the exposed tissue
00:26:08.820 --> 00:26:13.540
but it's the same thing that happens in the bystander effect.
00:26:13.540 --> 00:26:22.460
There's some physiological biochemical change that is started by the radiation but then
00:26:22.460 --> 00:26:31.420
spreads and continues and the increased estrogen happens to imitate these processes started
00:26:31.420 --> 00:26:32.580
by the radiation.
00:26:32.580 --> 00:26:40.820
So there are probably many levels from the single cell which emits the bystander acting
00:26:40.820 --> 00:26:48.340
substances to the whole organism in which estrogen becomes one of the bystander activating
00:26:48.340 --> 00:26:49.340
substances.
00:26:49.340 --> 00:26:56.380
So you're saying a little bit of radiation causes this cascading effect throughout the
00:26:56.380 --> 00:26:57.380
body?
00:26:57.380 --> 00:26:58.380
Yeah.
00:26:58.380 --> 00:27:08.540
Two or three years ago in Seattle they were using low level fancy latest well calibrated
00:27:08.540 --> 00:27:16.500
x-ray equipment and covering the patients with lead aprons and so on.
00:27:16.500 --> 00:27:25.060
And they found that a full set of dental x-rays if the woman was pregnant at the time even
00:27:25.060 --> 00:27:34.460
though her body was shielded thoroughly her baby turned out underweight showing that basically
00:27:34.460 --> 00:27:39.300
the same effect as taking a dose of estrogen while pregnant.
00:27:39.300 --> 00:27:48.460
It spreads a stress influence that malnourishes the developing fetus and causes its brain
00:27:48.460 --> 00:27:58.060
to develop less fully than an unexposed fetus.
00:27:58.060 --> 00:28:02.860
Now the method you used to describe how the government assessed the dangers of radiation
00:28:02.860 --> 00:28:13.540
poisoning where they just sort of had a hypothetical theory that one molecule being affected by
00:28:13.540 --> 00:28:19.900
ionizing radiation but they didn't take into account the living being.
00:28:19.900 --> 00:28:26.340
I think you've said before that that's common in how science is conducted in the West.
00:28:26.340 --> 00:28:31.300
They do a lot of experiments in test tubes basically.
00:28:31.300 --> 00:28:38.460
Yeah and worse than that rather than if you look through PubMed you see lots of abstracts
00:28:38.460 --> 00:28:44.300
described as in vitro but now they have the concept in silico.
00:28:44.300 --> 00:28:47.300
What does that mean?
00:28:47.300 --> 00:28:53.220
It means they didn't have anything living at all it was all done in a computer.
00:28:53.220 --> 00:28:59.780
But people read the article and they're used to seeing in vitro and they think real cells
00:28:59.780 --> 00:29:04.940
were involved but in silico means in the computer.
00:29:04.940 --> 00:29:10.060
I've never heard that before in silico.
00:29:10.060 --> 00:29:14.500
So what's wrong with that Ray?
00:29:14.500 --> 00:29:18.220
What's wrong with doing I guess that's modeling basically isn't it?
00:29:18.220 --> 00:29:27.580
Yeah it's like the medieval arguments about angels.
00:29:27.580 --> 00:29:32.900
How much force base does an angel need to dance and how many can get on the head of
00:29:32.900 --> 00:29:33.900
a pin.
00:29:33.900 --> 00:29:36.860
You mean it's meaningless unless it's...
00:29:36.860 --> 00:29:37.860
Worse than meaningless.
00:29:37.860 --> 00:29:49.700
It is a way of amplifying your favorite hypothesis or assumption.
00:29:49.700 --> 00:30:00.180
It'll actually promote some absolutely wrong theory if you do your modeling right.
00:30:00.180 --> 00:30:07.380
So in studying science I think a lot of people are a little bit confused that we just figure
00:30:07.380 --> 00:30:12.220
it's empirical and they're testing theories all the time and of course the best theory
00:30:12.220 --> 00:30:20.180
will end up on top because it'll get the most positive results.
00:30:20.180 --> 00:30:26.980
How come that isn't the way it works?
00:30:26.980 --> 00:30:36.140
Lots of reasons but probably the basic thing is that it's all filtered through the culture
00:30:36.140 --> 00:30:53.100
and the system of assumptions and the assumptions if you look at different cultures the whole
00:30:53.100 --> 00:31:03.740
background of philosophy and religion influences what you think can be taken seriously as an
00:31:03.740 --> 00:31:13.900
assumption and because in the medieval times people believed in alchemy and the influence
00:31:13.900 --> 00:31:27.260
of the planets and astrology ordinary chemists and physiologists think it's absurd to consider
00:31:27.260 --> 00:31:33.940
the phase of the moon when you're doing a chemical or biological study but several people
00:31:33.940 --> 00:31:45.420
have looked at lab results done over a period of time and have seen that the phase of the
00:31:45.420 --> 00:31:54.900
moon does influence many experiments in the lab and for example I worked in the hamster
00:31:54.900 --> 00:32:05.860
lab at the university where the indoor temperature was kept constant and the light was artificially
00:32:05.860 --> 00:32:17.940
controlled so a person would not have any cues indoors whether it was winter or summer
00:32:17.940 --> 00:32:26.020
but somehow the hamsters knew what was going on outside the walls because their thymuses
00:32:26.020 --> 00:32:33.420
would atrophy in the winter season and come back in the spring just like they do when
00:32:33.420 --> 00:32:48.260
they're exposed to changing day length and that was investigated.
00:32:48.260 --> 00:32:58.900
Professor Brown in Indiana did many tests with potatoes, oysters and flowering plants
00:32:58.900 --> 00:33:09.740
and he had noticed that his experiments varied with the moon and he got some oysters from
00:33:09.740 --> 00:33:19.900
the east coast and studied their metabolism in Indiana and if it had been genetically
00:33:19.900 --> 00:33:27.980
determined the way the paradigm said it must be because hamsters can't know when it's winter
00:33:27.980 --> 00:33:33.180
if you're controlling their life cycle so it must be some kind of a genetically operated
00:33:33.180 --> 00:33:37.300
clock in their brains.
00:33:37.300 --> 00:33:48.100
Brown took his oysters to Indiana and they were still metabolically cycling as if the
00:33:48.100 --> 00:33:57.220
tides were coming into Indiana and he did the same thing with potatoes which aren't
00:33:57.220 --> 00:34:05.700
susceptible to tides and so no one knew about monthly cycles in potatoes but he saw a similar
00:34:05.700 --> 00:34:17.300
metabolic moon cycle in potato metabolism and flowering plants that he saw that he could
00:34:17.300 --> 00:34:25.260
take one of these plants that opens its petals at dawn and closes them at sunset taking it
00:34:25.260 --> 00:34:35.220
indoors they still kept up the same cycle and so he took it into a big building where
00:34:35.220 --> 00:34:43.980
no cues from the outside apparently reached and they still did it so he took his plants
00:34:43.980 --> 00:34:50.900
into a mine shaft and they kept cycling until they got down I forget I think it was hundreds
00:34:50.900 --> 00:35:02.420
of feet below the surface the plants finally didn't receive a cue and no longer cycled.
00:35:02.420 --> 00:35:12.660
So he demonstrated that something lunar or planetary influence was able to penetrate
00:35:12.660 --> 00:35:22.900
hundreds of feet of shielding and his plant showed that when properly shielded they no
00:35:22.900 --> 00:35:33.380
longer cycled disproving the idea that it's a genetic clock and other people were able
00:35:33.380 --> 00:35:41.580
to train plants to move their leaves at different times of day by giving them cues that over
00:35:41.580 --> 00:35:52.780
rode the environmental cues again disproving that it's all controlled by an abstract genetic
00:35:52.780 --> 00:35:53.780
clock.
00:35:53.780 --> 00:35:59.780
I see so you're saying that genetics is a dogma that's been pretty much accepted by
00:35:59.780 --> 00:36:01.940
the culture as the.
00:36:01.940 --> 00:36:20.620
Yeah it really is primarily a kind of religious belief that remember the Lamarck Cuvier controversy
00:36:20.620 --> 00:36:30.420
the person who took over the museum that Lamarck had been the director of for years when Lamarck
00:36:30.420 --> 00:36:37.100
was doing his work showing the inheritance of acquired traits the man that took over
00:36:37.100 --> 00:36:45.380
was a Christian catastrophist who basically said there was no evolution it was accounted
00:36:45.380 --> 00:36:52.740
for by a flood destroying the ancient species and so on.