July 15, 2010

(Stuart Fox, Popular Science, 03.30.2010)
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In a move that could significantly alter the future of genetic medicine and the industry around it, a US District Court judge invalidated seven patents for human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer, on the grounds that genes are discovered, not created. The ruling opens up challenges against the patents held by numerous companies on thousands of human genes, and jeopardizes an industry business model based on exclusive rights to gene treatment. . . . The case, Association for Molecular Pathology, et al. v U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, et al., reverses decades of rulings, including a 1980 Supreme Court decision upholding the patenting of artificial bacteria. In his opinion, Judge Robert Sweet decided that naturally occurring isolated genes are not legally distinct from entire genomes, which are protected from patent by law. Judge Sweet even went as far as calling the reasoning that deemed isolated genes legally distinct from entire genomes a “lawyer’s trick”.

(Andrew Hough, The Telegraph, 29 Mar 2010)
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Bingeing on junk food is as addictive as smoking or taking drugs and could cause compulsive eating and obesity, a study has found.

American researchers found burgers, chips and sausages programmed a human brain into craving even more sugar, salt and fat laden food. . . . Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida found laboratory rats became addicted on a bad diet just like people who became dependent on cocaine and heroin. . . . the study, published online in Nature Neuroscience, suggests for the first time that our brains may react in the same way to junk food as it does to drugs. . . . “The new study explains what happens in the brain of these animals when they have easy access to high-calorie, high-fat food.” . . . He added: “It presents the most thorough and compelling evidence that drug addiction and obesity are based on the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.” . . . The very same changes occur in the brains of rats that over consume cocaine or heroin, and are thought to play an important role in the development of compulsive drug use. . . . The scientists fed the rats a diet modelled after the type that contributes to human obesity easy to obtain high-calorie, high-fat foods. Soon after the experiments began, the animals began to bloat. . . . Latest figures show that one in four people in Britain are obese with married people twice as likely to become obese than their single counterparts. . . . Eight in 10 men and almost 7 in 10 women will be overweight or obese by 2020. . . . Cases of devastating health conditions like heart disease, diabetes and stroke will increase with the nation’s waistlines, the recent Government-commissioned Foresight report warned.

(David Edwards and Sahil Kapur, Raw Story, March 9, 2010)
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“The congressman told Raw Story in January that Democrats “lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies.” He alleged that the proposals on the table would further escalate income inequality in the United States. ”$70 billion dollars a year, and no guarantees of any control over premiums, forcing people to buy private insurance, five consecutive years of double-digit premium increases.” . . . The proposal the White House and Democrats are coalescing around comprises subsidies for lower-income individuals and a mandate that they purchase insurance. It also bans insurers from dropping sick people from their plans or denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing conditions. . . . An ardent proponent of a single-payer or Medicare-for-all system, Kucinich reiterated his view that the current template offers private insurers “a version of a bailout” and predicted they’ll continue “socking it to consumers.” . . . ”I told the president twice in two different meetings that I couldn’t support the bill if it didn’t have a robust public option and at least if it didn’t have something that was going to protect consumers from these rampant premium increases,” he added. . . . The Ohio congressman left no doubt that he plans to oppose the bill again, even if he were to cast the swing-vote. “If that sounded like a no, you’re correct,” he told guest host Lawrence O’Donnell, declaring the effort was like “building on sand.” . . . The congressman told Raw Story in January that Democrats “lost the initiative the minute that our party jumped into bed with the insurance companies.” He alleged that the proposals on the table would further escalate income inequality in the United States.

(psypressuk.com, Reviews & research in psychedelic literature)
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Originally published in 2002 ‘Hallucinogens: A reader’ is a collection of psychedelic texts edited by Charles Grob, M.D. and includes contributions from such notables as Ralph Metzner and Terence McKenna. It covers a wide range of topics like society, shamanism and research and manages to avoid the pitfalls of being too topically restrictive, or too linguistically complex.

In his introduction Charles S. Grob takes a look at two threads that helped create the history of what we call the psychedelic movement. These two elements are characterized by their earliest exponents: Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary. They amount to a different perspective on how those with the knowledge of psychedelics should proceed in attempting to ingratiate the experience into society as a legitimated, functioning and positive phenomena. . . . One of Terence McKenna more famous monologues ‘Psychedelic Society’ has been transcribed. . . . In amongst the widely known figureheads of the psychedelic movement included in this reader, like Albert Hoffman, Ralph Metzner and McKenna, there are several lesser known figures whose contributions are of real note. . . . Thomas Riedlinger does a wonderful exposition of two psychedelic novels, which are rarely classed as such: Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Nausea’ (1938,) with its mescaline hell, reflecting the authors own experiences and ‘Exploring Inner Space’ (1961) by “Jane Dunlap”, a pseudonym for the famous nutritionist Adelle Davis. Davis underwent a quest for spiritual enlightenment using LSD. . . . Scientific method, case studies and religious implications in science are all explored by writers like Rick Strassman, Gary Fisher and Jeremy Narby. As a reader ‘Hallucinogens’ truly fulfils its potential. Not only by reiterating knowledge in new contexts but by showing the variety and depth to the boundaries that the psychedelic movement has pushed out into in the last fifty years. A collection of texts, such as this, that carefully outlines the flight of psychedelic research is a valuable tool.

(Tara Lohan, AlterNet, March 6, 2010)
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Food Inc: Michael Pollan and Friends Reveal the Food Industry’s Darkest Secrets

It turns out that figuring out the most simple thing — like what’s on your dinner plate, and where it came from — is actually a pretty subversive act. . . . That’s what director Robert Kenner found out while spending six years putting together the amazing new documentary, Food Inc., which features prominent food writers Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation). . . . Warning: Food Inc. is not for the faint of heart. While its focus is not on the gory images of slaughterhouse floors and filthy feedlots, what it does show about the journey of our food from “farm” to plate is not pretty. . . . The story’s main narrative chronicles the consolidation of our vast food industry into the hands of a few powerful corporations that have worked to limit the public’s understanding of where its food comes from, what’s in it and how safe it may be. . . . But it’s also a larger story about the people that have gotten in the way of the stampeding corporate herd

(Raymond J. Lawrence, CounterPunch, March 6, 2010)
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<i>The idea of sexual pleasure as a harmful addiction parallels the most perverse aspects of Western religious history.</i> . . . Sex addiction is the latest star in America’s sexual burlesque. Sex addiction has of course been a malaprop from its first usage. . . . Applying such a metaphor to sexual pleasure creates a misleading and ominous innuendo. Sex is not an addictive substance. It’s a human interaction on which the survival of the species is dependent. It is also possibly the most pleasurable and sought after activity known to humankind, and arguably an experience no one should be deprived of. Most normal people consider more rather than less sexual pleasure to be a major objective in life. . . . Following the substance abuse mode implies that the only cure for an addiction to sexual pleasure would be a celibate or monastic life, a complete renunciation of the alleged addictive sexual pleasure. . . . The very idea of sexual pleasure as a harmful addiction plays precisely into the hands of one of the most perverse aspects of Western religious history, namely the teaching that sex is a work of the devil redeemed only by the act of procreation itself. Reliance on the notion of sex addiction in counseling and psychiatric treatment is ominous. . . . So now according to the working version of the new DSM-5, psychiatrists will be able to assess whether one is having too much sex, or even whether one simply wants too much sex. Or too little. They will presumably have some kind of measuring rod to determine what is too much or too little. . . . This new project, of assessing who might be wanting or getting too much sexual pleasure, or too little, should create many more jobs for psychiatrists. We’ve been needing something to improve the job market. Maybe this will do it. Perhaps psychiatry will now join hands with the worst elements of Christianity and recreate the medieval Christian dream, a world where the only sexual pleasure allowable is that accidentally associated with the desire to procreate.

( Andy Isaacson, Mother Jones, Nov/Dec 2009)
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<b><i>Paul Stamets is on a quest to find an endangered mushroom that could cure smallpox, TB, and even bird flu. Can he unlock its secrets before deforestation and climate change wipe it out?</i></b>

IN THE OLD-GROWTH forests of the Pacific Northwest grows a bulbous, prehistoric-looking mushroom called agarikon. It prefers to colonize century-old Douglas fir trees, growing out of their trunks like an ugly mole on a finger. When I first met Paul Stamets, a mycologist who has spent more than three decades hunting, studying, and tripping on mushrooms, he had found only two of these unusual fungi, each time by accident—or, as he might put it, divine intervention. . . . Stamets believes that unlocking agar i kon’s secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillium mold’s antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago. And so on a sunny July day, Stamets is setting off on a voyage along the coastal islands of southern British Columbia in hopes of bagging more of the endangered fungus before deforestation or climate change irreparably alters the ecosystems where it makes its home. Agarikon may be ready to save us—but we may have to save it first. . . . Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.” Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. . . . Insisting that he’s merely a “voice for the mycelium,” Stamets says he can’t really take credit for his discoveries about an extraordinarily diverse and evolutionarily successful kingdom that modern science has scarcely explored. Still, over the past four years, he has filed for twenty-two patents and received four. “I’m up against big bad pharma, and they will try to steal from us. I have no illusions about this,” he says. “Truly, it’s a David versus Goliath situation.” He asserts that after one of his public talks, in which he spoke about his discovery of a fungus that kills carpenter ants and termites by tricking them into eating it, he was approached by two retired pesticide industry executives. Convinced that their former employers would feel threatened by this relatively cheap, nontoxic pesticide, Stamets claims, they advised him to watch his back. . . . Fungi were among the first organisms to colonize land 1 billion years ago, long before plants. A visitor to the planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by fungi such as prototaxites, a bizarre-looking, 30-foot-tall mushroom. Contemporary fungi may be more discreet, but they’re just as ubiquitous—and mysterious. Fewer than 7 percent of the estimated 1.5 million species have been cataloged. Mycologists have recently identified 1,200 species of mushrooms in just a few thousand square feet of Guyanese rainforest, half of them previously unknown to science. . . . As we walk, Stamets points out that the spongy feeling under our feet is a vast subterranean network of mycelium. Stamets refers to mycelium as “nature’s Internet,” a superhighway of information-sharing membranes that govern the flow of essential nutrients around an ecosystem. A honey mushroom mycelium that covers 2,200 acres in eastern Oregon is thought to be the world’s largest organism. When Stamets saw mycelium for the first time, growing like a spiderweb across a log, he brought it home and tacked it onto his bedroom wall. Mycelium’s labyrinthine tendrils prevent erosion, retain water, and break down dead plants into ingredients other organisms can use to make soil. Stamets likes to call fungi “soil magicians.”

(Yasmin Anwar, UC Berkeley, Alternet.org,March 4, 2010)
In contrast to “every man for himself” interpretations of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of “Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life,” and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits. . . . They call it “survival of the kindest.” . . . “Because of our very vulnerable offspring, the fundamental task for human survival and gene replication is to take care of others,” said Keltner, co-director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. “Human beings have survived as a species because we have evolved the capacities to care for those in need and to cooperate. As Darwin long ago surmised, sympathy is our strongest instinct.” . . . While studies show that bonding and making social connections can make for a healthier, more meaningful life, the larger question some UC Berkeley researchers are asking is, “How do these traits ensure our survival and raise our status among our peers?” . . . One answer, according to UC Berkeley social psychologist and sociologist Robb Willer is that the more generous we are, the more respect and influence we wield. . . . Overall, these and other findings at UC Berkeley challenge the assumption that nice guys finish last, and instead support the hypothesis that humans, if adequately nurtured and supported, tend to err on the side of compassion. . . . “This new science of altruism and the physiological underpinnings of compassion is finally catching up with Darwin’s observations nearly 130 years ago, that sympathy is our strongest instinct,” Keltner said.