Politics & Science with John Barkhausen

JB - John Barkhausen

RP - Ray Peat

JB: Today we're going to talk about some autoimmune diseases and some movement disorder dysfunctions. I’m intrigued by them, not only because I have friends suffering from these, but also because the medical world offers so little knowledge about the diseases and so little hope or practical knowledge in terms of treatment. I’m very happy that Dr. Raymond Peat is joining me again today. There are many theories as to the causes of the diseases and one common factor that is present in all of them and that most people agree on is inflammation. Ray, why is so little understood about these diseases?

RP: Well, I think there's a lot more known than the public is aware of. The medical journals aren't a good place to look, if you're just wanting to find out how much is known. But if you read widely, in not only medical journals but also general science journals, you see that people have discovered really interesting things about all of them, and that there are patterns that show up across the various diseases...that I think, really, things could be put into practice more than they are. And there are people demonstrating improvement in the degenerative diseases with very simple antioxidant supplements and creatine supplements and such that you just don't hear about in the New York Times stories about advances in health. I think part of it is that when a generic substance looks like it might prevent or cure one of these horrible conditions, the drug industry isn't interested, and so there's no advertising money to be made by running publicity about it.

JB: So nobody pursues it. Ray, can you explain where you're finding out this knowledge of hopeful techniques to combat these diseases?

RP: A lot of it you can find right in PubMed and Google; some of it in more obscure journals, that there's enough to keep a person busy for years, just putting pieces together. Like making a meaningful puzzle out of scraps from the various lines of thinking. Like, if you follow one disease over 20 or 30 years, like Alzheimer's, you'll see there are styles, focusing on the cholinergic nerve death or the accumulating fibrils, amyloid and such, and explaining that as the toxin that causes the disease. And the various different diseases, each one goes through its styles of what they think is interesting, but the pressure on funding research and such pushes generally towards a genetic explanation that makes a simple drug solution conceivable, like something to stop that one genetic defect from taking its effect.

JB: So, when you say "styles", are you're talking about there are certain fads in research that are prevalent at certain times?

RP: Yes, definitely, fads. But the basic, big fad, has lasted for a hundred years: it's a genetic explanation. Like in Huntington's disease, it's a certain repeat that causes a series of glutamine amino acids in the protein to increase. And that creates a protein that shows up as if it's doing damage. And, so, the framework idea is that the gene expresses itself in a protein, and the protein causes the symptoms of the disease. And so, it's the idea that the gene is causing the disease. But there are several ways of approaching that; one is that something is causing this repeat to be formed in the gene itself. For example, notice that generations, even though typically, Huntington's is thought to set in at the age of 40 or so, they noticed that the children of those people had developed it about 8 years earlier. So, each generation anticipates and starts the condition earlier. So, there's something causing that repeat in protein to increase in each generation. And, that's something that's slow to sink into the genetic causality, that things are happening right now, each generation creating a tendency to mutate in a certain direction. There were many genetic theories that said that mutations do have a directionality. And they used to explain the growth of horn antlers on elks and so on as getting bigger and bigger because of some tendency in the organism to go in a certain direction. Orthogenesis, they called it. That was sort of vaguely anti-Darwinian and inclined towards Lamarckism. And so, it brought out the idea of the defect in the gene that causes it to get worse and worse quickly with each generation. It's more acceptable, because in immunology, that was a solution to how antibodies can adapt so quickly to any conceivable infection or antigen. They said they have to adapt by mutating so fast, that it can evolve in just a few days to match whatever antigen they're exposed to. So, this idea of almost directed mutation got put into genetics by way of immunology. And there are the trailings in a few places: John Cairns and Ted Steele are the people known to be working on the idea of directed mutations in a constructive way, not just destructive.

JB: I'm awfully confused by this, because I think of geneticists as saying, in the past at least, that genes were a permanent thing, that were passed down from generation to generation and could not be changed easily.

RP: Yeah. They have been open to the idea — they’re still not seeing it as anything deliberate or constructive, just a way the defect can develop. But it’s a way to save the genetic causality, rather than seeing that the same thing causing the symptoms of the disease, might also be causing the genes to change in the same direction. That's what they don't want to see is a link between the way the gene changes, and the function of the protein in the life of the individual organism — that's where it implies Lamarckism.

JB: You mean that the organism is directing the gene mutation?

RP: Yeah. Or, that something is causing the organism, on the cellular, not genetic level, to change at the same time that the gene that regulates that cellular function is changing in the same direction. They shouldn't be coordinated that way, so that the function and the gene change simultaneously, or even with the information going from the function into the gene and then back.

JB: So that would mean that the organism is a purposive being on an evolutionary level?

RP: Yeah, exactly, that's the whole point. Ever since the anti-Darwinians in the 19th century, Weismann in particular, they hated the idea that things could be changing meaningfully or purposefully, and wanted to say that there is no real change, and genes were the way of proving that you might get a different mixture of traits but the traits are eternal, and the gene is what causes that. One of the people questioning this, James Shapiro, was working along in ordinary bacterial genetics, and he noticed that individuals exposed to an antibiotic could become resistant to it, and that they could pass that information on, very intentionally, to their neighbors. And it could even cross a variety of one bacteria to another, and spread it through whole systems. That got him thinking about this idea of purposive change, and he's proposed that the organism does genetic engineering along the lines of what Barbara McClintock was talking about. But he says this is the general way genetics works in the organism, that the organism is its own genetic engineer, doing changes for its own benefit.

JB: Yeah. I can believe it, because I was looking today at a physiology book, trying to understand the nervous system, because a lot of the diseases we started off talking about are diseases of the nervous system, and it’s pretty phenomenal — if you open up an encyclopedia and look at how the nervous system is laid out, it’s an awe inspiring system. The idea that some scientists and philosophers think that happened by random evolutionary trial and error seems impossible to my mind.

RP: Yeah, the establishment genetics biology system, including most of medicine, are attacking James Shapiro, with his application of Barbara McClintock's way of thinking. What was your point?

JB: The complexity, the organization of it...

RP: The complexity, yes. Randomness is such a deep part of their way of thinking that they are accusing Shapiro of being a Creationist. He says, well, the Creationists sometimes speak very reasonably, and sometimes the so-called neo-Darwinians don't speak so scientifically and reasonably. So he isn't attacking the science, invoking Creationists, because sometimes their arguments are plausible.

JB: Yeah, I mean I don't personally buy into the father figure in the sky, looking down on us all, but...