I’ve just been reading about an interesting fellow named Franklin Chang-Diaz.  Here are some facts about Mr Chang-Diaz:

• He currently holds the record for the most number of space flights by a single astronaut
• He is the first naturalized US citizen to become an astronaut.  (He’s originally from Costa Rica.)
• His daughter is now a senator for the state of Massachusetts
• He is 61 years old
• He is of both Chinese and Hispanic extraction

Interesting fellow, no?  I think it’s important to take note of role models other than entertainment, sports and political figures.

Now, how did Mr Chang-Diaz enter into my awareness?  Well, I was reading about the Vasimir (variable specific impulse magnetoplasma) rocket.  It’s a revolutionary rocket design that, if successful, will dramatically reduce the time needed for interplanetary travel.  The concept of the vasimir was developed by Chang-Diaz, and his company is busily trying to build one.

In fact, later this year, a prototype will be fitted to the international space station to be tested.  If successful, it will prove to be a significantly more cost-effective method of performing the periodic firings required to maintain the station’s altitude.

Isn’t space stuff fun?

Clyde Tombaugh, circa 1930

As we are all now aware, the former 9th planet in the system of Sol, Pluto, has been demoted to “dwarf planet” or large Kuiper belt object.  Pluto was discovered by a jovial and very young astronomer in 1930, named Clyde Tombaugh, using an exhausting tecnique of visually appraising telescope plates for minute and almost imperceptible changes upon serial exposures.

Only the truly geeky amongst you will also be aware that in 2006 NASA launched a spacecraft called “New Horizons“, which is scheduled for a rendezvous with Pluto in the summer of 2015.  This is a terribly exciting mission for a number of reasons.  First, it will be the first time we’ve ever had any sort of reliable visual image of Pluto.  Even with the Hubble space telescope, Pluto appears as a blurry mess of pixels.  Who knows what it really looks like?

Second, this will be our first view of the mysterious Kuiper belt, this vast stretch of matter at the outskirts of the solar system which may nonetheless be the source of the organic materials from which all life on Earth was formed.

And third, the New Horizons spacecraft contains a special cargo: the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who died in the late 90s, mercifully before his discovery was demoted.  It’s not the first time human remains have ended up in space. Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, was among the first to have his remains blasted into orbit, in something now called “space burial“.  And one of the discoverers of the Shoemaker-Levy comet, Eugene Shoemaker, actually has his ashes scattered on the surface of the Moon!  It was dropped by the Lunar Prospector probe in 1999.

Tombaugh’s burial, though, really is a remarkable thought.  What would he have thought if we had told his 23 year old self in 1930 that this impossibly distant, almost theoretical “planet” that he had just discovered would one day be the location of his mortal remains?  What a heady idea.

Actually, New Horizons will not be dropping Tombaugh’s remains on Pluto.  Instead, it will keep them as the probe swings out to penetrate the Oort cloud and, eventually, emerge into interstellar space.  So Clyde Tombaugh will be the first human being to have an aspect of his physical body transported to the stars.

It will be thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years before the probe ever gets anywhere near another solar system, though.  By then, humanity may be long extinct.  But imagine for a second if an advanced alien technology finds the probe in the very distant future.  Maybe they have a way of extracting long destroyed genetic material from cremated ashes.  And maybe they can reconstitute a whole person from this material.

Clyde Tombaugh will then be the real Buck Rogers: born in 1907, yet the last surviving human being, living hundreds of thousands of years in the future with space aliens light years away.  Interestingly, Tombaugh was a lifelong UFO buff, and while alive was one of the most prominent astronomers to have publicly claimed to have seen UFOs.

If indeed he ends up being humanity’s sole representative in the galactic commons, from what I’ve read about the man, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.

I don’t like getting older, but I do appreciate having lived in, now, six decades (whew!) including the historic moments of both 1960s and 1970s.  Yes, I was a toddler in the 60s, but I have very vivid memories of the early 70s, as early as 1971.  And one of the advantages of being the youngest of many children is that I was rarely exposed to childish things and often to adult things, even as a very young child.

I remember, for example, the Watergate hearings, though I was 5 or 6 at the time.  Mind you, my recollection of Watergate is that it was a bad TV show.  But the memories are nonetheless vivid.

Similarly, I recall quite clearly the immediate fallout of the Beatles having broken up, and the full expectation that they would be reuniting any day.  And, of course, I remember the space race.

We didn’t have a TV set in the early 70s, so my memories of watching the Apollo launches are situated in a series of relatives’ homes.  It was a strange and exciting time for space exploration.  Everyone expected the first mission to Mars to be scheduled for sometime in the 1980s.  By the mid-70s, moon missions had become so common that most people just assumed that there was already a moon base, and that both Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts were all over the moon, all the time.  This misconception was fueled by TV shows like The Six Million Dollar Man, which featured episodes such as one in which Steve Austin travels to the moon twice, and the asteroid belt once, in a single day.

My love of space exploration is well documented.  I once applied to be an astronaut, after all.  And on the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk, this blog post became a feature article in a California magazine.  And people always disappoint me by not knowing who the man on my T-shirt is:

Why do I bring all this up?  Because right now I’m watching a documentary made in 1969 during the Apollo 11 mission.  It was finally released in 1972 and is called Moonwalk One.  The tone, feel and sound of the documentary capture well the sentiment of the time.  Space travel back then was literally otherworldly and mystical.  Today, a comparable documentary would be chock full of computer animation, lots of wide-eyed children looking into the sky, and other Disney-esque nonsense. Moonwalk One shows the conquest of the moon as a serious adult affair that was truly the culmination of 2500 years of human ambition.

If you haven’t seen it, and that era in history interests you, I heartily recommend it.  I just can’t believe that it all happened over 40 years ago.

In Other News

Took a walk on the frozen canal today.  Took this picture of the base of the Pretoria bridge:

Let’s zoom in on that weird sign:

What the frack is that supposed to mean?  No sine waves allowed?

Hey, dig the latest produce from my rooftop garden.  I’m a farmer!

Here’s a photo of a little known street behind the Central Reference Library in downtown Toronto:

I get it. Sherlock Holmes was a major literary character, and the street is behind a big building full of books. But what an odd choice for a street name in Toronto! Are there any Canadian literary characters worth celebrating? Actually, I can’t think of any.

More concerning is that City Council chose to celebrate Holmes and not his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Makes me wonder how many Torontonians actually realize that Holmes was fictional, and that Conan Doyle was real.  Hmm.

The last photo I will share with you is essentially a follow-up of my 2007 post called “Abuse of Numbers“.  In that post, I railed against a well-meaning ad by a women’s shelter that presented statistics in such a way that, in my opinion, ended up being propagandistic.  Go have a quick look at that post before continuing to read.  Go.  I’ll wait.

Okay, back?  Cool.  Now check out this ad I saw in a Toronto subway station:

It’s put out by the Canadian Foundation for AIDS Research (CANFAR) and says, “Did you know that 86% of HIV Positive Canadians are male, And 2/3 of boys, aged 15 to 19 are sexually active? You think your kids aren’t at risk? Think again.”

All right, epidemiology fans, who sees the problem with this quote? (Other than the questionable grammar, that is.)

Well, the concept of risk is a touchy thing.  It’s not a lie: everyone is at risk for pretty much everything.  And HIV/AIDS is a serious disease worldwide that needs our attention and resources….

…BUT, the data as presented in this ad are propagandistic because they have been selected for their largeness and their emotional appeal moreso than for their accuracy in representing the true scenario.  It is true that about 86% of Canadian HIV Positive people are male.  CANFAR itself states that about 58000 people are living with HIV in Canada.  Using their 86% statistic, that means that 49880 males are living with HIV.

Note that the ad says “male”, not “men”.  According to the same CANFAR page, “youth between the ages of 15 and 19 account for 1.5% of all reports”.  So atuomatically we see some duplicity in the ad, trying to conflate “male” with “men”, when in fact the thrust of the ad is to warn of youth behaviour.  Yes, I know the implication is that male youths grow up to become men, but I think the propagandistic elements here are obvious.

So, of our 49880 males with HIV, about 98.5% are adults, giving us 49132 cases, to be generous.  Each case is a tragedy that should have been avoided, to be sure.   But 49132 cases, divided by a denominator of  16,332,277 total adult males gives us a prevalence estimate of adult men living with HIV of 0.3%.    Obviously, 0.3% is not as impressive a number as 86%.

But let’s consider the thrust of the ad again: it warns of sexual activity among male youths and the risk of HIV.  Okay, but not all of the prevalent HIV cases were the result of unprotected sex.  Some were the result of drug abuse, or transfusions, for example.  So let’s break down the transmission stats.  It is believed that sex of any kind is responsible for the bulk of HIV cases in Canada, with the bulk of those cases due to gay sex (or as we in the business call it, “MSM” or “Men Who have Sex With Men”).  According to Avert.org, sexual contact constitutes about 44% of cumulative HIV cases over the past 15 or so years.

Using the most recent complete data of 2007, it seems that sex was responsible for 37% of male HIV diagnoses in that year alone, and that includes cases of mixing sex with IV drug use.  Among those, heterosexual contact accounted for 18% of all sex-based cases, or 7% of all adult male HIV cases overall.  And heterosexual contact still remains the most prominent form of sex among Canadian males.  (Looking at cumulative stats from 1985 to 2007, heterosexual contact accounted for 6.2% of all Canadian male HIV cases.)

Overall, then, the prevalence of Canadian males currently living with HIV who likely got it from sex (including sex mixed with IV drug use) is about 44% of 0.3%, or 0.13%.  In my opinion, then, 0.13% more accurately represents the risk of of being sexually active, where HIV is concerned in Canada.

To get even more sticky (no pun intended), the risk of being a Canadian man living with HIV, having contracted it through heterosexual contact, is about 6.2% of 0.3%, or 0.02%.  (Another way to look at it is to divide the 3000 cases of known male HIV cases due to heterosexual contact by the 16 million at-risk male population, which also gives 0.02%).

Obviously, neither 0.13% nor 0.02% are as impressive numbers as 86%.

Lastly, the ad makes a sly connection between a problematic allusion to HIV rates (i.e., 86% of HIV positive cases are male) and sexual activity among young people (i.e., 2/3 of males aged 15 to 19 are sexually active).  The slyness is in not spelling out the connection, which is fraught with issues, many of which are outlined above.  I hope it’s obvious that one particular pitfall really throws a wrench into the ad’s wording: sure, maybe 2/3 of youthful males are indeed sexually active; but are they having risky sex?

Risky sex is unprotected sex.  If the ad-makers knew the proportion who are having unprotected sex, or knew that proportion to be substantial, I assume they would have included that bit of information.  Without it, we are left with the following message: “sex is bad, mmkay?”

Sex is not bad.  Unprotected sex is problematic and probably unwise.  That is all.

So, are sexually active male youths not at risk for acquiring HIV?  Of course they are!  But not nearly to the extent that the misleading ad suggests.

Draw your own conclusions, but I call shenanigans on a very sloppy and anti-intellectual ad campaign by CANFAR.

Courtesy of the Other Ray, this is one of the coolest graphics (educational, too) that you’ll see all week. It’s too big to upload directly to this post, so go ahead and click on the link.

Everyone’s favourite cyborg, Professor Stephen Hawking, is in a bit of trouble with the media.  Apparently, he thinks that if we were to have contact with an advanced alien species, we would suffer for it.  Therefore, he argues, we should avoid contact with potential non-terrestrial intelligence.

I don’t know why he gets shit for articulating this belief.  He is not the first to do so.  In fact, if one applies the rational model of decision theory, it is hard to escape the conclusion that things will necessarily go badly for homo sapiens in the great cosmic blind date.

Hawking’s proclamation reminds me of the way in which I conceptualize this discussion, as a dialectic between two poles.  On one end is the pacifist optimism of Carl Sagan, my boyhood hero.  On the other end is the cold, calculating, almost neo-liberal harshness of Charles Pellegrino, whose books I discussed in this Podium article (reproduced on Skiffy.ca).

In short, Sagan’s argument was that any civilization that managed to master the economics, politics and technologies needed to achieve sustained interstellar travel must have also solved its indigenous social issues.  For, he argued, if one is constantly diverting resources to address preventable concerns, such as wars, then one can never become a multi-planetary civilization.  Therefore, when we finally venture forth into interstellar space, we will have become a truly peaceful society.  By that same logic, any aliens we encounter must also necessarily be pacifistic.

Do remember that Sagan presented his many ideas mostly during the 1970s, when the Cold War was fierce and foremost on everyone’s mind.  Hope was in desperate need, and Sagan often saw it as his duty to provide such hope from the podium of science.

Pellegrino, arguing from another era –the post-Society era of crumbling empires, multipolar uncertainties and a global return to warlordism– had another take.  He argued essentially three things:

1. Vegetarians don’t become top dog.  In other words, the dominant species on any planet will likely be a predatory species well bred in the arts of conflict.
2. When push comes to shove, any rational party (i.e., the aliens) will always consider their own needs above ours.
3. They will assume the same of us.

With those three assumptions, Pellegrino concluded that any meeting of any two interstellar species will eventually become violent.

Pellegrino added to his argument the likely development of “the big gun,” a weapon of such awesomeness that its theoretical existence is sufficient cause to ratchet up the tension levels.  Pellegrino’s “big gun” is the relativistic missile.  Imagine, if you will, a ship the size of a space shuttle.  One could accelerate this ship to high relativistic velocities, of the order of 99.999% the speed of light, using foreseeable technology, such as an ion impulse drive (which was successfully tested on NASA’s Deep Space One mission).  You’d have to leave the engine running for many centuries to achieve such a speed, but we are dealing with immense distances and times here, so that is not a problem.

Now imagine such a ship, traveling at such a speed, colliding with an inhabited world the size of the Earth.  It is conceivable that 100% of the ship’s mass would be instantaneously converted to energy, according to Einstein’s famous theorem.  That amount of energy would, Pellegrino argues, be sufficient to destroy all life on the target planet.

Okay, so the big gun sucks.  So what?  Well, a relativistic missile is moving at almost the speed of light.  This means that by the time you see it, it’s already here.  There is therefore no conceivable defense against such an attack.  This is not a failing of technology, that can be overcome with more research.  Rather, it is an immutable fact presented to us by the laws of physics.   (Just accept the argument; I know there are science fiction solutions having to do with subspace or hyperspace or whatever, but those constructs currently don’t play well with mainstream physics.)

Lastly, since the relativistic missiles need to be launched centuries in advance, it’s best to launch earlier rather than later.

So, given that any interstellar species could build such a thing, and that there is no possible defense against it, and that its result is complete genocide….  well, you do the math.  Pellegrino concludes that if we were to ever meet an interstellar species, we must launch first, because we cannot tolerate the risk that they might launch first.

He uses this reasoning to explain why the skies are silent, why the SETI project has failed to find any sign of intelligent extraterrestrial life: anyone who was foolish enough to broadcast was summarily terminated.  The universe might be teeming with civilizations clever enough to know to stay silent, and they have the good sense to hide from us and from each other.  Civilizations, it seems, were meant to never know of each other’s existences.  Our only choices are aloneness or summary destruction.

And remember: we’ve been broadcasting for about a century now.  For all we know, relativistic missiles have already been launched in our direction.

Have a nice day.

I’ve lost count of the number of people sending me links to stories about Prahlad Jani (or “Mataji”), the yogic mystic who claims to have survived for decades without food and water, and who just recently submitted himself to a two-week study by Indian physicians, under the auspices of the Indian military, to validate his claims.  This is not the first time Mr. Jani has made the news, as the Discovery Channel made a documentary about him back in 2006.

Now, I am a scientist.  I declare it so proudly.  But I think many people have a distorted conception of what a scientist is, and, frankly, what science itself is.  Science is not truth, not a body of knowledge and not a set of technologies.  Science is a philosophy and a methodology that assists one in seeking the truth, or at least some approximation of the truth.  For example, science allows us to observe and measure in a rigorous format the falling of a object from the sky to the ground.  From these observations arise theories which are, one at a time, discarded as our methodology systematically allows us to discount them.  The theory that remains is not truth, but merely the best approximation of truth, given the observations available up to that point, and must remain plastic and non-dogmatic as future observations compel us to refine our theories.

The story of Prahlad Jani, then, is not one of science versus mysticism, though many seem eager to promote it as such.  Rather, it is an opportunity to explore our motivations and impulses with respect to our evolving society’s relationship with both rationalism and mysticism, as we all seek some compromise between our spiritual and physical lives.  So let us parse the phenomenon of the Man Who Does Not Eat through the following filters: is it real, is he lying, are the scientists studying him lying, and so what?

Is It Real?

When discussing with my physiotherapist Mr Jani’s supposed ability to live without food and water, she exclaimed, “That’s impossible!”

She is correct, it is indeed impossible –according to our present paradigm of understanding.  In fact, the entire science of biology is based upon the assumption that life is an energetic process that acts to combat the natural state of entropy that exists among all things.  This anti-entropic process is made possible through regular injections of energy, i.e. the eating of food, which contains chemical energy locked within molecular bonds.  To live without the regular ingestion of energy violates the Laws of Thermodynamics.

It has been proposed many times in history that an animal might be able to receive energetic sustenance from a source other than food.  After all, plants convert solar energy into chemical energy through the process of photosynthesis.  Some ocean floor unicellular creatures do a similar thing near lava eruptions, using the heat and light of the geothermal event to fuel their biology.  Within the existing paradigm of understanding, one can conceive of a complex “higher order” animal, like a human, developing a similar trait, however improbable that might be.

Another yogi, Hira Ratan Manek, once claimed, essentially, to be able to photosynthesize.  In fact, every few months a handful of stories about seemingly meta-human individuals pops up in the media.  For example, in 2004, many reputable news outlets reported on the Russian teenager Natalia Demkina, who apparently had x-ray vision.   Demkina has vanished from the news wires, and Manek now makes a living selling his “sun gazing” lectures, CDs and DVDs.

Probably over a trillion people have walked the Earth since the rise of humanity on this world.  The distribution of genetic variability is the crux of evolution, what allows our species to select from a vast menu of mutations in response to whatever environmental challenges present themselves.  This is the nature of natural selection.  Therefore, it is not only unsurprising, but indeed necessary, that extremes of biology be reflected within our diverse species.

For instance, the youngest human mother on record was Lina Medina, a Peruvian girl who in 1938 gave birth to a healthy baby boy when she was only five years old.  It is not typical, expected or even desired for such an extreme genetic tendency toward early puberty to manifest itself, but given the size and breadth of our species, some outliers from the norm will occur.

An outlier, however, is different from a physical impossibility.  To survive without eating, or more precisely without measurable energetic input, is called “inedia“; and inedia, according to our present paradigm of understanding, is impossible.  Inedia is a popular claimed manifestation of this biological outlier phenomenon, particularly among Indians.  Separate from the mostly Western movement called “Breatharianism“, Indian versions of inedia are typically associated with religion.  Mr Jani himself claims that a goddess blessed him as a child, allowing him to live on a magical nectar that flows from a hole in his palate.  (I’m sure he meant this metaphorically, as physical examinations have revealed no such hole.)

It can be argued that a land uniquely beset simultaneously with deep, all-pervading religion and brutal poverty and famine is the ideal breeding ground for religion-based claims of  inedia.  In the fat, wealthy West, claims of living without eating are received with incredulity and some mild curiosity.  In a place where every rice grain counts, to thrive without food is to provide the best kind of hope.  (Perhaps the equivalent in the West would be claims of being able to ingest copious amounts of fatty foods while not exercising and watching hours of TV, without ever getting fat or sick.)

Jainism is particularly well-suited for embracing claims of inedia.  The ancient religion prescribes extreme non-violence as one of its ancient tenets, and features saints who eschewed eating in order to protect the “life force” of the food that would otherwise be consumed.  Not surprisingly, both Jani and Hira Ratan Manek are followers of Jainism, as is Dr. Sudhir Shah, the physician tasked with observing Jani’s extreme fast.

In the Indian paradigm of understanding, then, inedia is not necessarily an impossibility.  Which provides objective truth, then? The Western paradigm or the Indian paradigm?  For that matter, does objective truth really exist?

Is He Lying?

Obviously, we cannot know what lies in the heart of another man.  But approaching the phenomenon from the Western paradigm, we must conclude that the claims of inedia are false, regardless of the data presented.  (More on the data later).

Famed quack-debunker and skeptic James Randi has not yet spoken on the recent news about Prahlad Jani.    But based on his comments about the photosynthesizing yogi, I think it’s safe to assume Randi would call Jani a deliberate liar and faker.  I’m not so distrustful.  Assuming that the inedia phenomenon is not real (and I will give you my conclusions later, don’t worry), it does not necessarily follow that Jani is intentionally fabricating his life story.

Ever meet a vegetarian who gives you a hard time about your burger, then goes ahead and orders a plate of fish and chips?  She is not necessarily a hypocrite, but simply defines “vegetarian” a bit differently than you do: fish don’t count, since they’re a kind of moving vegetable.  It’s an issue of semantics.

My very first yoga teacher was a nut who would preach endlessly about the fall of Atlantis, the Pyramids, aliens, and about his extreme fasts, denying himself food for days to “purge the body and the soul”.  During one of these fasts, I found him sipping a very large tankard of fresh fruit juice.  “Oh this doesn’t count,” he said.  “This isn’t food.”

Similarly, some have claimed that Jani has lived for decades without ingesting a drop of water.  But he gargles daily with water.  He may or may not spit most of it out, but it’s pretty much guaranteed that he’s ingesting or at least absorbing some of it.  Frankly, we don’t know how he defines food, ingestion, eating, drinking or fasting.  This is not a failing on his part, but on the part of those describing and reporting on his phenomenon.

Are The Investigators Lying?

And now we get to the science portion of today’s adventure.  You can access a PowerPoint presentation by Dr Shah, the leader of the investigation on Mr Jani, summarizing the results of the study, on Dr Shah’s website.

I do not know Dr Shah.  By all accounts he is an intelligent, respectable and well trained neurologist with the best of intentions.  The following comment is not directed to him or about him, but rather is for the consumption of the general population.  Ready?  Here it comes: medical doctors are not scientists.  Read that again and remember it, because it will serve you well in life.

I have lost track of the number of times I’ve had to rebut very unscientific comments made by physicians about the nature of scientific research.  Medical doctors employ the products of science, its technologies and conclusions, in their everyday practices.  A good medical school will have also taught its graduates basic epidemiology and the foundations of research, but nothing very advanced.  Having lectured in three respectable North American medical schools, let me assure you that medical schools do not produce scientists.  That is not their goal, and that is not what society needs them for.  Medical schools produce practitioners of medical knowledge.

Of course, there are many physicians who are also excellent scientists.  But they have taken the time to acquire the necessary skills to do so at an acceptable level.  My point is that one should always be skeptical of when a non-specialist makes a conclusive statement about something in which he or she is not an expert.  For example, I wrote about this article back in 2007.   A physician said something about the calculable risk of infection due to an STI.  My argument was that the statement was one requiring epidemiological expertise, not medical expertise.

Thus, unless the expertise to design a rigorous, testable scenario is demonstrated, I am not sanguine about Dr Shah’s team’s ability to produce convincing data, vis-a-vis Mr Prahlad Jani.

Even on its surface, there are questions of accountability and bias that go unaddressed.  Dr Shah’s eagerness to “detect an effect”, as we say in my profession, is evidenced on his website, where he expounds the virtues of Jain philosophies.  This in and of itself is not a failing, but does need to be considered.  It is made worse by the revelation that India’s leading debunker of extraordinary paranormal claims, Sanal Edmaruku, was prohibited from observing Dr Shah’s study of Jani.  According to Edmaruku:

“I asked to be allowed to send an independent team to survey the room where this test is taking place, but I was repeatedly turned down…”

“…Dr. Shah has been in charge of three similar investigations over the past ten years, and he has never allowed independent verification.”

This is not the path of rigorous science.   Let us not jump to the conclusion that Dr Shah is intentionally skewing his data.  Rather, I would accept that his personal drive to observe evidence of inedia firsthand may have biased his development of a suitable protocol for proper testing of Jani’s claims.

So what are the methodological flaws implicit in Dr Shah’s attempts to test Prahlad Jani’s claims of inedia?  These are hard to gauge since I can find no thorough description of the protocols or the degree to which they were adhered.  However, based on the skeletal bits of information gleaned from news reports and from Dr Shah’s own website, here are some areas of discontent for me:

• Invasive procedures were disallowed, which means no continuous intravenous monitoring was performed.  According to the data on Dr Shah’s website, biochemical reports (presumably using extracted blood) were performed every fourth day.  Over a 10 day testing span, this amounts to 2-3 tests only.  What many would have liked to have seen is real-time –or at the very least daily– measurements of key indicators, such as blood glucose levels.  If there was any cheating (e.g., adding sugar to the gargled water), it would have been easy to have done so on any of the 7 non-testing days.

• The study was run for a mere 10 days.  It is very possible to live without food for 10 days or more.  For most of us, this would not be pleasant.  But for a disciplined yogi capable of slowing his metabolism through meditation, this is well within the realm of known possibility.  An Australian nutritionist commented that:  “So even though the yogi might be able to slow his metabolism right down so that it might only be 20 or 30 per cent of normal … there’s still going to be a point, about 100 to 120 days without food – and without water, it might be 24 days – that he’ll die.”  Since Jani claims to have lived for decades without eating, why was the study not conducted for, at the very least, several weeks?

• The subject should not have been allowed to gargle or bathe.  The photo above shows Jani dowsed in water, while this link provides a looping video of his bathing practice.  I hope it’s clear to people that it’s not only possible, but quite likely, that he ingested water during these episodes.

• Where was the rigour?  This may sound harsh of me, but it’s very possible to smuggle sprinkles of sugar in one’s beard or clothing, that would be easily dissolved in gargled water.  A packet of sugar can go a long way toward sustaining a person on a starvation diet.  I am not accusing Jani of doing this, merely pointing out that it is unclear whether the study’s protocol controlled for such a possibility.  Neither is it clear where his bathing and gargling water came from.  Was it brought by an assistant, or given by the scientists after testing it for dissolved nutrients?

There are some other niggling points, like the study’s lack of control subject, uncertainty about whether Jani was ever left alone, or about who was allowed to visit him.  But I think my points above are sufficient to cast a lot of doubt on whatever conclusions arise from this venture.

So What?

First, let me answer the question that I’m sure most readers want me to answer: I do not feel qualified to pronounce whether or not inedia is a real phenomenon.  I further do not feel qualified to pronounce whether or not Prahlad Jani is a genuine example of true inedia.  But I am quite confident in pronouncing that Dr Shah’s  study of Prahlad Jani, making so much news everywhere, does not provide anything resembling convincing evidence of the veracity of Jani’s claims.

As a representative of the paradigm of Western science –true Western science, the one that seeks the truth, not the one that decries apostates– I adhere to the practice that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Inedia is indeed an extraordinary claim.  Dr Shah’s study is not only not extraordinary evidence, it isn’t even passable ordinary evidence.

But to me the more interesting question is, what if it was ?  What if Dr Shah had adhered to the most stringent and rigorous of scientific protocols?  What if he’d used the finest tools in the arsenal of Western science and managed to produce viable evidence that Jani’s claims were defensible?  What then?

As I noted, inedia is impossible according to the present paradigm of understanding.  But this is not the first time that the present paradigm has been challenged.  And history has shown that it can be successfully challenged.

When Einstein first introduced General Relativity to the world, it was met in some orthodox circles with cries of voodoo.  (Sort of like Christwire’s depiction of Jani’s feat as “Satanic”.  Please not, of course, that Christwire is satire.)  After some extraordinary bits of evidence, Relativity was absorbed into mainstream physics dogma.

A similar thing happened when a handful of clever European physicists developed the theory of quantum mechanics, whose tenets were so fantastical that under the existing paradigm of understanding –that of Newtonian physics– they were deemed impossible.  Decades of extraordinary evidence later and quantum mechanics is at the heart of much of what we in Western science consider the truth of reality.

Science does not know truth.  Science approximates truth.  With each discovery, test and observation, that approximation becomes more refined.  Skepticism is healthy.  The vaunted scientific method has as its engine the steam of skepticism.  But when that method is satisfied, the challenge of incorporating new knowledge into the prevalent paradigm of understanding becomes a human one.  It is based more on emotion, values, prejudice and ego than on the rigours of philosophy.

And so I ask again: what if Dr Shah had done everything right, and, according to our present models of scientific rigour, presented real evidence of inedia?  Do we as a culture have the maturity and humility to re-examine our assumptions about the world?

I am sooooo overworked these days. So I’m doubling up on responsibilities. Today’s post is actually a preview of my MicroSoft Small Business Forum column:

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Recently, I attended a scholarly conference on the topic of evidence-based decision making. For those not in the know, “evidence” has been a hot topic in all areas of physical, medical and now social and political science for many years now. The idea is that one should base one’s decisions on the best available information, rather than on other, presumably softer, criteria.

It might be surprising to many lay people to learn that Evidence-Based Medicine, or EBM, was fairly revolutionary when first introduced a few years ago. The assumption that most people make is that medical therapies, supposedly rooted in the rigour of Western science, is informed by clinical observations in controlled surroundings. For the most part, they are. But a large part of an individual doctor’s decisions about his patient is also based on personal experience, or anecdote, and the personal experiences and hearsay of his teachers and colleagues.

The conference pitted two seemingly opposing viewpoints against one another. On one side was the hard science argument, that good evidence must always be at the core of decisions, especially decisions made by government in response to important phenomena, such as the appropriate policy responses to medical crises. The H1N1 pandemic is a good example.

On the other side was a proponent of the so-called “precautionary principle”, which holds that sometimes it is not possible to wait for sufficient evidence to make a fully informed policy decision. Rather, sometimes it is incumbent upon policy makers to act within a milieu of great uncertainty.

Arguments about the degree of evidence required to justify official action are themselves tainted by ideologies. Climate change is a good example. Those convinced that the phenomenon is real (and I count myself among that number) hold that the evidence is sufficiently convincing and the threat is sufficiently dire that the precautionary principle holds: we must act now and not wait until 100% are on side. The deniers would argue that we must wait until every last scientific hold-out is on-side.

But ultimately it is a false dichotomy. First of all, pitting “evidence” against the “precautionary principle” is misleading because the first involves a discussion about the nature of scientific rigour, while the second is a discussion of the nature of decision making.

Second, and most interesting to me, is that the discussion is ultimately a non-starter. Cynics (and again I count myself among them) would argue that decisions are almost never made with evidence prominently in mind. Rather, policies –especially those stated by governmental bodies– are more likely to be informed by values, ideologies, politics and utility. Only after those avenues have been exhausted do decision-makers turn to the evidence, and then usually it is to justify a decision that has already been made.

I cannot estimate the extent to which this process is also prevalent in the business world, but I would not be surprised to find evidence getting short shrift there, either. But is this really a problem? I hope to explore this in a later segment.

As some of you are aware, I’m the new editor of the national newsletter of the Canadian Society for Epidemiology and Biostatistics (CSEB). The first issue with me as editor was just published this morning. The newsletter is only available to paying members, but I am reproducing the first feature article here:

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Nothing To Do With Skin
By Raywat Deonandan

I remember well the first time I saw an epidemiologist on a movie or TV show. It was the creepy 1995 John Carpenter remake of the classic British horror flick, Village of the Damned. In the film, Christopher Reeve heroically tries to understand why all of his town’s children are blonde and demonic and possibly alien. At one point, the entire town goes unconscious simultaneously, long enough to attract the attention of the CDC (Centres for Disease Control), who send an epidemiologist to investigate.

A sveldt Kirstie Alley plays Dr. Susan Verner, a tough no-nonsense outbreak investigator who arrives –get this—brandishing a badge and a gun and leading a battalion of policemen. Ahhh, thought I, this is the career for me! Aliens, guns, badges, excitement, action… why doesn’t every young person want to be an epidemiologist?

A more serious portrayal of the outbreak investigation aspect of epidemiology was presented in the 1995 film, Outbreak, in which Dustin Hoffman played a military epidemiologist studying a new, weaponized type of haemorrhagic fever. He not only carried a gun, but also had a helicopter! The famous stills from the film include Hoffman in the biocontainment “spacesuit” that so many lay people now falsely associate with epidemiology. I’ve been trying to buy one on eBay ever since.

And, really, this is the crux of society’s misunderstanding of our science: their conflation of epidemiology with virology and other bench sciences. We all have stories of being introduced at parties as an epidemiologist, and being met with uncomfortable silence, or worse, medical questions about skin rashes. For the last time, epidemiology and dermatology are different sciences! (I’ve been toying for some time with the idea of writing an epidemiology-for-the-masses manifesto called, “Nothing To Do With Skin”!)

A former professor of mine was once held at the US border as inspectors searched her luggage for “possible dangerous insects” after she self-identified as an epidemiologist. All the border guard could hear, apparently, was “entomology”. And I’m surprised that people don’t regularly ask me about the origins of words. (That’s an etymology joke, by the way.)

Now, Village of the Damned and Outbreak were both released over a decade ago. In the interim, we’ve seen real epidemiologists all over the mainstream media in the wake of such emergencies as the SARS outbreak, the Walkerton disaster and last Fall’s H1N1 pandemic. Surely, the media has learned some sophistication in the mean time?

Well, one of my favourite current TV shows is Fringe, which is an American science-fiction program about weird science and its intersection with crime. In one episode, someone was systematically murdering “epidemiologists” by infecting them with a virus that that grows to the size of your head. Yes, a single virus the size of your head. Leave aside the fact that such a thing would physically have to be multi-cellular, and therefore not a virus, and we’re left with the disappointing realization that once more the media has confused epidemiology with a bench science; because every murder victim on the list of “epidemiologists” turns out to actually be a virologist or microbiologist.

Yes, I know that some epidemiologists actually are lab scientists, as well. And even more epidemiologists are also physicians. But most are not, at least not in this country. So who is responsible for the failure of society to appreciate the role and contribution of the population epidemiologist? The lowly cubicle jockey with his SAS licence and penchant for odds ratios needs his day in the sun.

Our contributions are profound and dramatic, after all. It was epidemiologists who figured out how to address AIDS at the population level, long before the HIV virus was discovered. It was epidemiologists who eradicated smallpox from the face of the Earth. It’s epidemiologists who regularly figure out where governments should best apply their dwindling health care dollars, and which vaccines to manufacture, and whether something that appears serious really is serious. But you know the drill; I’m preaching to the converted here.

Maybe the responsibility is ours? Maybe we need to engage the world more openly and actively and push for our worth to be acknowledged and our function accurately portrayed? I recall fondly one of my favourite New Yorker cartoons, in which a party hostess is congratulated by her friend, “And it was so typically brilliant of you to have invited an epidemiologist.”

Well, I thought I was doing my part some years ago. I advised a script-writer for the Canadian TV show ReGenesis on some protocols for outbreak investigation and infection control, in order to make the content of the show more reflective of real life. ReGenesis is (supposedly, I’ve never watched it) about bioterrorism and the brave, shiny and young crime fighters and scientists who take on global biological evildoers.

To thank me, the writers created an extremely minor character who would be an epidemiologist and who would be named after me. This new, accurately portrayed Dr. Deonandan would only appear in one or two episodes, but would at last be a fairly representative example of Canadian epidemiology. Better yet, I was promised, she would be female and really quite attractive.

As an enterprising, self-obsessed, heterosexual man, I began to wonder whether I could engineer a new DSM diagnosis, based on me, for someone who is sexually attracted to his own fictional portrayal on television. Some sort of “trans-media narcissism”?

Imagine my disappointment when the Dr. Deonandan of TV turned out to be, not only male, and not only a physician, but a surgeon. Yes, a surgeon-epidemiologist. I’m sure such a thing does exist, and I’m sure they are superstar intellects who do extraordinary niche research. But it’s not exactly the representative portrayal of the population epidemiologist I was hoping for.

Sigh.

So what’s the lesson here? I’m not sure that there is one, except that maybe we should never expect our media to accurately portray any profession and any aspect of science. And that maybe we epidemiologists need to take a more active role in promoting the details of our work, responsibilities, skills and accomplishments to greater society.

A few days ago I hunkered into a lecture hall at the University of Ottawa to watch the most recent Munk Debate, this time between the teams of Nigel Lawson & Bjorn Lomborg vs Elizabeth May & George Monbiot, streamed live from Toronto. Had I known the debates could be accessed from the web, I would have stayed home to watch it with several strong glasses of port. But no….

The topic: Be it resolved, Climate Change is Mankind’s defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response.

Nigel Lawson came across as a fussy old fuddy-duddy, underinformed and full of ideological bluster.

Elizabeth May I’ve never really taken a liking to, given her screechy delivery and overly confrontational demeanour. However, she at least said the one thing that needed saying: that these four are the not the experts; the scientists are the experts. This lack of true expertise hindered further substantial debate, I think. She is a lawyer/politician. Lawson is a journalist/politician. Monbiot is a journalist. And Lomborg is a statisition cum self-promoter.

George Monbiot has been a favourite figure of mine for some time. What an eloquent, passionate and well informed speaker. His website’s earlier incarnations were actually the model for the direction my own website eventually took, so I admit to having a slight bias for all things Monbiot. Having said that, even the great George came across as slightly unscientific, given his background as a journalist. His famous self-imposed travel ban, meant as a gesture to encourage minimal carbon footprints worldwide, was suspended for this special occasion, allowing him to physically be in Toronto. I always felt this self-restriction to be a bit precious, if you know what I mean.

Bjorn Lomborg, meanwhile, is no stranger to this blog. I have discussed him in the March 5, 2004 post, the Jan 14, 2005 post, the Aug 31, 2007 post, and the Oct 17, 2007 post. In short, I detest everything Bjorn Lomborg stands for. I will not mince words here. The man is insidious and, in my opinion, simply for sale. His landmark book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, was the Climate Change denier’s bible for years, effectively used as ammunition to slow down change on the policy front.

In recent months/years, Lomborg has begun to rehab his reputation. He no longer denies that Climate Change exists, is a big deal or is human-caused. This is rather convenient, now that the book has made him insanely wealthy and positioned him as a preferred champion for the anti-Climate Change business sector. There is speculation, implied by May during the debates, that his position earns Lomborg a pretty penny. Instead, Lomborg’s new mantra is that:

(a) there are more important things we can be focusing on; and
(b) since we don’t seem to be making headway on Climate Change, why not apply these energies and monies to –I dunno– eliminating poverty or disease?

On the face of it, this is not a bad position to have. Indeed, his position seems to have won over many in the audience. The debate statistics show that public response was thus:

In essence, more people changed their minds in favour of the Lomborg/Lawson position than in favour of the May/Monbiot position.

Apparently, Time Magazine once listed Lomborg as one of the most important 100 intellectuals in the world, according to his intro during the Munk Debate. This surprises me, given his brazen anti-intellectual behaviour during the debate itself. Lomborg’s position, as I summarized above, is fundamentally untenable, and I’m afraid May and Monbiot did a poor job of explaining this to the audience. It comes down to this:

It doesn’t matter that poverty and disease remain as plagues upon the world. Climate Change exacerbates those things, making them increasingly worse. And it doesn’t matter that pro-environmental legislation slows down economic development. What is the point of creating wealthy nations if there’s no food or water left to buy with your newly created wealth?

These were the basic aspects of environmental and health science poorly conveyed during the debate. I proudly commented afterward that I’m certain my undergrad students could have debated Lomborg into a corner, given how much I’ve tried to encourage them to think in terms of interrelated networks and systems.

Let’s look at Lomborg’s claim that we are better off tackling global health than Climate Change. The world needs to understand that many of the problems in global health are either as a direct result of Climate Change, or will be exacerabted beyond repair as a result of Climate Change. As Stephen Lewis once commented during a live address in Ottawa, “I fear we are looking at an Apocalyptic event.”

When Monbiot (or was it May?) commented that Climate Change makes HIV/AIDS worse, Lomborg gave us his theatrical hands-in-the-air disbelief pose. “How is that even possible?” he demanded to know. Sadly, only Monbiot bothered to explain a mechanism, but only told part of the story. The incident, though, causes me to ask whether Lomborg is really so uninformed (causing me to wonder how Time would dare list him among the world’s top intellectuals) or is he instead disingenuous. If the latter, then he is insidious and dangerous indeed.

Monbiot’s mechanism was basic: Climate Change is causing droughts, which forces men off the land and into the company of prostitutes, hence spreading sexual disease, including HIV. In truth, it’s more than this. Drought leads to poor nutrition, which prevents proper uptake of the anti-viral drugs that treat HIV (which need good nutrition to work properly). Environmental collapse causes economic collapse and produces more disease issues, further overwhelming healt care systems and prventing a society from addressing its HIV epidemic.

The ecology of much of the developing world, including sub-Saharan Africa, which has the greatest HIV burden in the world, is already operating at the margins. The crops there already subsist at the very edge of tolerance for temperature and humidity perturbations. With Climate Change comes more dramatic perturbations and thus a certainty of widespread famine in those regions.

No amount of structural adjustments, as Lomborg champions, will give such nations the economic might to overcome such famine, not when most of the region is similarly affected.

In short, unlike crises in the past, Climate Change represents humanitarian challenges that one cannot buy one’ s way out of. Again, you can’t buy water that does not exist. In response to Lomborg’s assertion that human societies will develop adaptations, Monbiot powerfully retorted (and I paraphrase): in these parts of the world, the only adaptation is the AK-47.

There are many other mechanisms by which Climate Change exacerbates health, and thus wealth. Among them:

The changing of vector behaviour. Mosquitos and their like determine their ranges by temperature and humidity. As these factors change, the nature of related diseases will also change.

Water quality. Because rivers are changing paths and rainfalls are misscheduling, the predictability of the safety of drinking water is uncertain. Already, 2 million deaths a year, mostly among young children, are due to diarrhea, directly caused by unsafe water. WHO estimates that today 2.4% of diarrheal deaths are due to climate change. (WHO uses very conservative methods to reach these estimates.)

Changing agriculture. Agriculture is affected by temperature, precipitation and soil quality. According to a 2008 article in Science: southern Africa could lose more than 30% of its main crop, maize, by 2030. In South Asia losses of many regional staples, such as rice, millet and maize could top 10%.

Migration. There is a long established intersection between migration and health. The sudden stress of large numbers of people is ecologically bad. Environmental refugees must be fed, sheltered and cared for, and the world has a poor track record of caring for mass migrants. According to a 2007 article by Christian Aid: “The growing number of disasters and conflicts linked to future climate change will push the numbers far higher unless urgent action is taken. We estimate that between now and 2050 a total of 1 billion people will be displaced from their homes.”

Insecurity. Ecological collapse can cause war. According to a 2007 report by The Pentagon:
Global warming constitutes a security threat to the USA, as there will be wars based on diminishing fresh water supplies, refugees, and higher rates of famine and disease.

Economic effects. Less money means less spent on health and poverty reduction. As an example, according to a 2008 article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Coral bleaching can lead to collapse of the world’s fisheries in a matter of decades.

Air pollution. One US model predicts that by 2050, due to global warming, ozone-related
deaths will increased by 4.5% and there will be 60% more alert days.

Heat waves. According to WHO, heat deaths in California alone will double by 2010.

Natural disasters (floods and storms). According to WHO, flooding will affect 200 million people by 2080.

Here is an interesting little graphic showing deaths due to Climate Change in the year 2000, almost a decade ago. The truth today is much more daunting:

There are a lot more data and many more details. There is no dearth of studying on the topic. I don’t know how anyone who’s familiar with even a fraction of the data can conclude anything other than Climate Change is indeed the single most important crisis facing humanity now and in the next two centuries. More than the threat of nuclear war, and possibly on par with the threat of direct cometary impact, runaway greenhouse affect might very well drive civilization itself into the dust within our lifetimes.