While half the population is horsing through the brightly coloured product range of Nabisco and Nestle's food chemists, the other half are horsing through a veritable pharmacopoeia of multi-vits, as if this avenue is "healthier".
A lot of what we believe to be true about the benefits (near universal, it seems) of vitamin C, (and by extension other vits) is due to relentless decades-long pushing by Professor Linus Pauling who won two Nobel prizes before he died on 19th August (today) 1994. Pauling made really fundamental contributions to our understanding of biochemistry, particularly the structure of proteins (the alpha-helix was his idea). He also discovered that a single genetic mutation in hemoglobin had physical, physiological and medical (sickle-cell anemia) consequences and so midwifed the birth of molecular biology. His classic mega-cited multi-edition book The Nature of the Chemical Bond was required reading for two generations of bio-scientists. His second Nobel was for Peace because after WWII he became such an ardent peacenik that he had his passport seized for a while by the US State Department to prevent him talking to the Reds that were, in those McCarthy Era days, under every unamerican bed.
Later he became shining-eyed-sure that Vitamin C was not only a cure for the common cold and 'flu, but also for cancer. To do this he had to abandon a life-time of scientific training to follow where the data led. Unaccountably he preferred to lead from the front in a personal jihad against disease while vigorously waving a vitamin C flag and letting the data for its efficacy fall where it may. Up until last month, I had been a desultory popper of vitamin C tablets on the premiss that the habit was at worst harmless even if the good it might do was marginal. I used to tell people that the evidence showed that, if taken before the fact, sufficiently large doses of vitamin C would, on average, slightly reduce, by 3/4 of a day IIRC, the length of your suffering with a cold. Your nose would stream as much, your eyes would be as red and you'd feel as crappy as usual but not for so long. I think now that if I had done a proper study of all the data from the very many carefully controlled investigations, even this marginal benefit would be suspect not to say wrong.
In July, a long and quite angry article in Atlantic Monthly - whence I get a good proportion of my long-form reading over the interweb - by Paul Offit explodes this cosy primum non nocere view. Several carefully controlled studies have shown that people who take multivits are more likely to die from various forms of cancer - including prostate, lung and GI tract. Ooops! One of the problems with reporting science for ordinary folk is a strong tendency to talk
up the new and exciting and fail to report the painstaking repeat
studies that undermine or contradict the original finding especially if the original is written by a Nobelist. Even within science we have real problems with replication and reporting mundane negative results.
Next month I'm going to start teaching Human Physiology again to The Institute's 1st Year students. The pervasive theme in any such course has to be the concept of homeostasis - the observation that all our bodily functions are arranged about a set point and that complex, subtle and redundant mechanisms are in place to maintain them there: core body temperature at 37oC is the most obvious example. Too much selenium or vitamin C or E is seemingly as bad a thing for the roundabouts as too little is for the swings, perhaps because they overwhelm the normal homeostatic mechanisms.
If, without an exhaustive study of the science behind the claims, you choose to believe that your diet in Ireland or Россия or the US is in some sense deficient and you therefore buy and consume vitamin supplements, you are a fool with too much money. I'll put it stronger than that: for every multivit you pop a small black child, who really is on the edge of nutritional insufficiency, dies [The math: $10 for 50 MV pills is 20c a day, while 1 billion people live on $1 a day or less]. Sorry folks, but science is hard. Tracking down and reconciling a couple of dozen contradictory, slightly different studies is a lot of work, so you may think that a long article by the highly qualified Professor Paul Offit will sufficiently inform you. It is very interesting and I urge you to take the half-hour it requires to read it. But Offit is not above a rhetorical device or two to make his point. After citing all the studies that showed how wrong Pauling was about the value of vitamins in dealing with prostate cancer, the final sentence of Offit's article is "In 1994, Linus
Pauling died of prostate cancer." Duh! Pauling was 93 and a half when he died. From which I take, Professor, that those multivits worked treat for Linus Pauling keeping him going for more than two decades over his allotted three-score-and-ten. I think I'll start a course now and forget about the black babies.
Monday, 19 August 2013
Sunday, 18 August 2013
The Oola Oval
I elicited an interesting response to yesterday's post about places names in Ireland, their origins and the bafflement of foreign tourists in dealing with the spelinge and pronunciation. My pal Chris "Rissoles" Hayes from Wexford, who has appeared on The Blob before, shared some stories of robust rural humour meted out on Yanqui tourists trying to locate themselves in the warren of strangely-named medieval streets that is Wexford town. He also told a tale (cue splutterings of barely suppressed laughter behind the back of gent generously filling a pair of plaid shorts and a bright green Guinness Hop-Store casual shirt) of a tourist totally lost between Tipperary and Limerick waving a map at a farmer and asking directions to Zero-Zero L.A.
Poor chap of course meant Oola Co Limerick, not to be confused with Oulart, Co Wexford which has its own store of interest. As you do, I went immediately to Google maps to find the place, which I must have passed through a dozen times but of which I have no memory: I must have blinked. Unless you live there or thereabouts, perhaps the most interesting thing about Oola is the strange oval field pattern to the East (http://goo.gl/maps/JgFQW):
It's about 300m x 400m, 10 hectrares in size. I had no idea what it is so I went to the Ordnance Survey (http://maps.osi.ie/publicviewer/#V1,583165,642225,6,3):
That view is a bit pale and although you can see the feature, there is no useful annotation on the current map, nor much more from the 25 inch second OSI series of the 1880s:
What's a "foot-stick"? The ever-intrusive GoogleStreetview car has even been down the lane to within 100m of the Oval, but the hedge is so dense you can't see anything through it.
There must, I thought, surely be some mention at the National Monuments Service (http://webgis.archaeology.ie/NationalMonuments/FlexViewer/) where sites are as dense across the country as currants in a cake. But although there are a a good dozen interesting items identified near the village
none of them coincide with the Oola Oval. And neither does it match the two round hillocks (which may name the village) Oolahills West and Oolahills East which name two townlands just East. I'm not sure whether to contact Chris Corlett of the Archaeological Service or check the ley-lines to see if the Oval's major axis points towards Roswell, New Mexico. Come to think of it, the feature looks a little like an enormous rissole; maybe Oola is an antient colony of Wexford (Oulart!!) and the Oval represents what they fed their mighty god Yellowbelly the Hurler.
Poor chap of course meant Oola Co Limerick, not to be confused with Oulart, Co Wexford which has its own store of interest. As you do, I went immediately to Google maps to find the place, which I must have passed through a dozen times but of which I have no memory: I must have blinked. Unless you live there or thereabouts, perhaps the most interesting thing about Oola is the strange oval field pattern to the East (http://goo.gl/maps/JgFQW):
There must, I thought, surely be some mention at the National Monuments Service (http://webgis.archaeology.ie/NationalMonuments/FlexViewer/) where sites are as dense across the country as currants in a cake. But although there are a a good dozen interesting items identified near the village
Saturday, 17 August 2013
The Old L33t Street
We can knock off the county if we pull back the view focus to:
But we haven't parsed the whole sign yet. Before about 20 years ago there were effectively no road numbers. There would be The Old Bog Road, The New Line, lots of places had a Dublin Road pointing towards the capital, local roads would be, as here, the Kill Road or the Bunmahon Road. The main artery West of Dublin serving Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and all points between and beyond was universally known as The Naas Road after the first town encountered about 30km out of the City. This caused all sorts of comical problems back in the day trying to direct foreign tourists. They weren't even sure how to pronounce the 'aa': sensibly but incorrectly trying 'Narse' rather than 'Nayce'. A concerted effort by the Tourist Board and the National Roads Authority has got all but the oldest and most contrary to call the road the N7. After they'd got the N roads solid in a majority of heads, they started to identify the network of inter-connectors with R (R for Regional rather than Rural, I think) numbers, like the R702 near us. Then about 6 or 7 years ago, the smaller roads started to acquire numbers with L (Link? Local?) like the L4015 here discussed. This makes life, particularly direction-giving much easier, "turn left at the L4015" is more reliable than "turn left at the widow's bar" or "take the fourth left after Kilmeadan". Although the whole NRA naming-of-parts exercise is something of a chimera, because 3 km from 'our' sign, there is a fork in the road with no signs at all at all.
I think that the L numbers are totally arbitrary which is a missed opportunity because if identified hierarchically like in Britain, where the A19 and A14 branch off the A1 and all roads beginning 7,8 or 9 are in Scotland, it would help travellers to locate themselves. But if they are arbitrary there's a huge & geeky l33t-speaky missed opportunity not to have L4015 pointing towards Laois (LAOIS geddit?). Dang!
Friday, 16 August 2013
GUBU
On this day in 1982 the then Attorney General (the chief law officer of the country and adviser to the government on all legal matters), Patrick Connelly, resigned. Falling on your metaphorical sword is much less common in Irish political circles than, say, in Britain. I'm not sure if it's a devil-may-care-but-I-don't tolerance here or a limpet-like adherence to the trappings and salary of power. Twenty years ago, for example, a Minister of State was found cruising through a sea of male prostitutes in the Phoenix Park and he maintained his position, and indeed is still a TD now. That's fine with me but I was surprised it was tolerated by his government colleagues as it's not the sort of action that's guaranteed to secure a landslide of votes at the next election.
Ten years earlier in late July 1982, and not a mile from The Cruising, a young woman was bludgeoned to death so that an unhinged idler called Malcolm MacArthur could have the exclusive use of her car. He needed wheels so that he could go out and buy a gun down the country. He needed the gun so that he could rob a few banks to restore his depleted funds. Having a dead body in the back of the car made it too difficult to drive in broad daylight to Edenderry that afternoon, so it wasn't until three days later that MacArthur went out to purchase the gun that had been advertised for sale. MacArthur's first action with his new acquisition was to shoot the vendor and steal his car to return to Dublin. This was grist to the tabloid mill and the police eventually ran the murderer down . . . in the home of the Attorney General. The irony was too great to allow AG Patrick Connelly to survive in government. The Taoiseach of day Charles Haughey spluttered about "a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance." As if the louche acquaintances of his legal adviser were tolerably odd rather than exposing a systemic something rotten in the state of Dublin. Conor Cruise O'Brien, journalist and opposition insider, abstracted the adjectives from Haughey's statement and clagged them into the acronym GUBU which has become rather a cliche over succeeding years.
Ten years after this first of many GUBU events, Haughey was back in power as Taoiseach and I was getting to know a new friend from Madrid. Jose-Maria "Pepe" Malpica was visiting TCD on a year's sabbatical from his Institute in Spain. Over coffee one morning I was explaining to Pepe just how corrupt the country was. The latest of gubu shenanigan might have been that the Taoiseach was having his shirts tailored by Charvet in Paris and getting them delivered by diplomatic bag - I forget. Pepe pulled himself up and patriotically asserted "You call that corruption? That's small potatoes my friend. If you want true corruption you must come to Spain, we do things bigger there". Pepe died a few years ago, I miss him.
Ten years earlier in late July 1982, and not a mile from The Cruising, a young woman was bludgeoned to death so that an unhinged idler called Malcolm MacArthur could have the exclusive use of her car. He needed wheels so that he could go out and buy a gun down the country. He needed the gun so that he could rob a few banks to restore his depleted funds. Having a dead body in the back of the car made it too difficult to drive in broad daylight to Edenderry that afternoon, so it wasn't until three days later that MacArthur went out to purchase the gun that had been advertised for sale. MacArthur's first action with his new acquisition was to shoot the vendor and steal his car to return to Dublin. This was grist to the tabloid mill and the police eventually ran the murderer down . . . in the home of the Attorney General. The irony was too great to allow AG Patrick Connelly to survive in government. The Taoiseach of day Charles Haughey spluttered about "a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance." As if the louche acquaintances of his legal adviser were tolerably odd rather than exposing a systemic something rotten in the state of Dublin. Conor Cruise O'Brien, journalist and opposition insider, abstracted the adjectives from Haughey's statement and clagged them into the acronym GUBU which has become rather a cliche over succeeding years.
Ten years after this first of many GUBU events, Haughey was back in power as Taoiseach and I was getting to know a new friend from Madrid. Jose-Maria "Pepe" Malpica was visiting TCD on a year's sabbatical from his Institute in Spain. Over coffee one morning I was explaining to Pepe just how corrupt the country was. The latest of gubu shenanigan might have been that the Taoiseach was having his shirts tailored by Charvet in Paris and getting them delivered by diplomatic bag - I forget. Pepe pulled himself up and patriotically asserted "You call that corruption? That's small potatoes my friend. If you want true corruption you must come to Spain, we do things bigger there". Pepe died a few years ago, I miss him.
Al Harouns
The book starts:
“Some of the evil in my tale might have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us, and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds. A purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. ”
How could you not want to read on . . .
“Some of the evil in my tale might have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us, and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds. A purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. ”
How could you not want to read on . . .
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Dark dark clouds, silver lining
[Today is the 15th anniversary of the Omagh bombing, the bloodiest (28 dead, 200+ injured) event of the Irish Troubles]
The Boy was born in early December 1975 and came home to a garden flat looking out to sea in Dun Laoghaire - poor students could rent such places back then. We were wrapped up in ourselves as The Boy was wrapped up in a cosy warm blanket. But in the cold black heart of 'bandit country' of South Armagh is was a bloody awful month of reciprocal atrocity which paused only after the Kingsmill Massacre on 5th January 1976. On that evening a minibus returning textile workers (both protestant and catholic) to their homes was stopped, the only remaining catholic on the bus was identified and told to leg it. The other 11 occupants were then gunned down - miraculously, one of them survived.
In the dark humour of the day, this shocking incident was transmogrified into a joke: Gunmen stop a chap in the dark and ask what is his religion. Unsure which side his interrogators are from - one balaclava looks much like another - and thinking quickly, he replies "I'm an atheist". To which the answer is "Sure, would that be a protestant atheist or a catholic atheist".
Twenty years later, after 'bring up baby' in three countries on two continents we returned home. The Beloved had work in domestic energy efficiency and fuel poverty which she brought from her last job in England. Part of this involved running training courses in Northern Ireland and her local contact had a rather interesting background. His grandfather had been a Jewish glazier from central Europe who had survived the holocaust and in the late 1940s made his living wandering through the rubble restoring the stained glass windows of some of the hundreds of bomb-damaged churches. A combination of accidents and opportunity and a growing family brought him to Belfast in the late 1950s.
The Europa Hotel in downtown Belfast was completed in 1971 at the height of the troubles. It was where all the journalists used to hang out plagiarising each other's stories and became the 'most-bombed hotel in Europe'. Surviving and trading through 28 damaging attacks during the troubles, they only closed after the Provos put a really big bomb outside in 1993. And who got many of the contracts to repair the glazing? The conspicuously neutral company set up by the little feller from Central Europe.
The Boy was born in early December 1975 and came home to a garden flat looking out to sea in Dun Laoghaire - poor students could rent such places back then. We were wrapped up in ourselves as The Boy was wrapped up in a cosy warm blanket. But in the cold black heart of 'bandit country' of South Armagh is was a bloody awful month of reciprocal atrocity which paused only after the Kingsmill Massacre on 5th January 1976. On that evening a minibus returning textile workers (both protestant and catholic) to their homes was stopped, the only remaining catholic on the bus was identified and told to leg it. The other 11 occupants were then gunned down - miraculously, one of them survived.
In the dark humour of the day, this shocking incident was transmogrified into a joke: Gunmen stop a chap in the dark and ask what is his religion. Unsure which side his interrogators are from - one balaclava looks much like another - and thinking quickly, he replies "I'm an atheist". To which the answer is "Sure, would that be a protestant atheist or a catholic atheist".
Twenty years later, after 'bring up baby' in three countries on two continents we returned home. The Beloved had work in domestic energy efficiency and fuel poverty which she brought from her last job in England. Part of this involved running training courses in Northern Ireland and her local contact had a rather interesting background. His grandfather had been a Jewish glazier from central Europe who had survived the holocaust and in the late 1940s made his living wandering through the rubble restoring the stained glass windows of some of the hundreds of bomb-damaged churches. A combination of accidents and opportunity and a growing family brought him to Belfast in the late 1950s.
The Europa Hotel in downtown Belfast was completed in 1971 at the height of the troubles. It was where all the journalists used to hang out plagiarising each other's stories and became the 'most-bombed hotel in Europe'. Surviving and trading through 28 damaging attacks during the troubles, they only closed after the Provos put a really big bomb outside in 1993. And who got many of the contracts to repair the glazing? The conspicuously neutral company set up by the little feller from Central Europe.
Wednesday, 14 August 2013
Identical twins separated by time
I wrote a couple of months ago about the, to me, uncanny resemblance between T.H. Morgan, pioneer American geneticist, and D.H. Lawrence, game-changing English author. It's not just the identical middle initial:
Dang! I can't remember which is which now. This is a game that has been played out in biography.com where you can see Tilda Swinton-Bowie and Hugh Wilde-Grant from the Arts Block, along with a gallery of other pairs. Mais revenons-nous a nos savamts:
It's not just the open-neck shirt and that the ould hair has slipped from the top to the bottom of the head, is it? But they are not identical twins separated at birth. Left was born 14 Oct 46 and Right was born 03 Sep 29. Since 1994 Left has been been making the running in Big Science (e.g. 1994c PMID 7920649) while Right has been on the run.
Mouse over to reveal: Left J Craig Venter | Right JJ Whitey Bulger.
Mouse over to reveal: Left J Craig Venter | Right JJ Whitey Bulger.
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