My new blog at Substack

This blog has been largely inactive for quite a while, but I have continued to be interested in controversial issues in science and medicine, and am trying out a new blogging platform at https://henryhbauer.substack.com. I began with a couple of general discussions:

The Proper Place for Science in Modern Societies; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/the-proper-place-for-science-in-modern

and

When the Experts Disagree; https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/when-the-experts-disagree-fe2

Of course I hope that those of you who have followed this blog will subscribe to the new one.

Substack gives its bloggers the possibility of offering paid subscriptions, but I do not plan to do so. My hope is that readers will find the discussions sufficiently worthwhile to tell other people about them.

This return to blogging reflects my continuing frustration at the misleading stuff that appears continually in the mass media, even in the most widely respected places and sometimes by even the least biased and most respected pundits.

A great deal is misleading because it ignores contrarian minority views and the evidence that makes those views worth attending to.

Among the things that irritate me more or less continually nowadays is the hysteria about climate change, and the continuing confusion, lack of clarity, conflicting claims, over COVID.

In a number of instances, differing views over supposedly scientific issues correlate with political leanings, and I have observed, unhappily, how political correctness, which first affected me in the 1980s, has become ever so much worse since then and has come to influence even scientific matters in a significant way: see Anna I. Krylov, The peril of politicizing science, Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 12 (2021) 5371−5376;
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c01475, and
https://quillette.com/2021/12/18/scientists-must-gain-the-courage-to-oppose-the-politicization-of-their-disciplines.

Organized so-called “Skeptics” groups

Those of us who have been seriously and open-mindedly interested in such controversial topics as Loch Ness Monsters, UFOs, parapsychology, etc., etc., are quite familiar  with the dogmatic attitudes of individuals and groups that designate themselves as Skeptics. The earliest and iconic such groups were CSICOP: The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and its analogous group in Germany, GWUP: Gesellschaft zur Wissenschaftlichen Untersuchung von Parawissenschaften.

When they were first established,  some individuals took seriously the mission statements of investigating scientifically these controversial topics; but as it became clear that these groups aimed not at unbiased investigation but were concerned to ensure that such pseudo-science would not ever find acceptance in the wider society, a few prominent individuals resigned from the groups amid a certain amount of public to and fro. Marcello Truzzi resigned from CSICOP and Edgar Wunder from GWUP.

A wide-ranging  retrospective and updated discussion of the dogmatic character of the so-called “Skeptical”  groups has been published in the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik (Journal of Anomalistics), 21 (2021) issue 1; it is freely available at https://www.anomalistik.de/zeitschrift/inhalt/zfa-21-1 (my thanks to Harry Kriz for this information). It is well worth reading by anyone interested in these matters, and much of the issue is either written in English or accompanied by a translation into English.

 Edgar Wunder writes about past and present and clarifies his own position, which has often been misdescribed. All the commentaries are well worth reading, including an introductory editorial by Gerhard Mayer (Science, faith, faith in science). I was particularly impressed by the brief, cogent, insightful piece by Dean Radin (On pathological skepticism).

Follow the science?

Through much of the COVID19 episode, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has denounced with outrage those who question or dispute official guidelines about masking, distancing, etc., bellowing “Just follow the science!”

— by which he means, accept what the recognized authorities state that “the science” is.

What Scarborough doesn’t know — together with almost all other media pundits and commentators — is that the recognized authorities are sometimes wrong.

For those who know something about science, and particularly about the history of science — perhaps especially medical science — the problem is, how to find out what “the science” actually is, the  pertinent facts and contextual evidence.

Most of us have to rely on what the experts and the  recognized authorities tell us, but that is not always correct.

Although quite often there are eminently expert individuals who point that out, typically they are ignored, denigrated suppressed, persecuted. Re HIV/AIDS, see for example the case of Peter Duesberg, chapter 3 in [1]. Re aluminum, consider the example of Christopher Exley [2].

The salient point is that official pronouncements by the recognized authorities about scientific matters need to be fact-checked.

The lack of fact-checking has led to some highly damaging public policies and actions. The list of topics on which the official global “scientific consensus” happens to be wrong is alarming,  both in the public importance of some of the topics and in the steady growth in the number of specific matters which the global public has been misled and continues to be misled:

HIV/AIDS [3]

Global warming and climate change (pp. 18-26 in [1]; many posts at https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com

Eugenics [4]

A host of medical matters [5]

— including notably vaccines [6]
— and the risks posed by aluminum adjuvants in vaccines as well as by other sources of aluminum  [7]

The crucial point is that truth, including truth about scientific matters, is a public good: it surely benefits humankind as a whole, in the long run; but specific truths quite typically undercut some strongly vested interests. Truths about drugs and vaccines diminish profit-making by pharmaceutical companies, and thereby lessen political campaign contributions; and so on for all the commercial and ideological sectors of society. Environmental activists don’t want truths about climate change. No political parties want real truths about economics or sociology or psychology.

Humankind needs a system capable of discerning genuine truths; which includes fact-checking of what the recognized authorities say about scientific matters.

_____________________________________________

[1]    Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland 2012

[2]    “University Shuts Down World-Renowned Aluminum Expert’s Research After Big Pharma Sets Up Shop on Campus”

[3]    The Case against HIV , listing >20 books and >900 articles

[4]    Tens of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized as recently as 1981 on the basis of expert consensus about the heritability of certain behavioral traits — Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012

[5]    WHAT’S WRONG WITH PRESENT-DAY MEDICINE;

[6]    “Vaccines: truth, lies, and controversy”
Peter C. Gøtzsche, Vaccines: truth, lies and controversy (Kindle 2020, Skyhorse 2021)

[7]    Publications by Christopher Exley summarized in recent book: Imagine You Are an Aluminum Atom: Discussions With Mr. Aluminum (Skyhorse 2020)

The Loch Ness “Monster”: Its real and important significance

Because of my writings about Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster [1], I am periodically approached by various media. Last year I had published [2] the suggestion that the Loch Ness creatures are more plausibly related to sea turtles than to the commonly popular notion of plesiosaurs.

A Scottish journalist came across that article, and for one day something about it and me was featured in every yellow-press newspaper in Britain, and several broadcast media asked for interviews.

The episode reminded me of some of the things that are so wrong with modern mass media.

Their overriding concern is simply to attract an audience. There is no intention of offering that audience any genuinely insightful analysis or context or background information. Media attention span approximates that of Twittering. One television network asked for an instant interview, wanted the best phone-contact number, even offered me compensation — and then never followed up.

I did talk to one Russian and one Spanish station or network, and I tried to point to what the real significance is of the Loch Ness animals, namely, that their existence has been denied by official scientific sources for not much less than a century, demonstrating that official science can be wrong, quite wrong; and while that matters little if at all about Loch Ness, I said, it does matter greatly when official science is wrong about such matters of public importance as HIV/AIDS  or climate change,  about which official science does in fact happen to be wrong [3].

So far, however, my bait about those important matters has not been snapped up.

Misunderstandings about science are globally pervasive, especially not realizing that it is fallible. The consequent unwarranted acceptance of wrong beliefs about HIV and about carbon dioxide demonstrate the need for some institution independent of official science, independent of existing scientific organizations and institutions, to provide fact-checking of contemporary scientific consensuses, an impartial, unbiased, strictly evidence-based assessments of official science. In other words, society sorely needs a Science Court [4].

Misconceptions about science can already be seen as a significant reason for flaws in the announced policies of the new Biden administration, as it places high priority on “combating climate change” and engaging in a “moon shot” to cure cancer: having not learned any lessons from the failure of the war on cancer, or from the fact, obvious in great swaths of the geological literature, that carbon dioxide is demonstrably not the prime cause of global warming since there is no correlation between global temperatures and carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere [5], neither over the whole life of the Earth nor over the last couple of centuries.

——————————————————

[1]    The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery, University of Illinois Press, 1986/88; Wipf & Stock reprint, 2012
GENUINE  FACTS about “NESSIE”, THE LOCH NESS “MONSTER”
[2]    “Loch Ness Monsters as Cryptid (Presently Unknown) Sea Turtles”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 34 (2020) 93-104
[3]    Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland, 2012
The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[4]    Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed (McFarland 2017), chapter 12
“The Case for a Science Court”
“Science Court: Why and What“
[5]    “A politically liberal global-warming skeptic?”
”Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide”

The Banality of Evil — and modern medical practices

”The banality of evil” is a phrase famously used by Hannah Arendt in her description of the trial  of Adolf Eichmann. There has been much argument about what exactly she meant. For me, the insight is that evil is so often unintended, that it can result from perfectly well-intentioned actions.

The root of all evil is wrong belief.

If one believes that the most important thing about a human being is the immortal soul, and that the soul will burn in hell for eternity unless it has accepted what the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes, then obviously one should leave nothing undone in the effort to bring that soul to proper belief, even if that amounts to torturing the immortal soul’s body, even to death.

If one believes that one’s country was defeated and devastated by sabotage perpetrated by Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, and the like, then obviously one should do whatever is necessary to rid the country of those perpetraitors.

 And so on

The human tragedy is that we acquire beliefs according to the environment into which we are born and in which we are raised; and once belief has been acquired, it tends to become increasingly entrenched and increasingly difficult to modify.

The problem for society is how best to ensure that collective public actions are based on correct rather than on wrong beliefs.

Nowadays that is taken to mean that public actions should be based on science.

Unfortunately, the nature of scientific activity is widely and thoroughly misunderstood [1], in particular its fallibility, which results inevitably from the fact that science is carried out by fallible human beings.

That fallibility is well illustrated by the history of medicine, where many past practices are now recognized as having been harmful rather than helpful — drawing out blood in sizable amounts, for example. Nowadays, the excellent intention to base medical practices on sound scientific knowledge has sadly gone wrong in several ways, as a result of beliefs that turn out to be wrong.  One pervasive reason is that statistical associations are taken as indicating cause and effect — an error that is warned against in even the most elementary introductions to statistical analysis.

Several pertinent stories are analyzed in Jeremy Greene’s magisterial Prescribing by Numbers [2].

One story has to do with blood pressure. Life insurance companies required physical examinations. Their accumulated data revealed that on average mortality increased with increasing blood pressure. Now, mortality increases with age; and it happens also that every relevant study has shown that blood pressure too increases naturally with age in otherwise healthy people. The association of blood pressure with mortality is an artefact illustrating the common principle in statistics that when two things, A and B, are each correlated with a third factor, C, then A and B will also show a correlation with one another; even though neither causes the other [3].

The misinterpretation of life-insurance statistics has resulted in contemporary medical practice based on a wrong belief, namely, that it is beneficial is to bring everyone’s blood pressure to a level that is normal only for people in their twenties.

This mistake becomes particularly harmful since the means used to lower blood pressure almost invariably involve administering drugs, though lip service is always paid to advising appropriate diet and exercise as the first resort.

That drug companies are permitted to advertise direct to consumers (among developed countries, only in the USA and New Zealand) means that such practices become so taken-for-granted as to be virtually unquestionable.

Another mistaken belief is that high levels of cholesterol in the blood constitute cardiovascular disease and increased risk of stroke and heart-attack. The corollary misguided belief is that bringing cholesterol levels down by administering statin drugs is beneficial; even though statins hinder the body’s production of coenzyme Q10, which is a necessary component of the energy-producing mechanisms of all cells. Inevitably, therefore, statins induce in muscular weakness, which is officially but quite mistakenly described as a “side” effect; it is a direct effect.

Many well documented books and articles have debunked the cholesterol theory (for example, Kendrick (2007) and Ravnskov (2000) in [4]), without effecting any change in standard practice — although many individuals ignore or defy their doctor’s prescribing of statins.

Not only do modern American medical practices rely on misleading, incompetent statistical analyses, they are based fundamentally on the wrong belief that preventive medicine can be successfully practiced by administering of drugs. This becomes increasingly harmful when those drugs continue to be prescribed as people get older and the steadily cumulating danger from drug “side” effects outweigh any possible benefit from “reducing risk” of one or another ailment [5].

Drug-based treatments are particularly well entrenched because the pharmaceutical industry is hugely profitable in large part because of the profligate prescribing of drugs stimulated by pervasive advertising.

The greatest immediate improvement in prescribing practices would result if the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory authorities would demand statistically competent and honest protocols for clinical trials, including that outcomes not be assessed as “significant at p ≤ 0.05” but in terms of NNT and NNH: numbers of patients needed to be treated for 1 successful outcome compared to numbers of patients needed to be treated to observe 1 undesired adverse event [6].

That would prevent much harm, for example that now perpetrated by HPV vaccines, which are responsible for the greatest number of officially reported averse events as well as many horrifying anecdotes [7]; while there is no actual proof that HPV causes any cancer at all, HPV having been found guilty only because a few strains (out of many dozens) are often statistically associated with some cancers.

Well intentioned physicians are doing harm because of wrong beliefs, even as dozens of books [4] have exposed the misdeeds and their causes.

Is it not an evil,
 to persuade people to ingest things that do harm
 without any compensating good?

————————————————–

[1]    Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017
[2]    Jeremy Greene, Prescribing by Numbers, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007
[3]    “Seeking Immortality? Challenging the drug-based medical paradigm”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 26 (2012) 867-80
[4]    What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine
[5]    “When is enough, enough? Stopping medicines in older people”, Best Practices Journal, #27 (April 2010) 6-9; Rushabh J. Dagli & Akanksha Sharma, “Polypharmacy: A global risk factor for elderly people”, Journal of International Oral Health,  6 (#6, 2014) i–ii
[6]    How (not) to measure the efficacy of drugs
[7]    Mary Holland, Kim Mack Rosenberg & Eileen Iorio,  The HPV Vaccine On Trial: Seeking Justice For A Generation Betrayed, Skyhorse, 2018
Documentary: Sacrificial Virgins

The HIV/AIDS blunder: Missed opportunities for mainstream research to self-correct

Quite a number of specific mis-steps conspired to the acceptance and continuance of HIV/AIDS theory. They illustrate much of what has gone wrong with science: It is subject to interference by commercial, political, and ideological influences; it is comprised of a variety of institutions that do not interact usefully or reliably. Above all:

 Science has no overarching watchdog to ensure
 that theories change appropriately
 as evidence accumulates

1. 1.The first and crucial mistake was when the Secretary of Health and Human Services (Margaret Heckler) held a press conference at which Robert Gallo claimed to have discovered the probable cause of AIDS. Illustrated by this sad episode is political interference and the pervasive ignorance of how science works:
   →     Gallo had not yet published anything. Insiders regarded him as incompetent and untrustworthy. Investigative journalism later (2002) fully documented that he is an unscrupulous charlatan [1].
   →     Heckler’s background was as a lawyer and a politically active Republican.
   →     Activists had been campaigning vigorously for the Republican administration to do something about AIDS.
    →    This official endorsement of Gallo’s claim acted as a signal that anyone who wanted research support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would likely be successful by proposing to work on HIV; virologists in particular were hungry for funding after their failure to discover cancer-causing viruses in the “war on cancer” [2].
2. 2.An important contributing factor  was statistical incompetence at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC):
   →     Mistakenly taking “gay” rather than drug abuse as the most meaningful association with AIDS [3]. The CDC should also have been aware  that AIDS-like symptoms had been quite common among addicts during the 1960-70s epidemic of so-called recreational drug use [4].
   →     Initiated the misleading “young, previously healthy, gay men” characterization based on 5 cases aged 29-36, average 32.6 [5]. Its Task Force on Kaposi’s Sarcoma had found the average age of AIDS victims to be 35. When Cochrane [6] re-examined the medical records 20 years later, she found that the average age of the first 25 AIDS patients in San Francisco had been 38. This mattered crucially: The greatest risk for sexual infections is among people <30; lifestyle ailments are increasingly likely at older ages, more compatible with a decade or two of what used to be called dissolute living.
   CDC researchers as early as 1987 failed to recognize the significance of their finding that, among Job Corps  members at ages about 17 and younger, females are more likely to test HIV-positive than males [7].
3. 3.The Army HIV Research Office also failed to recognize the significance of their finding that at ages about 17 and younger, females are more likely to test HIV-positive than males [8].
4. 4.Duesberg had published comprehensive debunkings of HIV in 1987 [9] and 1989 [10]. The latter  has a footnote promising a rebuttal from Gallo that never eventuated, despite several reminders [11: 233].
5. 5.As the years went by, more and more conundrums emerged whose significance was missed:
   →     The purple skin-patches of Kaposi’s Sarcoma had been the iconic signature of AIDS,  yet after half-a-dozen years they had become rare among AIDS patients.
   →     The correlation between drug abuse and AIDS became stronger and stronger.
   →     Prostitutes who did not use drugs were not at risk of  becoming HIV-positive.
   →     Drug abusers who used clean needles would more likely to test HIV-positive than those who exchanged needles.
   →     Marriage and pregnancy are risk factors for testing HIV-positive.
   →     Many further instances, with primary sources cited also for the points above, see The Case against HIV
   
   

Lessons:

The clearest general lesson is that policymakers and administrators should not take far-reaching actions on matters of science or medicine without advice from individuals who have at least an elementary acquaintance with the history of science and the understanding of present-day scientific activity incorporated in Science and Technology Studies (STS [12]). Anyone with that background would be familiar with the danger of accepting any scientific claim made by an individual researcher or administrator of research before the claim had even been published. The training of most scientists and most doctors neglects that important background.

A fairly general lesson is that competence in statistics may be sorely lacking even in an agency like CDC where gathering and analyzing statistical data is a central task. Much has been written during the last several decades about the pervasive abuse and misuse of statistics in medicine and medical science [13].

It is also not irrelevant that an overwhelming of proportion of those who were carrying out and reporting HIV tests were medical doctors, MDs or DVMs, rather than people trained in research. This is not to discount and the insights of the many MDs who have been able to learn from experience and to transcend some of the mistaken lore they were originally taught [14]. But medical training focuses on applying what is known, not on questioning it. By contrast,  journalists who were covering the HIV/AIDS story [1, 15] had a more holistic mindset and noticed how inadequate the officially accepted view is.

A part of understanding what contemporary scientific or research activity involves is to recognize that the overwhelming proportion of individuals doing what is loosely called “research” or “science”  are not engaged in seeking fundamental truths. Most of the published reports on HIV testing were based on taking for granted that HIV causes AIDS and gathering data for other purposes, say, recruitment into the Armed Forces, or the presumed need of for antiviral drugs in different regions of Africa; so those “researchers” had been blind to  the steady accumulation of data incompatible with the view of HIV as a contagious infection.

Present-day institutions of medical science
are incapable of self-correcting a mistaken “consensus”

That is why society needs a Science Court

***************************************************************************

[1]    John Crewdson, Science Fictions: A scientific mystery, a massive cover-up and the dark legacy of Robert Gallo, Little, Brown, 2002
[2]    Peter Duesberg, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery, 1996; chapter 4
[3]    John Lauritsen, “CDC’s tables obscure AIDS-drug connection”, Philadelphia Gay News, 14 February 1985 (and five other papers); reprinted as chapter I in The AIDS war: propaganda, profiteering and genocide from the medical-industrial complex, ASKLEPIOS, 1993
[4]    Neville Hodgkinson, AIDS: The Failure of Contemporary Science, Fourth Estate, 1996
[5]    Pneumocystis Pneumonia — Los Angeles, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 30 (#21, 5 June 1981.) 250-52
[6]    Michelle Cochrane, When AIDS began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic, Routledge, 2004
[7]    Michael E. St. Louis, George A. Conway, Charles R. Hayman, Carol Miller, Lyle R. Petersen, Timothy J. Dondero,  “Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection in Disadvantaged Adolescents: Findings From the US Job Corps”, JAMA, 266
(1991): 2387-91;  Fig. 4 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 RN]
 [8]   John F. Brundage, Donald S. Burke, Robert Visintine, Michael Peterson, Robert R. Redfield. “HIV Infection among young adults in the New York City area”, New York State Journal of Medicine, May 1988, 232-33; Fig. 3 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 DVM]
Donald S. Burke, John F. Brundage, Mary Goldenbaum, Lytt I. Gardner, Michael Peterson, Robert Visintine, Robert R. Redfield, & the Walter Reed Retrovirus Research Group, “Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infections in Teenagers: Seroprevalence Among Applicants for US Military Service”, JAMA, 263 (1990) 2074-77; Table 1 [authors’ training: 4 MD, 1 DVM, 1 MS, 1 PhD]
Burke, D. S., J. F. Brundage, J. R. Herbold, W. Berner,  L. I. Gardner, J. D. Gunzenhauser,  J. Voskovitch, & R. R. Redfield, “Human immunodeficiency virus infections among civilian applicants for United States military service, October 1985 to March 1986”, New England Journal of Medicine, 317 (1987) 131-36; Fig 1 [authors’ training: 5 MD, 1 PhD, 1 DVM]
[9]    Peter H. Duesberg, “Retroviruses as carcinogens and pathogens: expectations and reality”, Cancer Research, 47 (1987) 1199-220
[10]  Peter H. Duesberg, “Human immunodeficiency virus and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome: correlation but not causation”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 86 (1989) 755-64.
[11]  Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007
[12]  “STS draws on the full range of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities to examine the ways that science and technology shape, and are shaped by, our society, politics, and culture. We study contemporary controversies, historical transformations, policy dilemmas, and broad philosophical questions” (Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech)
[13]  Illustrated in many of the books cited in What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine
but see particularly the cited articles by Altman, Ioannidis, Matthews
[14]  See for example in the books listed in [13] those by Angell, Brody, Goldacre, Gøtzsche, Greene, Kendrick, LeFanu, Ravnskov, Smith
[15]      See books by Farber, Hodgkinson, Leitner, Shenton, in The Case against HIV

From uncritical about science to skeptical about science, 6: HIV/AIDS is a blunder!

Why now so obvious to me while officialdom remains misled?

This series of blog posts aims to help me understand why I and many other individuals came to see the obvious while the mainstream community failed and still fails to recognize the facts. The HIV/AIDS episode also illustrates how wrong is the popular view of science, for example that it is self-correcting.

The obvious evidence that HIV does not cause AIDS is set out in several places:
Ø     A book published in 2007 [1]  incorporating details set out in several earlier articles [2, 3-5]; the first of these [2] is already quite comprehensive.
Ø     Blog posts with further illustrating examples and responses to comments and criticisms [6].
Ø     A book chapter describing how I came to analyze the evidence and become frustratedly crankish as a result [7].
Ø     A website, The Case against HIV, cites >900 chiefly peer-reviewed mainstream publications, organized to make it easy to find detailed answers on specific points about HIV and AIDS. 

How the theory nevertheless became accepted and entrenched is described in Part III of my book [1].

My journey to realizing that HIV does not cause AIDS  was unique:
Ø      Long-standing interest in scientific controversies, always on the lookout for new cases to study.
Ø      Learning by chance in early 1990s that HIV/AIDS had been controversial in the past.
Ø      Learning that HIV had supposedly entered into United States  at the earliest in the late 1970s, among gay men  in large cities: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco.
Ø      Chancing (around 2003) on an assertion that among potential Army recruits in  the mid-1980s, female and male teenagers all over the country had tested HIV-positive at about the same rate: impossible, according to the previous point.
Ø      Pedantic obsession with fact-checking: determined to check that assertion, whether it was perhaps a mis-citation, led to  collating all available data from HIV tests.
Ø      Familiarity with the history of science as a succession of mistaken consensuses later corrected; any majority consensus can quite often be wrong, especially contemporary or recent ones.
Ø      Familiarity, largely through participation in the Society for Scientific Exploration, with the fact that the majority consensus in science suppresses minority views ruthlessly and indiscriminately.
Ø      Having available the considerable needed time through being retired, but still with easy access to a research library.
Ø      More general background: As a research chemist, taking as axiomatic that there is no satisfactory substitute for perpetually subjecting theories to the test of factual evidence.

No doubt the journeys by which other people had reached the same understanding were also unique. Certainly it was different than mine for those who were there at the beginning of the AIDS era, or for the several investigative journalists who saw at first hand that theory does not match reality (see Crewdson, Farber, Hodgkinson, Shenton in The Case against HIV).

How to enable the rest of society to shed the mistaken view about HIV/AIDS? How to question a matter that has been taken for granted by officialdom around the world for more than two decades and is still supported by the consensus in the medical-scientific community?
Ø      Once a belief has become generally taken for granted, including in medicine and in science, self-correction becomes increasingly unlikely. A following blog post will cite some of the missed opportunities for self-correction over HIV/AIDS.
Ø      Any questioning of the belief is likely to be ignored, or dismissed as crankish, Flat-Earther-ish, by media and pundits as well as the majority consensus.

That’s why something like a Science Court is needed; see “Science Court: Why and What” and chapter 12 in [8].

A Court is necessary because the majority consensus refuses to engage substantively with dissenters. The Court would serve to force public engagement among the disagreeing technical experts. As the consensus and the dissenters are made to present their arguments and their evidence openly, publicly, and to defend them under cross-examination, the points of disagreement would be identified and clarified; in the case of HIV/AIDS, the truth would become obvious.

—————————————————-

[1]    The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory,
McFarland, 2007
[2]    Is HIV really the cause of AIDS?, The Anomalist, 11 (2003) 19-21
[3]    Demographic Characteristics of HIV: I. How Did HIV Spread?
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 19 (2005) 567–603;
erratum, ibid., 20 (2006) 95
Demographic Characteristics of HIV: II. What Determines the
Frequency of Positive HIV Tests?
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 20 (2006) 69—94
Demographic Characteristics of HIV: III. Why Does HIV
Discriminate by Race?
Journal of Scientific Exploration, 20 (2006) 255–88
 [4]   The mystery of HIV/AIDS, Quadrant, July-August 2006, 61-3.
[5]   Questioning HIV/AIDS: Morally Reprehensible or Scientifically Warranted? Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, 12 (#4, Winter 2007) 116-120
[6]    HIV Skeptic
[7]    Confession of an “AIDS denialist”: How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS, pp. 378- 82 in You Are STILL Being Lied To — The REMIXED Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths, ed. Russ Kick (Disinformation Co., NY, 2009)
[8]     Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

From uncritical about science to skeptical about science: 5

Learning from what science ignores — within science as well as outside

The Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE) had been founded at the start of the 1980s by scientists, engineers, and other scholars who believed that there was sufficient substantive evidence, enough sheer facts, to warrant proper scientific investigation of topics ignored by science or dismissed as fictive, existing not in Nature’s reality but only in human imaginations: psychic phenomena; flying saucers or UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects); cryptozoology — animals unknown to biology, or extinct animals said to be still extant; as well as such heretical views as that the theory of relativity is unsound [1].

Being ignored in the face of apparently good evidence was the shared bond within SSE. Few if any of us shared belief in the reality of all the topics that one or more members favored. I certainly didn’t. In fact, I soon began wondering how it was that so many competent, accomplished, intelligent, highly educated, cosmopolitan people could believe firmly in things that seemed to me highly implausible, at best doubtful.

The next insight followed naturally: My new colleagues surely wondered how I, a successful  chemist and cosmopolitan Dean of Arts and Sciences, could firmly believe in the reality of the Loch Ness Monster.

My fascination over that had begun through random chance, a book picked up and riffled through. No doubt something analogous, some unplanned experience, had set my new colleagues off on their particular interests.

There is an important general point to be made here. Scientists characteristically have an intellectual blind spot — certainly I do: imagining that beliefs are created by factual knowledge, remain held because of factual evidence, and can be changed by new facts. That is simply not the case.
Interest or some other stimulus is crucial. Why does one ever seek facts in some specific direction?
Everyone would likely look for reliable knowledge about something pertinent to health, family matters, earning a living; but it can also happen by chance, by happening upon a book picked up at random. So there is no reason why others should find interest where I happen to.

And it is not sufficient that good and respected friends and colleagues urge one to look at the facts. I have maintained only an observer’s interest in most of the matters that absorb others in the Society. Even though I’d quite like to know enough to warrant having an informed opinion, the problem is the sheer amount of time and effort needed to wade through all the claims and counterclaims before reaching a reasonably firm belief or disbelief. Outside chemistry, I’ve looked in enough detail at only three major controversial topics: Loch Ness Monsters, HIV/AIDS, and global warming (or climate-change).

That there are a great variety of different specialized interests in the Society for Scientific Exploration was not a disturbing factor. We talked (and wrote and published [2]) about our interests and claimed facts and speculations, and benefited from constructive mutual criticism, sometimes quite incisive.  Frustration at the lack of interest from mainstream science was and remains an overwhelmingly strong bond. A corollary is something like shared disdain for the individuals and groups who wage public campaigns about the purported dangers to society of believing in the reality of UFOs, Bigfoot, psychic phenomena and the like [3]. Those activists, who purport to be supporters and defenders of science, typically describe themselves as Skeptics [4], a grossly misleading misnomer since they are dogmatists of the highest order, unwilling to contemplate that official or mainstream science might be wrong in any particular — a stance that ignores the whole history of science.
To my mind, the real danger to society stems from such arrogantly dogmatic groups which insist that everyone share their particular beliefs, as is all too commonly the case with specific religions or, in this case, scientism, the religious faith that science be acknowledged as the sole authoritative source of knowledge and understanding.
These “Skeptics” (Truzzi famously and aptly called them “pseudo-skeptics”) criticize the topics of interest within SSE as pseudo-science, but SSE advocates scientific exploration, seeking the best available facts about Nature and trying to explain and understand them. SSE has quarrels not with “science” but with the too-many career scientists who behave unscientifically in forming opinions without looking at the facts, and then defend those opinions dogmatically.

When I analyzed the Velikovsky Affair [5], what had then most struck me was how incompetently the scientific community had criticized Velikovsky’s pseudo-science, and how little so many scientists seemed to understand what science is really about. Several decades later, having written articles and books about the prevalence of dogmatism in science [6], I can see in retrospect that I had overlooked or not noticed or missed the significance of how insufferably dogmatic the criticisms of Velikovsky had been. Yet that dogmatism was far from a minor part of the Affair; it surely played some part in bringing some social scientists and humanists to rally to Velikovsky’s defense.

The Society for Scientific Exploration also led to my learning about the extent of dogmatism within mainstream science. The society offered a forum not only for topics dismissed as pseudoscience, we also heard at times about  the suppression of unorthodox views within mainstream science. For example, Thomas Gold was widely acknowledged and applauded for his original insights in astrophysics, but mainstream science wanted nothing to do with his ideas about the origin of what are said to be fossil fuels in the Earth  and about life having originated deep in the earth rather than in warm ponds on its surface [7]. Gold also favored the steady-state theory of the cosmos rather than the accepted paradigm of the Big Bang. Halton Arp, an observational astronomer, published data that support the steady-state theory, whereupon mainstream science refused to allow him further access it to the telescopes he needed [8]. A variety of observations indicate that earthquakes may be predictable by electromagnetic or other signals, but mainstream geology will have none of it [9]. “Cold fusion” remains beyond the pale despite intriguing evidence from competent mainstream researchers [10].

I learned that even distinguished mainstream researchers who take a distinctly different view from the prevailing majority consensus are treated no better than are those of us accused of espousing pseudo-science, in fact they often have it worse: their unorthodoxies can damage their career, whereas most members of SSE earn their living by something quite separate from their oddball interests, which are more hobbies, things pursued in amateur fashion, out of sheer fascination and not as a way to earn a living.

So Loch Ness Monsters led me to SSE and SSE led me to recognize how widespread throughout mainstream science is the passionately dogmatic, even vindictive suppression of minority opinion [6] — quite contrary to the popular view of science, the idealistic view that remains my own vision of how science should be carried on.

It seemed natural, then, in my new academic career in STS, to make my special interest the study of scientific controversies and of what exactly distinguishes genuine proper science from what is widely denigrated as fringe, alternative, or pseudo science [1].
My research focus required looking for examples of scientific controversies to study. I don’t recall what first alerted me that there was dissent from the belief that HIV causes AIDS, that there was ever any controversy about it, but I did come across that in the early 1990s.
That is what eventually taught me that what taken-as-authoritative institutions nowadays proclaim in the name of science should never be automatically trusted; it should be fact-checked. The dogmatism, careerism, and institutional as well as personal conflicts of interest that are now rampant in contemporary science have actually brought official public policies and actions that are contrary to the facts of reality, have harmed massive numbers of people, and threaten to cause yet further damage.

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[1]    Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic Healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies, University of Illinois Press 2001
[2]    The Journal of Scientific Exploration began publication in 1987. It is now freely available on-line
[3]    Examples are discussed and critiqued at p. 200 ff. in [1]
[4]    The iconic organization was CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), founded in 1976 by predominantly non-scientists (philosophers, psychologists, writers, amateur investigators) but including a few prominent scientists, for example Carl Sagan; it publishes Skeptical Inquirer and includes under matters criticized as “paranormal”, claims of the existence of what would be perfectly natural creatures
[5]    Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, University of Illinois Press, 1984
[6]    Dogmatism  in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth, McFarland,  2012
[7]    Fuel’s Paradise
[8]    Halton Arp, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, Interstellar Media, 1987; Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, Apeiron, 1998
[9]    On earthquake prediction, but more generally about matters that global tectonics (“continental drift”) does not adequately explain, see the NCGT Journal
[10]  The topic is nowadays thought to be not the fusion originally inferred but the general phenomenon of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), nuclear transformations at ordinary temperatures

From uncritical about science to skeptical about science: 4

Learning about science from beyond the pale

Synopsis for this series of posts:

From post #1:
“Could my opinion be erroneous about a decline in the trustworthiness of science?
If not, why is it that what seems so obvious to me has not been noticed, has been overlooked by the overwhelming majority of practicing researchers, by pundits and by scholars of scientific activity and by science writers and journalists?
That conundrum had me retracing the evolution of my views about science, from my early infatuation with it to my current disillusionment.”

My interest in the Loch Ness Monster led indirectly to learning about other topics that science similarly ignores, dismisses, or denigrates, often by calling them pseudoscience (UFOs, Bigfoot, etc.). Trying to understand how studying such matters differs from doing science automatically meant trying to understand what makes science special; so by learning about pseudo-science one learns as well about science itself. As Rudyard Kipling put it, “And what should they know of England who only England know?” (from poem, The English Flag).

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Continuing the narrative:

 Fortuitously for me, several things happened at about the same time in the mid-1970s: There was a shortage of potential graduate students, because the job market for PhDs had collapsed. My large 5-year grant came to an end, and new grant funds were more and more difficult to come by. There was a widespread infatuation, including at NSF, with the supposed value of interdisciplinary work, and my university was urging faculty to develop interdisciplinary projects as a way of attracting grant money. And some tangible evidence that the Loch Ness Monster is a real animal had been widely publicized: Underwater photographs of large flipper- or paddle-like objects apparently appendages on an indistinct large shape [1].

So I recruited an eminently interdisciplinary team of faculty members — a journalism professor, an historian of science, a philosopher of science, a sociologist — to study how scientific understanding or belief changes as evidence accumulates: Science had long been fairly sure that reports of the Loch Ness Monster were baseless; now that substantive evidence was accumulating, how would the scientific community accommodate it?

Our proposal to NSF was unsuccessful, but one of the reviewers’ comments set me off in a new direction. If we wanted to study how science treats unorthodox claims, a reviewer suggested, why not look into the Velikovsky Affair?

I had never heard of that, and obviously I should have; so I did look into it, and found it very interesting indeed. The psychoanalyst Immanuel Velikovsky had published a popular best seller, Worlds in Collision [2], in which he inferred from legends and myths about heavenly happenings that Jupiter had ejected a comet-like object that had come close to several other planets, producing on Earth effects that included such events reported in the Bible as the parting of the Red Sea and the collapse of the walls of Jericho.

Several things struck me about the Velikovsky Affair.

—> Many a people had found Velikovsky’s scenario plausible or even convincing.
—> That included some quite accomplished historians and social scientists, who had ventured strong criticisms of the scientists who had unceremoniously dismissed Velikovsky’s scenario as utter nonsense.
—> Scientists had indeed been arrogantly dogmatic, making the declaration of nonsense without attempting to address the substantive details in Velikovsky’s book, indeed famously saying that they had not bothered to or needed to read the book. They had behaved unscientifically, in other words.
—> I was struck particularly that everyone was quite wrong in several respects about the nature of science — not only media pundits and humanists but also scientists, including social scientists.

So I resolved to write a book, to be titled Velikovsky and the Loch Ness Monster, setting out the realities about science and illustrated by one example of science getting it right about an unorthodox claim (the Velikovsky Affair) and an example of science getting it wrong (the Loch Ness monster). Altogether, I had found all this so interesting, and the prospects for well-funded scientific research so gloomy, that I decided to make a permanent change of academic career, from chemistry to something like history or philosophy or sociology of science.

It was a very good time for such a move. Historians and philosophers and sociologists of science were teaching interdisciplinary courses together, sometimes establishing joint Centers or Departments, together with some political scientists, engineers, and scientists interested in science policy. The intellectual Zeitgeist was presaging an integration of disciplines that is now the actuality usually named Science & Technology Studies or Science, Technology & Society (the acronym STS works for both; earlier incarnations included “Science Studies”, “Science and Society”, and the like).

These developments in the scholarly world were another sign that the role of science in the wider society was undergoing significant changes following World War II. the Vannevar Bush Report to the President had resulted in dramatic increases in funding of research. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had been founded in 1945 by some of those who had worked on the Manhattan Project and were very conscious that policy makers needed information and insights from the technical community for sound planning.

 To make my intended change of academic field possible, I needed time to learn at least the basics of the history and philosophy of science. But as member of a Chemistry Department, it was my obligation to garner grants and support and mentor graduate students, too time-consuming to allow for much new learning and thinking. So I applied for administrative jobs, which would be undemanding intellectually and leave ample time for reading and learning subjects new to me. After a couple of dozen failed applications, I lucked into what turned out to be perfect for me: Dean of Arts and Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU, formerly VPI, but now everywhere known as “Virginia Tech”).

It was easy for me to gather an informal group of people interested in interdisciplinary projects and coursework combining Humanities and Social Sciences with Engineering and Physical and Biological Sciences. The agriculture, engineering, and science departments at Virginia Tech were long-established, with strong research components; and several of the faculty in History and Philosophy in particular had already been teaching some interdisciplinary courses with faculty from technical fields.

Soon we created a Center for the Study of Science in Society (A few years later came interdisciplinary degrees, initially undergraduate but soon graduate as well. More recently the Center was replaced by a full-fledged Department of Science, Technology, and Society.

I learned a great deal about science from the discussions leading to the establishment of that Center, but my belief in the trustworthiness of science, or at least the fundamental potential trustworthiness of science, was not at all shaken. Indeed it may have been enhanced by learning how uncertain, by comparison, is the knowledge commanded by social science [3]. I also learned a great deal about differences between the various subjects professed in a College of Arts and Sciences [4]. But first I want to concentrate on what I learned about science — what can in general be learned about science by looking into matters like the Velikovsky Affair.

My planned volume of Velikovsky and the Loch Ness Monster proved far too ambitious, and eventually emerged as two separate books[5, 6]. I was again extraordinarily fortunate that the Velikovsky manuscript had been sent by the publisher for review by Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist of science long interested in scientific unorthodoxies.

 After World War II, there had come much public interest in topics like Velikovsky — the Yeti of the Himalayas, UFOs (unidentified flying objects, at first “flying saucers”), psychic phenomena, and more [7]. On all of those topics of great public interest but ignored or dismissed or denigrated by authoritative science, there were some quite well-established scientists, engineers, and other scholars who believed that there was sufficient substantive evidence, enough sheer facts, to warrant proper scientific investigation. A group of these mavericks was in the process of founding a Society for Scientific Exploration to exchange experiences and learn from one another. Because Truzzi had read my Velikovsky manuscript, I was invited to join in founding that Society .

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[1]    Reprinted in many places, for example “The Case for the Loch Ness Monster: The Scientific Evidence”, Journal of Scientific Exploration, 16(2002) 225-246
[2]    Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, Macmillan 1950
[3]    P. 128 ff. in Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method, University of Illinois Press, 1992 ; pp. 151-5 in Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland 2017
[4]    To Rise above Principle: The Memoirs of an Unreconstructed Dean (under the pen-name ‘Josef Martin’), Wipf & Stock, 2012 (1^st ed. was University of Illinois Press, 1988)
[5]    Beyond Velikovsky: The History of a Public Controversy, University of Illinois Press 1984
[6]    The Enigma of Loch Ness: Making Sense of a Mystery, University of Illinois Press 1986 [7]    The Literature of Fringe Science, Skeptical Inquirer, 11 (#2, Winter 1986-87) 205-10

From uncritical about science to skeptical about science: 3

From more than ample funding to stifling competition

In the middle 1960s in the United States, I observed more of the consequences of the enormous infusion of federal resources into scientific activity that I had glimpsed as a postdoctoral researcher in the late 1950s.

Moving  from Australia, I was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky in 1966, just when the university was spreading its wings towards gaining recognition for research excellence. I was expected to help that along, given that I already had several dozen publications to my name.

Kentucky was far from alone in its ambition. The flood of federal money designed to stimulate scientific research and the training of future scientists had brought a major transformation in American academe. Four-year Liberal-Arts Colleges made themselves over into Research Universities; Teachers Colleges morphed into universities. In 1944, there had been 107 doctorate-granting institutions in the U.S.; then 142 by 1950-54, 208 by 1960-64, 307 by 1970-74 [1]. In chemistry, there had been 98 doctoral programs in 1955; by 1967 there were 165, and 192 by 1979 [2].

A presumably unforeseen consequence of pushing production of would-be researchers and wannabe research universities was that by the 1970s, demand for grant funds was exceeding the supply. At Kentucky, about half of the Chemistry Department’s proposals to the National Science Foundation (NSF) had been funded in the mid-to-late 1960s; but by 1978, our success rate had fallen to only 1 grant for every 10 applications. That sort of decline has continued into the 21^st century: at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main source of funds for biological and medical research, the national success rate for grant applicants fell from 31% in 1997 to 20% by 2014 [3]; the average age was 42 at which an individual first obtained a grant from NIH as Principal Investigator in 2011 [4].

By the 1970s, there were more PhD mathematicians and physicists graduating than there were academic research jobs available. Some pundits speculated that the 2008 economic crash owed quite a lot to ingenious stock-trading software programs and bad-mortgage-bundling-and-valuing “securities” designed by PhD mathematicians and physicists who were working on Wall Street because they could not find positions in academe.

When I had prepared at my first research grant application to the National Science Foundation in 1966, the newly-appointed Director of the University’s Research Division rewrote my budget without consulting me, to make it twice as long in duration and four times as costly in total. When the grant was refused, and I asked the NSF manager why, he pointed out that it requested about twice as much as their usual grants. Faced with this news, our Research Director expressed surprise, claiming that one of the purposes of these federal funds was to support universities in general.

Federal grants for scientific research brought with them many perks.

My particular specialty enabled me to observe how grants for analytical chemistry made it possible to enjoy summer-time fishing and scuba diving in the Caribbean, as a necessary part of research that involved analyzing sea-water.

Some groups of grant-getters would meet before or after professional meetings at desirable locations for fun and games. In those socially boisterous 1960s-70s, traveling at will on funds from research grants made it easy, for example, to sample the topless bars in San Francisco and perhaps a performance of the norm-breaking, counter-cultural musical Hair on the way to the highly regarded Gordon Research Conferences in Santa Barbara. And why not? What could be wrong with using small amounts of our grant funds for personal recreation, just as people in business or industry might use their travel expenses.

Such a point of view was certainly not hindered by the fact that grants for scientific research routinely brought, for academics, an additional 25-33% of personal salary. Almost all academics are  routinely paid on a so-called “9-month basis”, with no teaching or other responsibilities during the three months of summer. Since scientific research would be carried on year-round, including during the summer, it seemed quite appropriate that researchers would receive a salary during that time as part of their research grants.

That practice no doubt had an undesirable side-effect, arousing or enhancing jealousy among non-science academics, and perhaps increasing the determination, among social scientists in particular, to be treated like the physicists and chemists and biologists: after all, psychologists and sociologists are scientists too, are they not? Lobbying eventually — in 1957, seven years after NSF had been established — led to the Social Science Research Program at NSF, for support of anthropology, economics, sociology, and history and philosophy of science.

Federal grants for scientific research brought with them many benefits for institutions as well as for the researchers: universities siphoned off from grants the so-called “indirect costs”, the self-justifying, much-preferred term for “overhead”. Increased scientific research placed greater obligations on the university’s libraries and physical facilities and administrative tasks, so it seemed quite proper to add to the costs of actual research, and the researcher’s summer salary, and the wages and tuition fees of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, a certain percentage that the University Administration could use to defray those added burdens. That certain percentage can be as high as 50%, or even more in the case of private, non-state-funded, universities [5].

The more the money flowed, the more necessary it became for researchers to obtain grant funds. Costs increased all the time. Scientific journals had traditionally been published by scientific societies, underwritten by membership fees and edited by society members, often without remuneration. As printing and postage costs increased, journals began to levy so-called “page charges” that soon increased to many tens of dollars per published page, particularly as an increasing number of scientific periodicals were taken over or newly founded by commercial publishers, who naturally paid professional staff including editors. Page charges were of course legitimate charges on grant funds. Academics without access to grant funds could still be published in society journals, but their second-class status was displayed for all to see as their publications carried the header or footer, “Publication costs borne by the Society”.

Increasing competition, with the stakes continually increasing, would naturally encourage corner-cutting, unscrupulous behavior, even outright cheating and faking. At least by hindsight it is clear enough that scientists and universities had been corrupted by money — willingly,  greedily; but Science itself seemed not visibly affected, could still be trusted. Dishonest behavior began to be troubling, noticeably, only by the 1980s.

The 1960s were still pleasantly high-flying years for scientific researchers. Things went well for me personally, and at the tail end of those great years I even collared my best grant yet, a five-year (1969-74) million-dollar project for fundamental work relevant to fuel cells, whose promise was something of a fad at the time.

But in the early 1970s,  the American economy turned down. The  job market for PhD scientists collapsed. Our graduate program in chemistry could not attract enough students, and, as already mentioned, we were not doing well with grant funds from NSF.

That is when my recreational interest in the Loch Ness Monster began to pay off, in entirely unforeseeable ways: leading to new insights into science and how it was changing; as well as bringing a career change.

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[1]    A Century of Doctorates: Data Analyses of Growth and Change, National Academy of Sciences, 1978
[2]    Henry H. Bauer, Fatal Attractions: The Troubles with Science,
Paraview Press, 2001, p. 166
[3]    NIH Data Book: Research Grants, 15 June 2015
[4]    W. A. Shaffer “Age Distribution – AAMC Medical School Faculty and NIH R01 Principal Investigators” (2012), cited in Michael Levitt & Jonathan M. Levitt, “Future of fundamental discovery in US biomedical research”,
Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, 114 (#25, 2017): 6498-6503
[5]        Jocelyn Kaiser, “The base rate for NIH grants averages about 52%; NIH plan to reduce overhead payments draws fire”