Glories of the Green Medicine Chest (Bitter Pill–Part 2)

The track record for green medicines had previously been almost miraculous. Though neither doctors nor patients generally realize it, about half the drugs they depend on come directly or indirectly from the natural world. The list starts with aspirin (now produced synthetically but first found in the bark of the willow tree) and includes all the antibiotics, almost all the anticancer drugs, and many of the leading cardiovascular medicines, among others.

The medicine chest is packed with stories of the most unlikely species transformed ingeniously into lifesavers. Gila monster saliva, for instance, might seem to be worth less than spit. But a hormone in the saliva has become the model for a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes, an epidemic disease that now afflicts 26 million Americans (with another 79 million considered prediabetic). Cone snails deep in the Indo-Pacific prey on fish by jabbing them with a venom toxic enough to kill a person. But a compound in that venom is now

Among the One Percent, Look Twice Before Crossing

Shiny Cars, Scary Drivers

For cynics, this might come as unsurprising science.  But a new study shows that as social status rises, so does the propensity to commit unethical acts, like lying in a negotiation, cheating, stealing, and breaking the law while behind the wheel.   The study fits a long line of research by Dacher Keltner at the University of California in Berkeley.

I’ve written in the past about his “Cookie Monster” experiment for The New York Times.  For the new study, published Monday on PNAS:

Observers stood near the intersection, coded the
status of approaching vehicles, and recorded whether the driver
cut off other vehicles by crossing the intersection before waiting
their turn, a behavior that defies the California Vehicle Code. In
the present study, 12.4% of drivers cut in front of other vehicles.

But drivers of top status cars cut off other cars almost 30% of time, versus less than 10% for the lowest-status cars.

It was even worse for pedestrians:  Top status drivers cut off pedestrians 45% of the time, versus close to zero for the lowest-status drivers.

The study attributes the effect to multiple factors:

Upper-class individuals’ relative independence from others and increased privacy in their professions (3) may provide fewer structural constraints and decreased
perceptions of risk associated with committing unethical acts (8). The availability of resources to deal with the downstream costs of unethical behavior may increase the likelihood of such acts among the upper class. In addition, independent self-construals among the upper class (22) may shape feelings of entitlement
and inattention to the consequences of one’s actions on others (23). A reduced concern for others’ evaluations (24) and increased goal-focus (25) could further instigate unethical tendencies among upper-class individuals. Together, these factors may give rise to a set of culturally shared norms among upperclass
individuals that facilitates unethical behavior.

The bottom line:   If there’s a Mercedes or Escalade in the neighborhood, stand back from the curb and pray, while also watching your wallet.

Let’s call it “the Lizzie Grubman effect,” for the wealthy publicist who allegedly yelled “Fuck you, white trash” before backing her Mercedes into a crowd of pedestrians outside a Long Island nightclub.  (And true to the study’s theory about “downstream costs,” she got off with 37 days in jail.)

“High social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” by Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner

How Livestock Feed Spreads Deadly Drug Resistance

For more than 50 years, livestock producers have been fattening their animals on commercial feed laced with antibiotics.  Nobody bothered to ask how this treatment worked.  Adding antibiotics to livestock feed–28.5 million pounds of the stuff a year, 80 percent of all antibiotic use in this country–was simply a quicker way to get livestock to put on weight, and since added weight meant added profit, that was enough.

A new study being published today changes all that, revealing for the first time how antibiotics alter the ecology of an animal’s gut–and also how that inadvertently puts human health at risk by making dangerous pathogens like MRSA resistant to our limited battery of antibiotics.

Among the startling new details:  Use of antibiotics almost immediately causes a 20-100-fold increase in one of the most notorious bacterial pathogens, E. coli.  The antibiotics also quickly cause bacteria to become resistant even to antibiotics the animals did not actually receive.  (It happens through a process called horizontal gene transfer.)

Detailing what  happens inside the pig is a key step in the rapidly developing debate about whether to ban the use of antibiotics in livestock feed, as has already happened in

Games Pigs (and Primates) Play

The notion of Dutch pig farmers being obliged to hang around devising ways to entertain their pigs sounds like something out of Orwell, or maybe PETA’s Kafkaesque vision of hell for factory farmers.  You can imagine some poor guy in overalls doing his best standup routine (“Two pigs and a priest walked into a bar …”), only to have the displeased or merely bored pigs declare, “We are not amused,” followed by 30 days in a box cage.

But according to a recent press release from The Netherlands:

Since 2001, European legislation has made it compulsory for pig farmers to provide entertainment in the pens to combat boredom, aggression and tail biting amongst pigs, which will hopefully eliminate the need for routine tail-docking. Farmers have been experimenting with all kinds of materials and games, but in practice it proves difficult to provide the animals with an adequate challenge.

And now, to the rescue, just as the impatient pigs are about to declare “Off with their heads,” come the amusing folks at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU) and Wageningen University and Research Centre, with a computer game that allows pigs and people to play together. “Pig Chase” employs what looks like a huge widescreen tv in the rearing pen with light effects that enable the pigs to interact with a human player, who uses an iPad.  The press release continues:

Not just people but also pigs like to play. It was already known that pigs are capable of mastering a simple computer game, for example. The innovative aspect of this research is the idea of getting people and pigs gaming together. Thereby they might offer each other

Nonsense About Birds

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, here are some colorful names for imaginary birds by the eminent master of nonsense, Edward Lear:

Properly Screwed-Together Beetle

Papuan weevil

I don’t think you can call this biomimicry, since humans invented the screw sometime around the third century B.C., and this is the first we’ve heard that the Papuan weevil got there first.

So maybe it’s more like convergent evolution, two species arriving independently at the same solution.  In any case, I like the mechanical nature of the discovery.  I have vivid memories of watching Dr. Denton Cooley perform heart surgery, and being struck by how mechanical it seemed, with veins being 45′d together the way a carpenter 45′s a joint, and lines being threaded through blind spaces the way an electrician will run a wire with a fish tape.  So this further instance of the mechanistic way things get put together also pleases me.  Here’s the press release from this week’s Science:

Many innovations in modern mechanical engineering were taken directly from nature, like the ball-and-socket joint, which was first described as part of an organism’s anatomy before being adapted as a machine. The classic screw-and-nut system, however, was thought to be a uniquely human innovation. Now, researchers have found an example of this screw-and-nut system in the legs of a beetle known as the Papuan weevil, Trigonopterus oblongus. (Apparently, evolution beat us to the punch on that one as well.) In a Brevium, Thomas van de Kamp and colleagues describe this functional screw-and-nut system in the weevil’s coxa-trochanteral joints, one of the three major sets of joints in an insect’s leg.  Until now, these particular joints were considered to be hinges. But, according to the researchers, the tips of the insect’s coxae closely resemble nuts with well-defined inner threads that continue internally for 345 degrees and the corresp onding trochanters have perfectly compatible external threads that cover 410 degrees. They suggest that an advantage of this system may be that the weevil’s legs come to a stable resting position, which is ideal for life on twigs and foliage.

Half the weevil's leg joint with external screw thread

The other half has an internal screw thread

The Species Seekers Quiz: Getting Batty

Who was Obed Bat?

1.  A student of Linnaeus who became one of his “apostles” in the Far East.

2.  Head of the scientific team aboard the British Navy corvette Challenger on the first great round-the-world oceanographic survey.

3.  A naturalist who was a comic figure in American fiction.

4.  A British ornithologist who was ritually beheaded as a spy.

And the answer is:

LA Times on The Species Seekers

Here’ s the L.A. Times review of The Species Seekers:

by Sue Horton

As prehistoric cave drawings attest, humans have been fascinated by other species since earliest times. But it wasn’t until the 18th century that a comprehensive, science-based system for identifying and classifying them was developed. For that we can thank Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist and physician, who first devised a pyramid of categories — including kingdom, class, order, genus and species — into which all life forms could fit.

Linnaeus’ “Systema Naturae,” published in 1735, got many things wrong, but it was still revolutionary. As Richard Conniff writes in “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth,” the “ability to distinguish one species from another and to sort out the relationships among species was … a critical advance for understanding life on earth.” It also, he writes, inspired a great age of discovery, in which a new type of naturalist traveled the globe in search of previously unidentified life forms. In the course of collecting and cataloguing plant and animal species, humans “stumbled from the security of a world centered on our species, created for our comfort and salvation, to a world in which we are one of many species.”

The 18th century and 19th century naturalists at the center of this highly readable book were often arrogant adventure seekers, desirous of the status that came with putting their names on previously undiscovered species. But even though they were rarely driven by a pure desire

A Revolution in the Ways We Live and Die

One night in 1877, in a squalid port city on the southeastern coast of China, a Scottish doctor named Patrick Manson performed a small experiment that would soon revolutionize the ways we live and die.  What was his subject?

1.  A dog.

2.  A mosquito.

3.  A human being.

4.  A laboratory rat.

And the answer is:

Why Roger Ailes Shouldn’t Call Other People Nazis

You probably think I’m going to say it’s about the pot calling the kettle black.  But no.   It has to do with a more general rule for acceptable behaviors.  This is a short piece I wrote a while ago for Smithsonian. (Background:  In case you missed it, Fox News boss Roger Ailes made a snarky half-apology to the Anti-Defamation League for having called NPR execs “Nazis” in the firing of Juan Williams, now employed at Fox.  Where, by the way, they routinely obey Benford’s Law.)

I like to collect gratuitous opinions served up as laws of social behavior. Murphy’s Law (“If anything can go wrong, it will”) is the most famous example. But the obscure ones are more fun. Say, for instance, that someone in an argument starts to foam at the mouth. You mildly remark, “What you’re saying is a perfect instance of Benford’s Law of Controversy,” and it will take a Google search for the poor sap him to figure out that you have insulted him: Benford’s Law states that passion in any argument is inversely proportional to the amount of real information advanced.

Godwin’s Law is also handy. It holds that the longer an argument drags on, the likelier someone will stoop to a Hitler or Nazi analogy. And in common practice, when a rival tries it (other than in appropriate contexts like genocide), you have only to say “Godwin’s law,” and a trapdoor falls open,