August 27, 2005
A profile of Robert Trivers
In The Guardian, a profile of Robert Trivers (via Crooked Timber):
"Despite switching disciplines - from maths to law to history then the sciences - Robert Trivers profoundly influenced evolutionary biology with his theory that our sense of justice has Darwinian explanations. But he suffered severe mental breakdowns and his career at Harvard was dogged by controversy. After 15 years in genetics he has now turned to anthropology.
Robert Trivers could have been one of the great romantic heroes of 20th-century science if he'd died in the 70s, as some people supposed he would. But here he is, loping down the quiet, pale corridors of Harvard's Programme in Evolutionary Development, a powerfully built man about six foot tall, bespectacled, dressed in trainers, narrow blue cord trousers, a black leather jacket and a knitted watchman's cap. His language matches the macho clothes: for an Ivy League professor, he says 'fuck' a lot."
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:30 PM | Permalink
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When one is a student in school, quizes, tests, examinations, final examinations, etc., are common, or at least they were when I was a formal student for about 10 years from 1956-1966. If a teacher or professor wants to find out whether students have read a particular book or article, they simply ask the student about it.
I have often thought wouldn't it be nice if citizens, whose forced taxation often pays the salaries of teachers and professors, the latter often holding lifetime guaranteed jobs at colleges and universities, could ask the teachers and professors questions, which they would be required to answer, just like their former students? The trouble is, that while the students must answer the questions or receive an F grade, or also an F grade if the answers are wrong, the teachers and professors simply ignore possibly unpleasant questions from the public or almost anyone else.
When my wife nearly died, not from cancer, but from "treatment" for inflammatory breast cancer, having spent about 11 days on a ventilator in a vegetative state of near death, because the chemo"therapy" literally made a hole in her colon, and permitted clostridium septicum to enter her bloodstream, while one of her oncologists sought to make false and misleading statements about the "cause" of her condition, I wrote a very angry letter to Harold Varmus, then head of the National Institutes of Health, and now president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. The letter was sent two times, and acknowledged as received at least once by a clerk. There has never been a reply by Dr. Varmus.
I conclude from this episode, and many others, that the average citizen has virtually no way of questioning those in positions of high responsibility, and eliciting any meaningful response. I also conclude that it is very likely, that Dr. Varmus has NEVER read a single one of Dr. Otto Warburg's 500+ scientific papers, since, if he had read any of them, all he had to do was simply say so in a letter to me, and simply say they were wrong and state the reasons why they were wrong. Wouldn't that be a very simple thing to do, especially on a subject of cancer, where about one person dies in the U.S. every minute, about 550,000 persons per year?
One word that is conspicuously absent from the piece about this individual is the word cancer. I do not see it anywhere in the article. It is interesting that this individual could be so interested in biology, genetics, evolution, anthropology, etc., and not have some interest and concern about cancer, especially the discoveries of Otto Warburg, which apparently connect this horrible disease to conditions before oxygen was plentiful in the Earth's atmosphere in the early development. For example, in the book by Hans Krebs and Roswitha Schmid, pages 68-70, Dr. Warburg summarizes his main scientific achievements in 1961. Regarding cancer, he states, "... By methods of physics the fermentation of cancer cells has been discovered and the de-differentiated growth of cancer cells explained through a type of energy transformation which prevailed at a time before the atmosphere of the earth contained oxygen-a result which explained the ultimate cause of cancer by the anaerobic past of life...
The best physical and chemical methods, however, would not have been able to advance cell physiology, had they not been combined with a simplification in biological technique....In the investigation of cancer cells, ascites cancer cells were substituted for tumours; whole animal cells were replaced by the grana of liver cells as early as 1914. In all this experimentation it was always our aim to simplify techniques and to attain a speed and precision comparable to the methods of volumetric chemical analysis. With complicated methods we have never discovered anything significant." Perhaps his mistake was in going to Harvard in the first place, where the professors have also likely either not read any of Dr. Warburg's 500+ scientific papers in German, or if they did, likely did not understand them, or if they read them and understood them, simply ignored them for prejudicial reasons. For example, the book "The Glycolysis and Respiration of Tumors" by Alan C. Aisenberg, M.D., Academic Press, N.Y., 1961, the author, then at Harvard University, states in the Preface: "The author is aware that the book is weak in its coverage of the non-English literature, a result of inaccessibility of some of the journals in question, and of the author's rather limited linguistic accomplishments." I also sent a letter to Professor Aisenberg about some of these issues dated September 12, 2000. It was addressed to Professor Alan C. Aisenberg, M.D., Massachuetts General Hospital, 75 Blossom Court, Boston, Mass. 02114, and contained the correct amount of postage. I have never received a reply, but, of course, he may not have received the letter. Who knows what might have transpired had this bright individual, who is the subject of this article, been made aware of Dr. Warburg and his many discoveries? We might not be wasting all this manpower in the dead end and unproven genetics speculation of cancer, having even killed some patients with "gene therapy", instead of seeking to implement the brilliant experimental discoveries of Otto Warburg, M.D, Ph.D., many years ago.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Aug 27, 2005 7:53:51 PM
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