On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise.
Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating. Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse. Now we know which fish were in the Roman fish sauce courtesy of DNA analysis: Sardina pilchardus: Ancient DNA helps trace stinky Roman fish sauce to its source. The link to the article in Antiquity (Cambridge) is here:
The Romans were among the first societies to extensively exploit fish resources, establishing large-scale salting and preservation plants where small pelagic fish were fermented to produce sauces such as garum. Here, the authors demonstrate that, despite being crushed and exposed to acidic conditions, usable DNA can be recovered from ichthyological residues at the bottom of fish-salting vats. At third-century AD Adro Vello (O Grove), Galicia, they confirm the use of European sardines (Sardina pilchardus) and move beyond morphology to explore population range and admixture and reveal the potential of this overlooked archaeological resource.
My palate is regrettably underdeveloped, so I can’t say the fish sauce sounds all that appetizing. These sardines on the other hand? I grew up with the children of Portuguese fishermen, but their prime catch was the white shrimp, which I never liked very much despite local pressure and now have a late-onset allergy to them. And sardines were little smelly things from a small tin opened with a key. I have never eaten one of those, on a cracker or otherwise, as far as I remember. But next time you are in New Bedford, after visiting the Whaling Museum stop by Antonio’s, where the Sardinhas Assadas is the dish to order along with a Portuguese wine. Don’t forget the flan for dessert. I am now officially hungry in the middle of the afternoon.
And the edible dormouse, Glis glis, is still eaten in a few places coterminous with parts of the Roman world. They are said to be delectable, and I am sure someone in the international NC community can attest to this.
Part the Second: The Prospects for Cancer “Vaccines” Are Improving. Cancer chemotherapy famously kills normal cells while targeting cancer cells. Sometimes the race is won by the drug but by a small margin. Sometimes the race is lost. Either result leads to poor outcomes. The goal of cancer therapy for the past fifty years has been to find a “magic bullet” that kills cancer cells while sparing normal cells. In my former laboratory life, I helped develop a magic bullet that would work by conjugating the toxic castor bean protein ricin to an antibody that binds to cancer cells and kills them when the complex is taken up by the cell.
Those of us of a certain age will remember that ricin was probably used in the murder of the Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in London in 1978. I am living proof that it can be purified from castor beans without any danger. The ricin-antibody conjugate worked, very slightly, in cultured cells but translation to the oncology clinic was problematic as we say in the lab. Another good theory killed by a plain fact. A much better magic bullet is required.
We have discussed pancreatic cancer “vaccines” here before. Vaccine is a term of convenience in this context. A cancer vaccine is a preparation that elicits a specific immune response to a patient’s own cancer, which expresses novel non-self antigens, and destroys it. This article, Individualized mRNA cancer vaccines make strides, from Nature is an update on these interventions that are in clinical trials for melanoma, bladder, pancreatic, kidney, bladder, colorectal, stomach, esophageal liver cancer, and others listed in this table.
Many of these cancers are generally intractable to current therapies. This work-in-progress is the culmination of long-term research in basic immunology and cancer biology that was supported by public entities such as the National Institutes of Health and other agencies including the American Cancer Society and Cancer Research UK, which was the Imperial Cancer Research Fund when I almost got a postdoctoral position there. My intuition tells me these interventions will be the magic bullet that actually cures an individual’s cancer. And just so we remember, the scientific foundations of these therapies were financed by everyone! They will be expensive but we can afford them. The question is whether we will.
Part the Third: Consciousness, What Is It? Philosophers and neuroscientists have been trying to explain the nature of consciousness for a very long time. Recent progress is in the eye of the beholder:
Where in the brain does consciousness originate? Theories abound, but neuroscientists still haven’t coalesced around one explanation, largely because it’s such a hard question to probe with the scientific method. Unlike other phenomena studied by science, consciousness cannot be observed externally. “I observe your behavior. I observe your brain, if I do an intracranial EEG [electroencephalography] study. But I don’t ever observe your experience,” says Robert Chis-Ciure, a postdoctoral researcher studying consciousness at the University of Sussex in England.
Scientists have landed on two leading theories to explain how consciousness emerges: integrated information theory, or IIT, and global neuronal workspace theory, or GNWT. These frameworks couldn’t be more different—they rest on different assumptions, draw from different fields of science and may even define consciousness in different ways, explains Anil K. Seth, a consciousness researcher at the University of Sussex.
The Cogitate Consortium project, which began in 2018, set out to pit the predictions against each other at multiple labs run by theory-neutral teams. “These were people that did not have skin in the game,” explains Chis-Ciure. They used three different brain-imaging techniques to observe the brains of 256 participants—a very large sample size for a neuroscience study—while those participants completed the same visual tasks, which involved rotating faces and letters. These types of tasks require conscious experience.
The results challenge both theories because neither’s predictions were fully borne out by the data. For instance, GNWT predicted that electrodes in the prefrontal cortex would detect a signal when a stimulus disappeared and was removed from the mental stage of consciousness, but that was largely absent in the findings. “The fact that you didn’t see that…is something that I think is a significant challenge,” says Seth, who wasn’t involved in the new study. IIT, on the other hand, predicted that a sustained synchrony of networks of neurons would occur at the back of the brain, which also wasn’t observed.
This is all well and good and no doubt progress is being made. However, I tend to believe Iain McGilchrist has the better handle on what is at stake in this research and what it means. But I freely admit that “believe” may be the operative word in his context. It also seems that Hegel’s hypothesis (and Engels’s more accessible version from Dialectics of Nature) that an “increase in quantity eventually results in a change in quality” will remain essential in the study of consciousness. We know the neural circuitry of the sea hare, Aplysia californica. This organism is sentient, but does it have a consciousness similar to that of a human? Good question.
This principle of “quantity-to-quality” is the first principle underlying all multicellular life, even if this is not explicitly recognized by the general run of biologists (including by one of my grant reviewers back in the day who strenuously objected to a reference to integrative levels that was too old to be “relevant”). Whatever, but a hallmark of cancer is that cancer cells forget their place in the organism and cause all sorts of trouble. And whatever the outcomes of this research, room will remain for philosophers, poets, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, and social scientists (open access, interesting) in this never-ending discussion. The one thing I do know is that when the brain dies, so does its conscious mind, despite a persistent and puerile resistance to the reality of death among some, discussed here last February.
Part the Fourth: The Remediation of Pollution on the Back End, Literally. A long time ago when I was a chemical worker in a unionized plant, I had the title “Mercury Handler” for one long, hot summer. My employer (a large transnational corporation) operated a chlor-alkali plant and the electrolysis cells used a layer of metallic mercury at the bottom (the cell room in the photograph did not change much in the 50+ years between the photograph and my time). The things I remember most as an 18-year-old is that a steel flask of mercury about the size of a quart bottle weighs 92 pounds (it was easier to carry two at a time instead of one, for balance) and that I had to give a urine sample to the analytical chemist once a week. I never saw the results of the urinalysis and in retrospect it would not surprise me if the samples were poured down the drain.
Mercury inevitably escaped into the environment and my former workplace is now a Superfund site. As explained by Erik Loomis in Out of Sight, the Global North has fixed its problem by exporting such manufacturing to the Global South.
Thus, global mercury pollution endures. And while this has remained out of sight, it is still a problem in the Global North, especially for those who eat both saltwater and freshwater from, from the top of their food chains. These include tuna, salmon, and swordfish from the oceans and various varieties of bass and other large predators (e.g., pike and trout) from freshwater rivers, lakes, and reservoirs near coal-fired power plants and other sources or mercury. The sardines mentioned above are at the bottom of their food chain and do not present a risk of mercury ingestion!
A research group at UCLA has developed a strain of common gut bacterium and probiotic, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, that detoxifies methyl mercury, which has been recognized as the severely toxic form of mercury at least since the Minimata disaster in Japan, which I read about in National Geographic. Some things stick:
Mercury resistance (mer) genes are largely absent from the microbes present in the human and mouse gut microbiota. Because of this, the researchers turned to gene sequences merA and merB from a mercury-resistant strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These genes demethylate and reduce MeHg. This process generates less harmful compounds like inorganic mercury (the mercury I handled), which is less readily absorbed and more easily excreted from the body. They integrated both sequences into Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron, a highly prevalent commensal gut bacterium that has proven to be safe as a probiotic.
To test this engineered strain called Bt(merAB), the researchers grew the bacterium in media supplemented with either pure MeHg or a bluefin tuna-derived form of MeHg. In both conditions, Bt(merAB) exhibited MeHg demethylation activity while strains lacking the genes could not reduce MeHg.
Then, the researchers colonized germ-free mice with either wild type B. thetaiotaomicron or Bt(merAB) followed by a high oral dose of pure MeHg, since oral ingestion is the main route of exposure. Mice with the engineered bacterium only broke down MeHg in the gut, measured through fecal content; however, the researchers still saw MeHg in other tissues such as the liver or brain.
“We thought that we were overloading them with too much methylmercury because it was still able to get into the bloodstream,” explained Hsiao. Instead, the researchers opted to study its effects through chronic dietary intake. Indeed, mice colonized with the engineered microbe and fed a diet high in bluefin tuna had much lower MeHg levels than expected in the colon and brain. The researchers also saw similar effects when they gave the bacterium as a probiotic to mice with normal microbiomes.
Next, the researchers investigated whether this pattern would also occur in pregnant mice. “This is kind of the most vulnerable population to methylmercury,” said Hsiao. The team examined the effects of toxin exposure to MeHg-rich (tuna), MeHg-modest (salmon), and no MeHg diets during gestation. They found that mice with Bt(merAB) successfully decreased levels of MeHg in both maternal and fetal tissues, and the mice had lowered signs of mercury toxicity in the fetal brain.
These convincing experiments were done using mice. Will this be transferrable to humans, with Bt(merAB) included as a probiotic in the human diet? This seems very possible. There is no obvious mechanism by which the modified B. thetaiotaomicron could cause trouble. But this work as a long way to get to the clinic. Still, this is one example of biohacking that might be useful.
In the meantime, it is a good idea to avoid eating too many fish likely to have concentrated mercury in their bodies because they are at the top of their food chain. People on my home ground have learned where to catch fish, crabs, and shrimp. No one goes near the two Superfund sites, one with mercury and other heavy metals and the other with persistent pesticide residues, that drain into the marsh. If not for the Clean Water Act signed by our last liberal President Richard Nixon…Anyway, planet Earth needs a Clean Water Act in force everywhere.
Part the Fifth: The unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen united States of America. Although the author will undoubtedly be cancelled one of these days, if this has not already happened and I missed it, he had a way with words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Eleven years later Benjamin Franklin replied to his high-society interlocutor that he and his like-minded cohort had created for her and everyone else “a republic, if you can keep it.” There is work to do yet! And always.
To members of our American community, Happy Independence Day! And remember, this is our only Earth and we should treat it as our only home everywhere we live.
To all, see you next week!
Anyone know if these studies still going or where many of them lost/disrupted due to DOGE?
Oh, and happy Independence Day to all as well!
I really like the thinking of Erik Hoel on the issue of human consciousness:
“Within neuroscience the anomaly, the failure of existing rules that signifies the necessity of a paradigm shift, is the difference between conscious and unconscious neural activity. There is no immediate boundary or border that can be drawn on any map of the cortex that can currently tell you when neural activity crosses from extrinsic to intrinsic. Its is for this reason that neuroscience resembles so much the treading of water.
It has not had its big theory moment. The reason neuroscience is a quagmire is that it ignores the brains entire purpose, it’s very raison d’être–maintaining a stream of consciousness.”
See his recent book “The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science,” (2023). Hoel has done some of the significant mathematical work related to integrated information theory.
Garum: Italians have been playing with the idea of garum the last thirty or so years. It is generally agreed here that garum was umami (rich and whiffy, like a good Japanese soy sauce or nam pla from Thailand). Earlier cookbooks tended to write things like “sauce of chopped-up fish guts,” but it turns out that refinement and aging were involved. Another closely related Italian condiment is colatura di alici (distilled anchovies, aged).
So garum is harmless. It likely was salty and involved anchovies or sardines or both.
Here in the Undisclosed Region, we are devotees of the anchovy. And you notice no Russian invasion. Think about that.
And sardines. To understand the glories of this humble fish, one must try the Venetian dish sarde in saor, which are floured sardines fried in oil, with some cooked-down onions, and some raisins, and hot vinegar poured over. Then one must set the sarde in saor in a safe place and send prayers heavenward for a day or three.
Delicious.
Undoubtedly, sarde in saor, although a fairly plebeian dish, were not served at the Bezos Amazon Sanchez Wedding Simulation.
Sardines are much too classy.
PS: Fish at the top of the food chain. My doctor, at a recent exam that included looking through my bloodwork and the many factors he had had tested, noted with pleasure that my cholesterol count has dropped. Then he asked if I ate fish. I am a fan of Italian tuna under olive oil. “Ahhh,” said my very Turinese doctor, “if one thing doesn’t kill you, something else will.”
I generally add Vietnamese fish sauce rather than salt into soups (along with soy if the soup is asian) and as a base for many dishes, like omelets. It is delightfully earthily aromatic for 30 or so seconds, then the smell is gone, and it add a nice layered flavor to so many dishes. A shame that Gorum disappeared from the lands that were Rome (Europe).
Rarely does our local fish store have fresh sardines – they are nothing like the canned version.
‘Here in the Undisclosed Region, we are devotees of the anchovy. And you notice no Russian invasion. Think about that.’
And no Polar bears either. Something worth noting. I have seen videos of people re-creating Garum and all note it’s powerful smell. I guess that like beer, it is an acquired taste.
The Romans had factories for the stuff, which they aged in urns, all around the Mediterranean; I visited one on the Atlantic coast of Spain outside Cadiz not long ago and it was neat.
Yes, it was umami; fish paste is central to lots of Asian cooking.
What I love is eating fresh-caught sardines on a brazier at Portuguese and Spanish restaurants; people who say ick to sardines sometimes change their minds when they try that. The Portuguese and Spanish, of course, like their conservas, their tinned fish, and it’s becoming more popular here now (good way to eat at the bottom rather than the top of the food chain, and preserve the apex predators). Sardines also give a nice body to homemade fish-based (Hon Suyu) ramen, which takes seconds to whip up and which you can throw anything from a boiled egg to shrimp to dashi or even seaweed snacks into. (Carrots, greens, mushrooms. . . ) Beautiful ramen noodles off of the internet for not much more than shitty supermarket ramen, sexy AF.
Jefferson’s words about “all men” are quite noble but the facts are indisputable that he owned more than 600 enslaved persons during his lifetime, with 130 people enslaved at his estate at Monticello at any given moment. Jefferson never acknowledged the several children who he fathered with enslaved women, although he did eventually manumit his children by his late wife’s enslaved half-sister Sally Hemmings. One questions his sincerity.
That damned stain just won’t come out…
Then, to elaborate on the theme of the day, there were the words:
«Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed»
Back in the day, I cited these words to US ex-pat friends in Paris in support Carles Puigdemont’s abortive Catalonian independence drive (even while acknowledging the drive was economically ill-considered). They accused me of being a racist for citing a slaveowner.
They haven’t returned my emails since.
It’s tricky to reconcile the great things people have done with the awful things they also do. While some good outweighs the bad the slave owning one is tough to overlook. Maybe a dumb comparison but it feels similar to how as a kid Bill Cosby was a favorite and the show was my early positive introduction to the black community (grew up in very white rural places). There are times I want to site that positive role he played in my own perceptions since the news and much of tv/film mostly portrayed inner city gangs at the time. But how does one site such a toxic person as a positive influence without first devoting a long disclaimer that struggles to reconcile the issues?
Similar with my love of Schopenhauer (minus his awful and degrading views on women), Erich Fromm (minus his awful and degrading take on homosexuality), and on and on.
The excuse “product of their times” can work in some cases I guess but their particular faults still seem egregious even when the era is taken into account.
I don’t have an answer. Personally I still hold on to the positive from these people while accepting they were deeply flawed. For our wider society deeply in need of positive/inspiring messages of unity I do wonder if it is beneficial to negate the good stuff because of the bad. Not everyone can be a Mr. Rogers. But, yeah, owning hundreds of slaves is a hard one to simply push aside.
Words have a resonance independent of their speaker. I guess Jung might call this the “collective unconscious”.
I believe in this collective unconscious resonance more than I believe in ‘consciousness’.
People have forgotten how to separate the message from the messenger. It’s a fool’s errand to confuse the two.
They have. I recall from reading Lucia Stanton’s Those Who Labor for My Happiness, that two of Jefferson’s and Sally Heming’s children seem to have walked away from Monticello. In appearance they were ‘white’. Stanton’s opinion was that their “escape” was ignored, unremarked upon. This mitigates nothing. It points to, if not an uneasy conscience, a massive rationalization, a sort of intellectual schizophrenia. The Romans called a slave Instrumentum quod loquitur, the tool that speaks. Farm animals were the tool that does not speak and tools … hammers, rakes, saws … the tool that is mute. Seems pretty cold blooded doesn’t it. Was that how Jefferson saw it? No idea. His words express an ideal that ought be a fixed star for each of us. This is a discussion that comes round like Yeat’s rough beast to haunt us, but the words of another poet, T.S.Eliot, always occur to me. “… human kind cannot bear very much reality/Time past and time future/ What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always the present.
Some people haven’t forgotten that actions speak louder than words. Trump’s message is peace, because talk is cheap. It’s a fool’s errand to believe words of hypocrites.
In a very different context — a retreat with a Sri Lankan Buddhist teacher — I once heard a piece of advice that has served me well. “If the nourishment is good,” he said, “take it. Don’t worry if the spoon is dirty –there are some very dirty spoons out there. But if the nourishment is good, take it anyway.”
I wonder how much our ideas of morality are influenced by Christian strictures and an emphasis on an outwardly pious life. (Not that those prescriptions haven’t been atrociously accommodating of slavery and warfare.) Perhaps one solution would be to abandon a search for heroic figures to idolize and to accept the “great” men and women as simply human beings who once did or said something that can be if use to us.
It is evident that while none of the free thinkers like to dwell on it most of human behavior today as in the past is guided by nurture and not the other way around. Very few thinkers are able to transcend that barrier and find acceptance.
I am absolutely certain humans will look back at our sadistic treatment of animals in this day with wonderment, asking if absolutely everyone in our era was a cruel psychopath who took specific pleasure in causing pain to animals used for food or testing. The only way to overlook it, it to willfully choose to.
Cosby in the end. . . repugnant. And the way he normalized a kind of Black middle class image was pretty problematic, too, when you scratch the service; he pretty much had the Archie Bunker role in that family.
One of the things that also frustrated me about him, though, was that his early records brought the argot of bebop, and bebop culture, into the mainstream. Then there he was dissing rappers; WTF.
It is a stain. But I have found Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen to be very useful. I was directed to the book by this review in NYRB by Gordon Wood.
I guess that the notion of “equality” all depends on how you define “personhood.” To Jefferson, women, Black people, and indigenous people didn’t qualify for “personhood.” One can read his document as an apologia for a government “of the oligarchs, by the oligarchs, and for the oligarchs.”
The notion of “equality” that Danielle Allen finds so appealing in the Declaration of Independence does not appear in the Constitution until the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 (not ratified by California until 1959!). It took nearly another century after ratification to tear-down Plessy’s “separate but equal” construction. Women didn’t gain full economic equality until the 1970’s.
A Kiwi once said to me, “You Americans are obsessed with your freedom. We in New Zealand care much more about equality.” When I look at current events in America — not only ICE snatches but especially the looting of the commons by Our Billionaire Overlords — I’m not sure that stain will ever wash out.
This well-reasoned piece appeared yesterday at Consortium News. It’s written by Ace Thelin, a son of two of the original Haight-Ashbury “Diggers.” Thelin articulates and documents the pro-slavery/anti-indigenous bent of Jefferson, Washington and the Virginia cabal of planters and slave-breeders who created the institutions of the United States for their own benefit. Theirs was a revolt by capitalist oligarchs against an absolute monarch, and their capital was human beings.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/07/04/a-different-revolution/
I don’t think I could get into eating a dormouse, but sardines can be delicious especially when they are fresh. Quality varies with the canned varieties, but some can be very good. We eat them now and then with pasta, olive oil, butter and herbs.
I tried to make an ancient Roman dish once, it wasn’t to my liking, but perhaps I didn’t have a good recipe or the right kind of fish sauce. We have the Thai fish sauce quite often with our home-cooked Thai dishes.
Eating fish at the bottom of the food chain is healthier as larger fish can absorb toxins over time, so I hear.
My father learned to fish during the depression. I grew up on a diet of smelt (basically lo-sodium freshwater anchovies ;-). I stll love them, but my wife doesn’t understand…
I have to question the wisdom of what Iain McGilchrist seems to think is The Matter with Things. I gave up in disappointment with his 2009 Master and Emissary. This latest hype seems to be another new cover for an old song; no way will I read 1500 pages to refute him note-by-note.
At birth, there is no significant cytoarchitectural difference between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Even in gross anatomy, the hemispheres are achiral. The difference is developmental. No one knows why sugars are right-handed; no one knows why language and violin playing are left hemispheric. I’d hazard that the human heart, on the left, supplies more blood flow to the left. But then, no one knows why the heart is (normally) on the left.
If McGilchrist wants to blame the sorry state of the British Empire on the left hemisphere, language, rationality, and the literate history of replicable observations that form the foundation of science, then, for consistency, he should also blame the violin.
IMO, McGilchrist reprises a 1970s anti-scientific paean to the ‘holistic’ right hemisphere, while denying his intellectual patrimony in order to appear ‘modern’.
Yes, the deterministic serial logic of ‘reason’ is inadequate, but does McGilchrist not understand Heisenberg?
Language and science are tools that can be misused. Caricaturing them as intrinsically evil is a disservice, especially when paradoxically argued with putatively scientific evidence.
Whoops, this old brain got tangled up in the trope of homochirality. I meant to say the hemispheres are chiral only in gross anatomy. I also should not have flippantly said at birth. There are, in fact, hemispheric differences at birth. My own book notes that an “enlarged planum temporale was less reliably found in boys, who are also more prone to be left-handed, language-delayed, and dyslexic. Geschwind [passim] hypothesized that abnormal symmetry (non-lateralization) could be caused by the same effusion of testosterone that, while effecting sexual development in utero, also affected brain development.” Does McGilchrist mean to blame the devolution of society on the hyper-lateralized females of the species??
Anyway, the main point remains that there is no significant cytoarchitectural difference between the left and right cerebral hemispheres. As I argued back in the day, “If the race is to the quick learner, Geschwind’s asymmetry could have conferred a selectional advantage on Homo loquens as a species, but the brain is plastic and language is learned, so mother and family only need to protect any individual symmetric boy or left-hander for a few extra months until his plastic brain can adapt.”
‘Language and science are tools that can be misused. Caricaturing them as intrinsically evil is a disservice, especially when paradoxically argued with putatively scientific evidence.’
I did not give up on The Master and his Emissary and, if I get to 90, hope to read The Matter with Things in due course.
The remark which I quote above from your comment does not do McGilchrist justice. He does not condemn language and science (‘the left hemisphere’ [though this of course is short-hand for a much more complex idea]) as evil, but opines that it has become too influential. He effectively calls for a re-balancing so that both ‘hemispheres’ play the role they should.
Interestingly I have read suggestions that recent research into brain behaviour seems to indicate that when humans speak (engaging the left hemisphere to find the words), something happens in the right hemisphere previously. So the wordless half of the brain perhaps tells the other half to say something without knowing specifically what the words found will be.
For those who have not encountered any McGilchrist, I should add that he of course states that his remarks are generalisations and that there are always exceptions. So if you think his schematisation is overly rigid, you would probably find he would agree with you, albeit observing that generalisations are worth making, with the appropriate caveats, if they are useful.
Allied Chemical ran a chloralkali and soda ash plant on Onondaga Lake in Syracuse for years which shutdown in the late 80s. When I worked on the railroad probably 200 freight cars went in and out of that plant.
Onondaga Lake was the most polluted lake in the US. IIRC, 75 pounds of mercury was dumped in the lake daily. Honeywell inherited the assets and responsibility was dodged for 2 decades. The $750M “remediation” constitued dredging a couple hundred acres and covering hundreds more with sand. Needless to say, even though the lake is clear, it is unsafe to swim or fish. Immigrants routinely fish, however.
It drains into Lake Ontario, which was a toilet for Niagara Falls (remember Love Canal? ), Rochester and Hamilton. To this day lake trout and salmon can “safely” be eaten only once a month.
Now we’re eagerly awaiting Micron’s chip fab that will dump a witch’s brew of 5 million gallons a day into the municipal sewage system.
The first employees at the plant I described were from that Syracuse plant. Small world. The plant is now a brownfield that will remain so in perpetuity. Some damage has been remediated by Honeywell but the site was an oil refinery a hundred years ago and then a (lead) paint manufacturing plant until after the early 1950s. You get the picture…
Mercury pollution is bad but so is arsenic. My grandmother came from a town called Sunny Corner that was a silver town in the 1880s. It was a Carson City of the south and you even had Americans there installing advanced equipment for refining. At it’s peak, those half dozen batteries were producing two tons of arsenic a day in refining that silver but then the town died out by the late 1890s. And here is the result a century and a quarter later-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL9hr5fClGo (4:24 mins)
The Roman fish sauce, based on fermented fish and likely included herbs, doesn’t sound much different from Worcestershire sauce which is also based on fermented fish and herbs, and enjoyed by many people today.
On the Declaration, it’s worth bearing in mind that the words ‘all men are created equal’ was also meant for King George III, his ministers, and the aristocratic class all of whom did not believe all men were created equal. These five words had a dramatic effect on events far beyond the tendency to remind everybody of the hypocrisy of the slave system.
Consciousness is a good time to talk about AI which is misnamed. I share the opinion of people like Roger Penrose who is convinced that, in order to be intelligence, it must also be conscious, and AI is not conscious.
Humans are sentient beings, AI is a computational system. Though it might be advanced it is nonetheless a computer system without consciousness.
Human intelligence is capable of computations but consciousness and self awareness takes everything to a different level. Two people can stand in front of a museum painting and have distinct views and both may be correct, not to mention the creativity of the artist who was aware of something most people were not aware of.
Lastly, as to cancer, my own intuitive view and by no means expert, is persuaded by those whose view is that cancer is not the result of a genetic defect, which the medical community usually suggests and, instead, is a metabolic disorder; the result of inflammation.
Genetics might have a role between two people who smoke for decades and one of whom succumbs to lung cancer but the cause is inflammation. Yet, there is currently a rise in colon cancer among people <40. Is this a genetic defect over the course of one generation? Or perhaps eating a bag of Doritos or other none foods every day are sources of inflammation. These none foods do to your colon what cigarettes do to your lungs.
How many decades, if not centuries, have we tried to cure cancer and we are not much further than poisoning people with chemo and radiation; maybe we’ve been on the wrong track all along
From Thomas Seyfried “Cancer as a Metabolic Disease” he is also interviewed on YouTube.
“Emerging evidence indicates that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease involving disturbances in energy production through respiration and fermentation. The genomic instability observed in tumor cells and all other recognized hallmarks of cancer are considered downstream epiphenomena of the initial disturbance of cellular energy metabolism. The disturbances in tumor cell energy metabolism can be linked to abnormalities in the structure and function of the mitochondria. When viewed as a mitochondrial metabolic disease, the evolutionary theory of Lamarck can better explain cancer progression than can the evolutionary theory of Darwin. Cancer growth and progression can be managed following a whole body transition from fermentable metabolites, primarily glucose and glutamine, to respiratory metabolites, primarily ketone bodies.”
“Without a clear understanding of how cancer arises, it becomes difficult to formulate a successful strategy for effective long-term management and prevention.”