Was he a modern human with microcephaly instead? (New Scientist)

A team of scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories on Long Island claims that fluoxetine (Prozac) works by stimulating the proliferation of progenitor nerve cells in a part of the brain called the dentate gyrus. (BBC) Discovering that the medication has this action is a long way, however, from proving that that is how it treats depression. Psychiatric medications cause many brain changes and it is difficult to pinpoint which cause their clinical benefits, which are epiphenomena, and which are consequences of the fact that the patient gets better. The article alludes to a very important fact — for this to be an explanation of how antidepressants cure depression, it would have to be shown to be a mechanism of action common to all medications that have similar antidepressant efficacy. That research remains to be done. The consensus is, however, moving away from a neurotransmitter theory of depression and of how antidepressants work to one based on, essentially, tissue repair, as we appreciate that episodes of depression actually cause physical damage to the brain from, among other things, its exposure to chronically high levels of stress hormones.

…myself among them.

Publius understands the political and social preferences of white social conservatives on a host of issues in terms of a fundamental cognitive or cultural difference from their opponents:

Coincidentally enough, an FmH reader just posted a comment to my item on the National Reviews rock’n’roll list wondering about the seemingly fundamental Republican trait of “insisting that everything and everyone is really just like they are but won’t admit it.” How would I diagnose that, the commenter asked. Parochialism frames the answer succinctly, as Publius typified it.

Actually, this strikes me as similar to something I have been saying for awhile now about the essential Republican appeal to tribalism, which I find is an ingrained or, one might even say, innate human predilection. Here is what I said in August, 2005:

In other words, progressives rise against their base, reptilian, parochial tribal insticts, while conservatives indulge in them… and cannot conceive of the possibility of not doing so.

As suggested by Ed Fitzgerald at unfutz, you should check this list of medical doctors who do not believe in Darwinism. Finding your practitioner on the list should probably be grounds to start looking for someone new to take care of your medical needs. Funny, I was just talking to one of my colleagues on the medical staff of my hospital about a renowned specialist on our staff who guiltily shares with trusted confidantes that he is a non-Darwinist believer in ‘intelligent design.’ We were wondering whether he could really do a good job weighing the benefits of antibiotic treatment of his patients against the risk of breeding resistant strains.After all, it takes a conviction in natural selection, competitive fitness, etc…

The egg really came first! (Times of London)

At Least 16 Civilians Are Killed by US Airstrikes In Afghan Fighting (Washington Post)

The National Review offers up the top fifty conservative rock’n’roll songs of all time (New York Times via abby). Rock critic Dave Marsh, asked about the list, found it a desperate attempt by the right to co-opt rock music. Seems to me a classic example of how much mileage you can get out of taking things out of context. To say, for example, that the Who are counterrevolutionaries for singing, “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” (no. 1 on the list of fifty) ignores both the radical anti-authoritarianism of the overall theme of the song and the cultural iconoclasm of their cultural presence as a whole.

Michael Long, the list compiler, writes in National Review this week about the number two song, the Beatles’ “Taxman”, and announces that he will unveil the entire list of fifty on Friday, complete with iTunes links. But you can bet there will be no anti-capitalist links to free downloads of the tunes from Long!

Update: Here is the entire list courtesy of Left of the Dial.

“On May 16, the USPS expanded its year-old customized postage program to allow businesses the rights to place their logos on U.S. postage. The decision reverses a Civil War-era law that prevented businesses from placing advertising on any type of currency – including postage. The 1872 Mail Fraud Statute was adopted to establish the consolidated authority of the federal Post Office and to prevent schemes involving mailed materials.” From a Hewlett Packard press release; HP trumpets that it is the first corporation to take advantage of the new arrangements.

Related: Nothing is sacred: an off-Broadway performance of Stomp is preceded by the cast performing a live three-minute theatrical commercial. “They’re a captive audience. They can’t switch channels or change over or walk out once the thing is started.” (New York Times )

Incredible video close-up of a deep underwater volcanic eruption taken by a small remote-control submersible. Here’s more.

And news coverage:

Adam Gaffen at The Boston Globe ‘blog log’ took note today of my post about dental care for the indigent (scroll down to ‘The Root of the Problem’).

The Globe has now contributed to my conspicuousness by highlighting things this “Brookline psychiatrist” has written several times. Even people I know around town with no idea what a ‘blog’ is read the Sunday papers. Doctors are taught to write their notes in medical records as if the patient about whom they are writing is going to read the chart (which, often enough of course, they do). If Globe item keep popping up, I might have to start to write my FmH posts as if my colleagues in the medical community are going to catch wind of some of the things I say. I didn’t want my comment about having to beg favors for the care of my patients from area dentists to be construed as casting aspersions on the generosity the local dental community shows to the dentally needy!

I don’t know why in the world they don’t join the 21st century; ironically this Globe column covering online phenomena has neither (in the print version) the URLs of the weblogs to which it refers nor (in the online version) any clickable links. Instead, they direct readers to the gathered links at www.universalhub.com/0521.html.

And finally, Adam, as long as I am quibbling, wasn’t the Morgellons post more interesting than the dental one this week?? (Got more comments…)

Addendum: Adam forwarded me some feedback he got regarding his column, which will obviously be of maximal interest to Boston-area readers:

This MetaFilter query prompted a reader (thanks, Stan) to ask my opinion about the controversial medical condition referred to as Morgellons Disease, written about on only one academic paper by Savely, Leitao and Stricker in the American Journal of Clinical Dermatology in 2006. When I read the abstract —

— I was struck by several details. ‘First described more than 300 years ago’ but obviously not developing much of a medical following; an outlandish and medically implausible lead symptom; the assertion that it is ‘confused’ with delusional parasitosis (but is not delusional parasitosis per se), an ‘association’ with Lyme Disease, which, although a real illness, attracts a large number of wannabees hoping to explain diverse symptoms, many of them in the emotional or psychiatric spheres; and the dramatic language about ‘unlocking the mystery’ — all of these combine to spell ‘histrionic’.

The ‘disease’ has its own foundation, the Morgellons Research Foundation, which keeps a tally of the number of ‘registered households’ (3492 as I write this). Its website expands on the attributes of the condition, citing cardinal features of “disturbing crawling, stinging, and biting sensations”, non-healing skin lesions, and associated, striking fiber-like or filamentous projections as well as “seed-like granules and black speck-like material associated with their skin.” The website features a 10x magnified photo of the lip of an affected 3 year-old boy and an “object from the same lip” at 60x. The pictures make discussants of the condition on MetaFilter squirm, the only consensus emerging from the message thread there.

In noting that “the most significant element of the infection appears to be the effect on the central nervous system”, the web site notes that concentration and memory problems are nearly universal, that mood disorders are very common, and that the majority of affected children have “ADHD, ODD, mood disorders or autism”. Only one direction of causality is considered — that the supposed infection has CNS effects. But it seemed more likely to me that the causal flow is in the opposite direction — from the emotional to the (imagined) physical. So many of the attributes of this condition smack of the other controversial syndromes of which I have written which patients adopt as explanations for their distress and dysfunction, with implausible and inconsistent core sympotoms and definitions. Although many of these conditions have a medical reality at their core, diagnostic criteria are applied loosely and diffusely by wannabee sufferers and unrigorous clinicians swept up in the bandwagon effect. Interest in and information about them (much of it inaccurate and imprecise) is spread largely by the media and particularly the internet. An everchanging constellation of trendy syndromes or ‘diseases’ serve these roles. La plus ca change, la plus c’est la meme chose, as the saying goes…

Although searching academic resources such as Medline or Google Scholar for ‘Morgellons Disease’, as proponents dub it, yields only these few resources, a search on ‘Morgellons’ alone is more revealing. Weeding out the sensationalistic and the partisan, the best overview of the status of Morgellons is the Wikipedia article here. Lo and behold, modern interest in Morgellons is largely the product of one evangelist, the aforementioned journal article author Mary Leitao, who coined the term in 2002 while investigating her son’s unexplained rash. Not a medical professional herself, she has a degree in biology and has worked as a chemist and electron microscope operator. Far from having a 300-year history, it is merely named after a condition described 300 years ago to which it is analogous but certainly not identical. Thus, it is a bit disingenuous to aspire to legitimacy by the claim to a legacy.

Leitao is the founder of the aforementioned Morgellons Research Foundation. It would be tempting to suggest that she seems to have a sense of mission about this condition and that it is somewhat self-serving now that nonprofit dollars and the preservation of her foundation are at stake. Most of the other Morgellons boosters are not medical doctors either. And, uh-oh, the sensationalism is fueled by one nurse practioner who claims to have identified and treated ‘the majority’ of these patients. Sure, you might argue that that is because she is a pioneer who recognizes a condition to which others are blind in a geographic area which for some inexplicable reason has a cluster of cases, but more likely it is because she sees what she wants to see in a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of way.

The Wikipedia article notes the extent to which the condition embodies indicators of delusional parasitosis:

• The presentation of physical evidence such as skin scrapings and debris
• Obsessive cleaning and use of disinfectants and insecticides
• Rejection of the possibility of psychological or other explanations
• Emotional trauma, desperation, social isolation.
• Having seen numerous physicians, to no avail

While some clinicians report response of symptoms in several weeks with antipsychotic medication, I wonder whether it is necessary to invoke delusionality per se as an explanation. A delusion is a psychotic symptom representing a fixed disorder of thought not amenable to reasoning, and it is premature, even if one is debunking the disorder, to say that Morgellons sufferers are frankly delusional, rather than just insistent seekers of somatic explanations for emotional distress. Antipsychotics work in nonpsychotic conditions as well; most of them by the way are anti-pruritics, i.e. they have anti-itch properties. Using them in this condition, however, may be akin to using a sledgehammer to drive in a thumbtack.

This June, 2005 article in, of all places, Popular Mechanics, takes an expanded look at the phenomenon and ultimately shares my conclusion that sufferers convinced they have something real called Morgellons are leaping to conclusions. A number of doctors have sent samples from the skin lesions of affected patients to pathology labs and state health boards, standard practice in dermatological diagnosis. Investigations of samples uniformly fail to reveal any signs of infection or infectious organisms. Nevertheless, members of the Morgellons.org online community demand that the CDC investigate the condition as an infectious disease, a plaint recently taken up by Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Dick Durbin. Believers can write to Congress from the website.

Circumspect practitioners report that the nonhealing skin lesions go away if the affected area is casted for several weeks, preventing sufferers from scratching and picking at their sores, as our mothers taught us not to do when we were children. And what of the bizarre core symptom of the spinous or filamentous extrusions from the skin lesions? One Morgellons debunker found the photomicrographs touted by proponents to be almost identical to pictures at the same magnification of kleenex fibers stained with blood. It seems likely to me that most people would dab a weeping or oozing lesion with kleenex at least intermittently. I am tempted to elaborate that the absorptive properties of the fibers of kleenex would draw blood or serous secretions up and, as they dried, the fibers would stiffen. Probably the strands and fibers sufferers report are heterogeneous; perhaps some are fungal hyphae too, others clothing fibers and other adherent fiber fragments. The vehemence and histrionics with which the debunker’s explanation is dismissed in the comments by Morgellons proponents, unwilling to entertain any suggestion contradicting their fervent convictions, is quite telling. [See the same in the comments to this post. -FmH]

Morgellons is fascinating, but although certainly new medical syndromes are being discovered and/or codified all the time, it almost certainly does not belong among my occasional ‘Annals of Emerging Disease’ features here in FmH. Rather, I firmly believe it is of interest as a snapshot of medical sociology, illness subculture and the spread of trendy pseudodiagnosis in the age of the internet. Just as most fibromyalgia is chronic fatigue with muscle aches, this is chronic fatigue with skin lesions. And, although there may be a germ of truth (pun intended) at the core of all of these disorders, most sufferers have nothing very different than, yes, conditions described hundreds of years ago — neurasthenia, depression and hysteria.

Adam Gaffen at The Boston Globe ‘blog log’ took note today of my post about dental care for the indigent (scroll down to ‘The Root of the Problem’).

The Globe has now contributed to my conspicuousness by highlighting things this “Brookline psychiatrist” has written several times. Even people I know around town with no idea what a ‘blog’ is read the Sunday papers. Doctors are taught to write their notes in medical records as if the patient about whom they are writing is going to read the chart (which, often enough of course, they do). If Globe item keep popping up, I might have to start to write my FmH posts as if my colleagues in the medical community are going to catch wind of some of the things I say. I didn’t want my comment about having to beg favors for the care of my patients from area dentists to be construed as casting aspersions on the generosity the local dental community shows to the dentally needy!

I don’t know why in the world they don’t join the 21st century; ironically this Globe column covering online phenomena has neither (in the print version) the URLs of the weblogs to which it refers nor (in the online version) any clickable links. Instead, they direct readers to the gathered links at www.universalhub.com/0521.html.

And finally, Adam, as long as I am quibbling, wasn’t the Morgellons post more interesting than the dental one this week?? (Got more comments…)

Addendum: Adam forwarded me some feedback he got regarding his column, which will obviously be of maximal interest to Boston-area readers:

Italian P.M., calling the Iraqi occupation ‘a grave error’, to pull its troops out of coalition. (Washington Post)

Shayana Kadidal, an attorney at New York’s Center for Constitutional Rights working on a major lawsuit against the NSA spying program, details The Case Against The Hayden Nomination (The Huffington Post) Kadidal is also a contributor to Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush, from Melville House Publishing (2006)

Apparently, this minor author I delight in reading is now proclaimed Britain’s reigning postmodernist! Newsday interviews David Mitchell.

The US Dept. of Agriculture official guide: “Hijacking is extremely rare, but it does happen. It is well to consider how you should react if you end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time…”

If this is true, Jason Leopold of truthout has a scoop, in reporting that Fitzgerald told Rove attorneys he had 24 hours to get his affairs in order. As of this posting, any other references on the web to a Rove indictment are just citing Leopold. If Rove is served, can a Presidential pardon be far behind?

Update, also from Leopold:

Rove informs White House He Will Be Indicted: “Karl Rove told President Bush and Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, as well as a few other high level administration officials, within the last week that he will be indicted in the CIA leak case and will immediately resign his White House job when the special counsel publicly announces the charges against him, according to people knowledgeable about these discussions.” (truthout)

The Age [thanks to acm] takes an in-depth look at modafinil — the first eugeroic (“good wakefulness”) drug, which puts us on a new threshold in psychopharmacology. This drug promotes quiet wakefulness and seems to allow the body to get away with prolonged sleep deprivation seemingly without paying the price, and its enormous popularity makes the intended recipients — patients with medical conditions disturbing wakefulness, such as narcolepsy — a minute proportion of its actual users.

Although the ‘balance’ in the article consists of the comments of only one nay-sayer, I agree in finding it hard to understand how such a core biological necessity as restorative sleep, which has been rigidly conserved in evolution, can be cheated substantially without any biological or psychological consequences.

We think this medication is a dopamine reuptake blocker, but why it does not appear to induce the jangly tension that other dopaminergic stimulants such as the amphetamines do, why it does not induce tolerance (the need for larger and larger doses to produce the same effect over time) and dependency (a withdrawal reaction and rebound symptoms after it is stopped) with prolonged use, as do other dopaminergic drugs, is not at all clear. Of course, it has not been used long enough by a large enough number of people for us to be confident that its long term effects are already apparent. Yet, as the author puts it, we are too far down the path to the “24-hour society”, in which wakefulness is cool and sleep is not, to stop this juggernaut, its coming competitors and its flipside companions, the newer better sleep aids.

Targeting Myspace and social networking sites (CNET News ). Schools and libraries would have to render the sites inaccessible to minors under a new bill (backed by Dennis Hastert and so having a high likelihood of passage), the Deleting Online Predators Act. As Declan McCullagh points out, not only sites that let users create public “Web pages or profiles” but those that offer discussion boards, chat rooms or email services. It could target any weblog that allows public comments and discussion, for example.

Among other issues Hacking considers is why autism is being diagnosed more often; what it means for a diagnosis to be in vogue; and how autism might be a key to understanding the human mind. Is autism that one recovers from, or an autistic-spectrum disorder with preservation of intellect, somewhere in the spectrum of the same neurobiological condition, or something different?

“Grisly figures from the first systematic survey of early Neolithic British skulls reveal that life then was no rural idyll.” (New Scientist) Muggings were rife, deaths from assault-related head injuries a common cause of death. In and of itself this information is not telling, but it certainly does some harm to the myth of the Neolithic pastorale and the notion that scourges such as war and crime are products of the rise of the city-state, domestication and agriculture, and social class distinctions.

The news broke after an anonymous source with direct knowledge of the arrangement tipped the press that the phone companies had been turning over the records to the NSA. Let us hope this is, at minimum, a “growing impediment” to Hayden’s confirmation, as Dianne Feinstein put it.

Jesse Kornbluth is not apologetic for being ‘shrill’ and ‘partisan’, as accusers complain:

My sentiments exactly.

“…[M]ost dolphins recognized names — their signature whistles — even when emitted without inflection or other vocal cues. More than that, two dolphins may refer to a third by the third animal’s name…” (Yahoo! News) That last fact, for me, crosses the line to convince me that these are true names rather than just learned behavioral cues to a specific other individual’s presence.

New study endorses medication’s efficacy. In a complex design in which it was compared with behavioral treatment/counseling and acamprosate, another medication marketed for relapse prevention in alcoholism, the opiate blocker Revia (naltrexone) gets the nod as helpful. I use this medication for this purpose but have always puzzled about various aspects of how it works if it does.

First of all, as an endogenous opiate blocker, it supposedly blocks some of the activity of the internal reward system and thus diminishes the satisfaction connected with alcohol abuse. But why does it not block most satisfaction in the person’s life if that is the case? There is nothing specific about the effects of alcohol on the endogenous reward system; it responds generically to rewards.

Secondly, addictive behaviors pretty quickly pass beyond the stage of being rewarding; most people persist in abusing addictive drugs because they would be sick or in distress if they stopped. How would a reward blocker matter in such a case? I know I am speaking pretty schematically here, but I need to have some conviction I understand how a medication is supposed to work on a neurochemical basis before I will recommend it to my patients. That is partly because I believe that any medication works less well, or not at all, if the user does not have a belief in its effectiveness. In psychiatric treatment, where most classes of medications were discovered serendipitously and explanations derived after the fact, that is a particular problem.

The effects of naltrexone are modest at best; several studies have found that, while as in this study it was better than acamprosate, the combination of the two is far better than either alone in reducing the frequency and severity of alcoholic relapses. And the benefits usually are more robust in more severe alcoholism.

“Britain’s state-financed dental service, …stretched beyond its limit, no longer serves everyone and no longer even pretends to try.” (New York Times )

And neither, for that matter, does the United States’! None of my MassHealth (the version of Medicaid here) patients have any dental benefits, and it is getting more and more difficult to find even emergency services for them. From time to time, the underlying reason why someone presents to me with a mental health problem such as despondency or suicidality, alcohol or drug abuse (which MassHealth still pays for) is agonizing dental disease. When I can arrange to treat the ‘root cause’ [pun intended], it is only because I have begged and pleaded, calling in a favor from a dentist or dental surgeon colleague. More often, regrettably, the patient leaves the psychiatric service in as much mouth pain as when they came in, my efforts to go beyond merely patching them up to no avail. But I guess that is no different from many of the insoluble socioeconomic problems that are the real foundations of some of the mental illnesses I try to treat.

Addendum: Walker pointed me toward a particularly apt quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s <a href=”http://www.gladwell.com/2005/2005_08_29_a_hazard.html
” title=””>”The Moral Hazard Myth”:

I can’t help thinking that part of the impetus to accept moderation instead of abstinence comes from the growing prominence of pharmacological approaches to addiction which either moderate the desire or reward; or substitute a ‘more benign’ addiction for a more destructive one.

While the article does not detail what those advances in the understanding of consciousness are, my guess is that they relate to functional brain imaging of conscious mental activity. Nevertheless, I doubt that we will see surgeons obtaining PET scans or fMRIs of patients under general anaesthesia on the operating room gurney anytime soon. Consciousness researchers and surgeons couldn’t be further apart in the medical realm, methinks…

Some procedures are done under ‘conscious sedation,’ either because they are painfree or because they can be done with regional anaesthesia such as a nerve block. In some neurosurgical procedures, it is necessary that the patient be able to carry out actions on command to make sure that the surgeons are not messing about with the wrong parts of the brain.

But to be immobilized, conscious and feeling the pain of the surgical incisions would be the ultimate torture, to my mind. I have never seen or heard an interview with a patient who has been through that, but thinking about it inspires the kind of visceral horror that I imagine motivated those who fought for the abolition of vivisection.

In his first new album in six years, which the New York Times reviewer describes as “an ambitious and challenging work full of sonic experimentation and oblique lyrics”, Paul Simon is found working with Brian Eno.

New study endorses medication’s efficacy. In a complex design in which it was compared with behavioral treatment/counseling and acamprosate, another medication marketed for relapse prevention in alcoholism, the opiate blocker Revia (naltrexone) gets the nod as helpful. I use this medication for this purpose but have always puzzled about various aspects of how it works if it does.

First of all, as an endogenous opiate blocker, it supposedly blocks some of the activity of the internal reward system and thus diminishes the satisfaction connected with alcohol abuse. But why does it not block most satisfaction in the person’s life if that is the case? There is nothing specific about the effects of alcohol on the endogenous reward system; it responds generically to rewards.

Secondly, addictive behaviors pretty quickly pass beyond the stage of being rewarding; most people persist in abusing addictive drugs because they would be sick or in distress if they stopped. How would a reward blocker matter in such a case? I know I am speaking pretty schematically here, but I need to have some conviction I understand how a medication is supposed to work on a neurochemical basis before I will recommend it to my patients. That is partly because I believe that any medication works less well, or not at all, if the user does not have a belief in its effectiveness. In psychiatric treatment, where most classes of medications were discovered serendipitously and explanations derived after the fact, that is a particular problem.

The effects of naltrexone are modest at best; several studies have found that, while as in this study it was better than acamprosate, the combination of the two is far better than either alone in reducing the frequency and severity of alcoholic relapses. And the benefits usually are more robust in more severe alcoholism.

And: Bush CIA Pick is Domestic Spying Advocate (New York Times )

“Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans” (US News)

“Jews in particular need to be aware of the gift Brown has given, in all innocence, to anti-Semites.” (The Jewish Week thanks to walker)

FmH was ‘today’s blog’ a couple of days ago at Interrupting Gelastic Jew:

Actually, although I am no less dripping with contempt for Bush and Co., it seems to me I am venting it much less here these days. It is pretty well established that he is the worst president in recent history, if not in the history of the American presidency. I am far more concerned about, and contemptuous of, the sheeplike and cowardly electorate who elected him nearly elected him twice and demoralized by the futility of influencing the voters’ receptivity to be sold down the river by such an obvious scam artist.

In my earlier post on sudoku below, I referred to Brian Hayes’ column on the mathematical concepts behind it. Here is Hayes’ American Scientist essay:

A tour of 20th-century musical composition by The New Yorker‘s music critic, Alex Ross. (The Rest Is Noise)

An Indie-Rock Festival With Room for Madonna: “This was an indie-rock festival, 94 acts on five stages, and the operation was delicate: a sleek round of commerce for the taste-making class. Yet Madonna and Kanye West played here this year, and they encountered even more love than the alternative-rock groups that are at the heart of this festival.” (But, rumor has it (HuffPo ), Madonna altered the lyrics of one of her songs to tell her audience to go to Texas and “suck George Bush’s dick…”, although discreet asterisks were used in the reportage…)

Philip Weiss’ answer to the critics of Walt and Mearsheimer: “Given the paper’s parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?” (The Nation)

Add your name to Juan Cole’s petition: “This petition calls on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to forthrightly condemn the castigation of Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as anti-Semites for their academic paper, ‘The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.'”

(The Huffington Post)

“The Saddest Thing I Own invites people everywhere to share the saddest thing they own. What are these sad things? What makes things sad? Do things start off sad? Do some sad things begin as happy things that then become sad? Are some things only sad because for some sad reason we kept them? Are some things just plain sad no matter what? This is what we want to know.” [via boing boing]

Theresa has been keeping this running list; proof that many write with no ‘malice of forethought’. (Making Light)

“The Vatican stepped up its offensive against The Da Vinci Code on Friday when a top official close to Pope Benedict blasted the book as full of anti-Christian lies and urged Catholics to boycott the film.” (Yahoo News) Okay, I’ll admit it now, I’ve finally read the book, and am looking forward to the film. From the trailers I have seen, it looks to be a pretty literal adaptation. My work as an anthropological researcher with the modern-day Maya of southern Mexico when I was a college undergrad showed me firsthand how grafting Christianity on top of indigenous spiritual beliefs as a way of getting its soul-saving foot in the door inherently co-opted those beliefs. So the broad thrust of Brown’s thesis about the Christian Church’s relationship with the ‘pagan’ beliefs it supplanted makes sense to me, as does the Church’s investment in maintaining the paradigm in the face of the current challenge. Should be fun to watch all the hubhub, as it was with the Last Temptation film some years ago.

And:

The Priory of Sion

“Ed Bradley decided to find out for himself whether or not the Priory of Sion, which is central to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a real organization or not.” (CBS 60 Minutes thanks to walker)

The New York Times uses Google Maps for a visual display of homicide locations in New York City over the past three years. Figure out the safest places to live in the City. Wow, nothing within a large radius of the block on which I grew up in Queens. Nothing within a mile radius or so of my best friend’s home on the Upper West Side. And nothing within a several-block radius of my brother and his wife’s home in the West Village (although he was attacked twice on his street in the last five years…)

A related article describes other findings of the Times’ analysis of the murder details.

“Over the last several decades, a small group of researchers has tried to understand how a minority of maltreated children exceed expectations.” (New York Times Magazine) A good overview of a neglected topic championed by a few. “Mental health’ research is far better at looking at the pathology, but common sense says you can’t explain why someone falls victim to suffering until you compare them with those who escape that outcome.

The study was co-funded by the NIMH and Eli Lily, the manufacturer of the antipsychotic drug used in the study. This study seems to support the notion that early detection and treatment halts disease progression. However, the low completion rate among recruited subjects prompts the obvious question — is there some correlation between the potential for early stabilization and the wherewithal to hang in there with the study. Are the counterexamples simply washing out?

A new study demonstrates the first sucessful vaccine treatment of the deadly hemorrhagic Marburg disease in monkeys. Marburg is a close relative of the gruesome and untreatable Ebola virus. (New Scientist) It should not be surprising that the research was conducted at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Will we one day in a battlefield situation see the Pentagon immunize our own fighting forces against hemorrhagic fever and somehow arrange for their opponents to be infected?

Namedropper that I am, I need to mention that the lead researcher, Charles Czeisler, was a friend of mine in college whose career of preeminence in the biology of sleep regulation and circadian rhythms I have followed with interest. The value of melatonin as a sleep aid has long been equivocal, which I think has two explanations. First, since it is sold as a dietary supplement rather than a medication, there is no quality control about the dosage or bioavailability of the active ingredient in the melatonin you buy.

Secondly, the way it works essentially involves resetting your internal clock, telling your body it is time to go to sleep. Quite simply, melatonin will not be of much use helping a person whose sleep difficulty does not relate to a circadian rhythm problem. The current study, in which thirty-six healthy participants spent three weeks living in soundproof rooms with no time clues and were put on a 20-hour sleep-wake cycle in place of the usual 24-hour cycle, showed melatonin’s efficacy in re-entraining the body’s sleep schedule. This has most relevance to shift-workers who sleep during the daylight hours and to jetlagged travellers out of synch with their new timezones, situations in which I have recommended melatonin in the past.