The Sea Maiden, 1897 by Arthur Hacker

The Sea Maiden, 1897 by Arthur Hacker

Click to enlarge.

When he died in 1854 he bequeathed half of his estate to all the Hebrew congregations in the country . . . and the other half to the man who had saved his life on January 1, 1815

From The Battle of New Orleans: Andrew Jackson and America's First Military Victory by Robert V. Remini.  Page 112.

One low-ranking American soldier attached to the Louisiana militia, by the name of Judah Touro, volunteered to help carry ammunition from the magazine to Humphrey’s battery. Despite the missiles soaring over his head and on either sides of him he diligently kept at this task, seemingly oblivious to the danger that surrounded him. Then, suddenly, he took a twelve-pound shot in the thigh, which tore off a large mass of flesh. He was removed to a wall of an old building well behind Jackson’s lines and nearly demolished by the British bombardment. A doctor dressed the wound but held out little hope for him. Touro’s best friend, Rezin D. Shepherd, who had been assigned to Patterson’s marine battery but had recrossed the river to find two masons to help complete the building of the battery, heard what had happened to his friend and rushed to the stricken man’s side. The doctor told him there was no hope of recovery. But Shepherd would not accept that verdict. He obtained a cart and drove the wounded man to the city, administering brandy very liberally along the way to his prostrate and semiconscious friend. When he reached the city he carried Touro into his house and summoned the women who had been caring for the army’s sick and wounded and begged them to attend his friend and provide him with all their nursing skills. He then returned to his assignment.

Touro miraculously survived, and after the war the two men became millionaires, gave freely of their money to many charitable causes, and were regarded as “patriarchs” of the New Orleans community. Touro was known as “the Israelite without guile.” When he died in 1854 he bequeathed half of his estate to all the Hebrew congregations in the country and other charitable and religious organizations, and the other half to the man who had saved his life on January 1, 1815. Shepherd used the money to restore a street in New Orleans where the two men had lived most of their lives. Then he had the name changed to Touro Street.

Sixteen years and what do you get? A bunch of bad research and deeper in debt.

From Ruining It For Everyone by Zvi Mowshowitz.  This just builds on my earlier post that the longstanding recommendation to take Vitamin D supplements was not based on any rigorous research and that new research suggests there is no benefit from Vitamin D supplements for the general population.  

The revelation here is much deeper and more far reaching.  It appears that 16 years of Alzheimer's research has been misdirected owing to obvious frauds and false reporting in the original research.  

Remember that super-expensive ($56k/dose) Alzheimer’s drug that got approved by the FDA because it fights “amyloid plaques” in the brain but without any evidence that it, ya know, helps with the progression of Alzheimer’s?

And how drugs for Alzheimer’s keep not, what’s the word for it, working?

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

…

In 2006, Nature published a paper titled “A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory.”

…

The results of the study seemed to demonstrate the amyloids-to-Alzheimer’s pipeline with a clarity that even the most casual reader could understand, and it became one of—if not the most—influential papers in all of Alzheimer’s research. Not only has it been cited hundreds of times in other work, roughly 100 out of the 130 Alzheimer’s drugs now working their way through trials are directly designed to attack the kind of amyloids featured in this paper. Both Ashe and Lesné became neuroscience rock stars, the leaders of a wave based on their 2006 paper.

What intrigued Schrag when he came back to this seminal work were the images. Images in the paper that were supposed to show the relationship between memory issues and the presence of Aβ*56 appeared to have been altered. Some of them appeared to have been pieced together from multiple images. Schrag shied away from actually accusing this foundational paper of being a “fraud,” but he definitely raised “red flags.” He raised those concerns, discreetly at first, in a letter sent directly to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Only when that letter failed to generate a response did Schrag bring his suspicions to others.

Now Science has concluded its own six-month review, during which it consulted with image experts. What they found seems to confirm Schrag’s suspicions.

“They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.”

After reviewing the images, molecular biologist Elisabeth Bik said of the paper, “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Should this fraud turn out to be as extensive as it appears at first glance, the implications go well beyond just misdirecting tens of billions in funding and millions of hours of research over the last two decades. Since that 2006 publication, the presence or absence of this specific amyloid has often been treated as diagnostic of Alzheimer’s.

This does not seem, if this report is accurate - and I saw no pushback that it wasn’t - like a ‘Theranos level fraud.’ It seems much, much bigger than that.

Once again this also confirms the principle of obvious fraud. Whenever fraud is caught or revealed, it turns out to be very simple, very dumb, and remarkably easy to spot once you look. In this case, ‘shockingly blatant’ image tampering, and simple ‘dissolve the data that isn’t giving the result we wanted and appoint a new one.’

This would be akin to a construction firm erecting a major building with only a cursory check of the foundational geology.  Sixteen years of Alzheimers' researchers went chasing off after solutions without even checking that the original research was even valid.  

There was an original research study, bedecked with red-flags.  Everyone celebrated the study and ignored the red-flags and then spent sixteen years investigating the wrong things.  

The original reporting seems to be from Daily Kos, Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost millions of lives by Mark Sumner.  It is the beginning of the news cycle.  Maybe Sumner is wrong.  But several reputable researchers seem like they believe there is a real thing here.  Real and bad.  

Multi-decadal recommendation on vitamin supplements with no underpinning research to support it and then a two decade long fraud that misdirects an entire field of research and dozens or hundred of researchers into wrong areas of investigation for at least sixteen years and at the cost of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives.

And it all passed before out universities, our national medical agencies, all the peer review literature and no one ever noticed or was willing to speak out.  The foundations for being an "expert" and for belonging to the meritocratic class seem to be getting more and more tenuous.

Groaning Oldies

From Friar's Club Encyclopedia of Jokes by Barry Dougherty.

Did you hear about the veterinarian and the taxidermist who went into business together?

Their slogan was, “Either Way, You Get Your Pet Back.”

Follow the science they said but there was no science to follow

From Study Finds Another Condition That Vitamin D Pills Do Not Help by Gina Kolata.  

The idea made so much sense it was almost unquestioningly accepted: Vitamin D pills can protect bones from fractures. After all, the body needs the vitamin for the gut to absorb calcium, which bones need to grow and stay healthy.

But now, in the first large randomized controlled study in the United States, funded by the federal government, researchers report that vitamin D pills taken with or without calcium have no effect on bone fracture rates. The results, published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, hold for people with osteoporosis and even those whose blood tests deemed them vitamin D deficient.

These results followed other conclusions from the same study that found no support for a long list of purported benefits of vitamin D supplements.

So, for the millions of Americans who take vitamin D supplements and the labs that do more than 10 million vitamin D tests each year, an editorial published along with the paper has some advice: Stop.

“Providers should stop screening for 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels or recommending vitamin D supplements and people should stop taking vitamin D supplements in order to prevent major diseases or extend life,” wrote Dr. Steven R. Cummings, a research scientist at the California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute, and Dr. Clifford Rosen, a senior scientist at the Maine Medical Research Institute. Dr. Rosen is an editor at The New England Journal of Medicine.

We are accustomed now to the medical community being wrong.  Dramatically wrong and sustainedly wrong.  Still, it is startling that even basic stuff is being revisited and found wrong.

It was an entirely plausible hypothesis that Vitamin D would have the proposed benefits.  But I had assumed that the recommendations were being based on real world research, not mere plausibility.  I was wrong.

Kolada is a little less than clear but it sounds like the existing guidelines were essentially guesses.

Dr. Rosen said those concerns led him and the other members of the National Academy of Medicine’s expert group to set what he called an “arbitrary value” of 20 nanograms per milliliter of blood as the goal for vitamin D levels and to advise people to get 600 to 800 international units of vitamin D supplements to achieve that goal.

Labs in the United States then arbitrarily set 30 nanograms per milliliter as the cutoff point for normal vitamin D levels, a reading so high that almost everyone in the population would be considered vitamin D deficient.

The presumed relationship between vitamin D and parathyroid levels has not held up in subsequent research, Dr. Rosen said. But uncertainty continued, so the National Institutes of Health funded the VITAL trial to get some solid answers about vitamin D’s relationship to health.

From this new research, they now believe that other than for a few people with special conditions, no one should be taking Vitamin D supplements.  

It is wonderful that the research is being conducted to validated long established protocols.  But it remains astonishing to me that the existing protocols were essentially guess work.

History

A collection of Ancient Greek armour
with its bronze chest, its two leggings and its bronze shield, which compose armament of a Greek hoplite, at that time, displayed alongside Persian arrowheads fired from Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC.

National Archeological Museum, Athens pic.twitter.com/SQW0OkcPgO

— Archaeo - Histories (@archeohistories) June 18, 2022

 

An Insight

“Summary overview: the number of students at Pomona has increased 12 percent from 1990 to 2016; the number of faculty has increased 3 percent; tuition has increased 253 percent; the number of administrators has increased 384 percent “ https://t.co/En52Jxu5DB

— Tom Riley (@tomriley) June 21, 2022

 

I see wonderful things

Lol 😂 pic.twitter.com/PH9yZ2NBgI

— Woman of Wonder (@WonderW97800751) June 23, 2022

 

The Marrow Song (Oh, What a Beauty!)

The passing today of an English actor, Bernard Cribbins, representative of an earlier and earthier, English actor and comic, with echoes of the old English Music Hall.

The Good Old Days (6th April 1973). Bernard Cribbins leads the audience in a rousing rendition of The Marrow Song.pic.twitter.com/eipSk82A6o

— Archivetvmusings (@archivetvmus71) July 28, 2022

The Marrow Song (Oh, What a Beauty!)

Down the road there lives a man I'd like you all to know

He grew a great big marrow for the local flower show

And when the story got around, they came from far and wide

And when the people saw the marrow, everybody cried

 

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), I've never seen one as big as that before

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), It must be two feet long or even more

It's such a lovely colour, and nice and round and fat

I never thought a marrow could grow as big as that

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), I've never seen one as big as that before

(Oh-Oh-Ooooh! What a beauty!, we've never seen one as big as that before)

 

He was leaning on the garden gate the other day

And beckoned to a lady who lives just across the way

He took her down the garden path and showed it her with pride

And when she saw the size of it, the little lady sighed

 

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), She'd never seen one as big as that before

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), It must be two feet long or even more

It's such a lovely colour, and nice and round and fat

I never thought a marrow could grow as big as that

(Ooooh! What a beauty!), I've never seen one as big as that before

(It's stupendous!)

(It's colossul!)

(It's gigantic!)

(It's bigger than that!)

 

And then the flower show was held and everybody went

To see the great big marrow, lying there inside the tent

Soon the judges came along to give the prizes out

They only took one look at it and then began to shout

 

(Ooooh! What a beauty!, we've never seen one as big as that before)

(Ooooh! What a beauty!, it must be two feet long or even more)

It's such a lovely colour, and nice and round and fat

I never thought a marrow could grow as big as that

(Ooooh! What a beauty!, we've never seen one as big as that before

Oooo-oooo-oooh! I've never seen one as big as that before.

Offbeat Humor

This is why all my socks are so stretched out pic.twitter.com/PBOrroipqo

— Adam Taggart (@menlobear) July 17, 2022