The Doctor Weighs In

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D

On November 11 I read an Op Ed article in the New York Times titled “This is Your Brain on Politics”. Being interested in neurobiology, and an addict of all things political, I homed in like a laser beam: is this the holy grail of neuroscience? Are we capable of deciphering our innermost thoughts (in this case, political thoughts) using brain imaging techniques?

The article was written by three neuroscientists: Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman and Jonas Kaplan of the University of California, Los Angeles, Semel Institute for Neuroscience; a communications professor, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania; and Tom Freedman, Bill Knapp and Kathryn Fitzgerald of FKF Applied Research.

The experiment

The authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the subjects' brains while they viewed images of political candidates. This imaging technique can be used to measure changes in oxygenated blood and hence to infer changes in metabolic activity in different parts of the brain. Some parts of the brain reliably alter their activity under certain conditions, and scientists have used this fact, along with information drawn from other techniques in both humans and animals, to document which brain area is associated with which cognitive function. For example, greater activity in the insula is often reported when people experience disgust, whereas more activity in the amygdala is reported when people are anxious.

While in the scanner, the subjects viewed political pictures through a pair of special goggles; first a series of still photos of each candidate was presented in random order, then video excerpts from speeches. Then they were shown the set of still photos again. On the before and after questionnaires, subjects were asked to rate the candidates on the kind of 0-10 thermometer scale frequently used in polling, ranging from “very unfavorable” to “very favorable.”

The results

Here are some excerpts from the findings:

1. Voters sense both peril and promise in party brands. When we showed subjects the words “Democrat,” “Republican” and “independent,” they exhibited high levels of activity in the part of the brain called the amygdala, indicating anxiety. The two areas in the brain associated with anxiety and disgust — the amygdala and the insula — were especially active when men viewed “Republican.” But all three labels also elicited some activity in the brain area associated with reward, the ventral striatum, as well as other regions related to desire and feeling connected. There was only one exception: men showed little response, positive or negative, when viewing “independent.”

2. Emotions about Hillary Clinton are mixed. Voters who rated Mrs. Clinton unfavorably on their questionnaire appeared not entirely comfortable with their assessment. When viewing images of her, these voters exhibited significant activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, an emotional center of the brain that is aroused when a person feels compelled to act in two different ways but must choose one. It looked as if they were battling unacknowledged impulses to like Mrs. Clinton.

Subjects who rated her more favorably, in contrast, showed very little activity in this brain area when they viewed pictures of her.

This phenomenon, not found for any other candidate, suggests that Mrs. Clinton may be able to gather support from some swing voters who oppose her if she manages to soften their negative responses to her. But she may be vulnerable to attacks that seek to reinforce those negative associations.

7. John Edwards has promise — and a problem. When looking at pictures of Mr. Edwards, subjects who had rated him low on the thermometer scale showed activity in the insula, an area associated with disgust and other negative feelings. This suggests that swing voters’ negative emotions toward Mr. Edwards can be quite powerful .

Oh, Yeah?

Take John Edward’s “problem”, for example. Is the fact that the insula showed higher activity dooms his campaign? increased activity in any brain area is rarely exclusive to any one function. That insula activity did not necessarily mean the subjects were disgusted. Insula activity has also been associated with drug craving, the taste of chocolate, pain and the quality of orgasm (!). Not necessarily such bad news after all.

This is not “junk Science”; it is purely junk

The authors wouldn’t dare publish such an article anywhere else but on an Op-Ed page; a peer-reviewed journal would send a rejection notice by return mail.

Here is a response of Brandon Keim in Wired science magazine:

“As science, it was a joke. As political theory, it was shallow. As an op-ed, it should have been thrown out at first glance. Uninformed opinion is tolerable in an editorial, but not when it purports to be validated by bad science .”

And the response of 14 heavy-weight neuroscientists:

“The results reported in the article were apparently not peer-reviewed, nor was sufficient detail provided to evaluate the conclusions.

As cognitive neuroscientists, we are very excited about the potential use of brain imaging techniques to better understand the psychology of political decisions. But we are distressed by the publication of research in the press that has not undergone peer review, and that uses flawed reasoning to draw unfounded conclusions about topics as important as the presidential election .”

Why shame on the NYT?

After all, you might think, why not open a window of expression to all scientific observations, valid or not? We do publish rubbish like “intelligence design”, or “creationist theory” side by side with “evolutionary theory”. As chief Justice Brandeis famously said: sunshine is the best disinfectant. But as Nature magazine stated: “What is troubling about the NYT is that the results described in the op-ed are apparently the claims of a commercial product posing as a scientific study. This is only partially transparent. Three of the authors list their affiliation with FKF Applied Research, a company based in Washington DC that is notorious for using similar brain-scan analysis to conclude which TV adverts (pardon the Britishism) aired during a major sporting event were most effective. In its own words, the company is a "business intelligence firm selling fMRI brain scan-based research to Fortune 500 companies".

More troubling for a mainstream newspaper that prides itself on its balanced reporting is the absence of declarations from three other authors. Rightly listed as affiliated to a neuroscience institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, one is also a co-founder of FKF Applied Research and all three, according to a previous publication, have benefited from funding from the company.”

Any harm done?

Yes, and yes. First, harm was done to the reputation of Science as a self-monitoring and self-correcting mechanism, whose only fealty is to the Truth. It gives credibility to political hacks in Congress and other branches of the government who claim that global warming is a figment of statistical models conjured up by “UN scientists”, that Evolution is “only a theory” propagated by atheist-scientists, that the medical harm of tobacco smoking is not supported by credible evidence, and so on and so on. In a day when the assault on science has not reached such a magnitude since the days of the medieval church—we don’t need to provide more weapons for their armamentarium.

And second: The “Twinkies Defense”, used in supervisor Dan White’s defense of his murder of S.F. mayor John Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk, was a harbinger of things to come. This junk science was presented to the court by a psychologist-“scientist”. Brain imaging “evidence” is now being presented in court by hired gun-“neuroscientists”. Genetic information is being twisted beyond recognition in the service of racists and other malevolent rabble.

This is why an article such as this one is not just an innocent romp through neuroscience and politics, maybe even with a faint sense of humor. It is harmful, and shame on the NYT for publishing it.

Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D is in the biotech industry

By Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D

Here are three headlines from today’s paper:

1. Front page: “GOP Losing Grip On Core Business Vote”. For obvious reasons.
2. Opinion page: “Immigration Losers” by Richard Nadler, President of Americas Majority Foundation, a Midwest public policy think tank (and I might add, a Republican organization in the mold of the Taft dynasty): “ …Republicans need to repudiate… the immoral, uneconomical goal of mass deportation”.
3. Opinion page: “The Future of Bioenergy”, by Juan Enriquez, managing director of Excel Medical Ventures, cofounder of Synthetic Genomics, and founding director of Harvard Business School Life science Project.

The first article Chronicles the takeover of the Republican party by the social conservatives, and the virtual disappearance of the fiscal conservatives/social moderates from the party. The second decries the xenophobic and punitive stance of the Republican party with regard to immigration issues. The last one calls for innovative approaches, using biology to solve the energy and global warming dilemmas we are confronted with.

Quiz: which newspaper was I reading?

1. The New York Times.
2. The Washington Post.
3. The Los Angeles Times.

Answer: none of the above. It was the Wall Street Journal, the bastion and mouthpiece of conservative (read: regressive) ideology, and a fierce opponent of anything liberal, such as fiscal responsibility and global warming. The editorial page had labeled the global warming issue as a liberal hoax, a figment of liberal scientists’ imagination, invented out of whole cloth and computer models.

But the purpose of this posting is not to harangue one particular political view. I want to highlight the salient points made in Enriquez’s article as to what Biology can bring to the table in solving our energy and climate problems. I had intended to write about this issue for a long time and this article was the catalyst.

A paradigm shift

One of the deepest thinkers of the history of science was Thomas Kuhn who, in 1962, published his seminal book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”. In it he argued that we all share a certain view of the world (paradigm) at a given time, on which the science of the time is based. But then and insight occurs, which shakes the foundation of our old world view and on which a new paradigm is founded. For example, until the 17^th century Anatomy and Medicine were based on the writings of Galen, a Greek physician from the 2^nd century. For 15 centuries scientists and physicians did not bother to dissect an animal in order to observe and verify the Galenic dogmas handed down to them since antiquity. But then William Harvey, a British physician, had an insight: why not observe how blood flows-- which led to the discovery of the circulation. But more happened: the demonstration that Galen’s writings about blood flow were wrong led other scientists to question his other assertions, test them through direct observations- which led to the modern sciences of Anatomy and Physiology. In fact, the revolution did not stop there; people learned to view with suspicion “received wisdom” handed down by higher authorities. These momentous changes in world view were a “paradigm shift”.

We are changing our world view,again

When our agricultural practices, inherited from the time we began to cultivate crop plants about 10,000 years ago, no longer sufficed to feed an exploding population we invented better ploughs, bigger machines, synthetic fertilizers, powerful insecticides. But this solution finally reached its inherent limitations. In the 20^th century the world could not feed the hungry multitudes of China, India and Africa. Malthus was triumphant. But then another revolution took place.

‘We began to apply more Gregor Mendel and less Henry Ford. Plant geneticists like Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug found that altering plants biologically was even more powerful and efficient than brute-force mechanical solutions. By altering seeds, harvest cycles and climate range, Mr. Borlaug and his colleagues launched the green revolution. Poor farmers in China and India, who could never afford a mechanical solution, became net exporters using a biological solution.’

The new world view is that the cleanest and most efficient solutions to our environmental and energy problems will be provided by Biology.

Consider coal, the most abundant and most polluting source of energy we have. Hydrocarbons are, in essence, sunlight concentrated in plant, animal or bacterial matter. Be it coal, gas or oil, what we are extracting and burning is bioenergy concentrated in carbon. Molecular Biology, the science that launched a thousand medical advances, is now enabling us to convert coal into ethanol in the ground; no more mining, no more environmental degradation, no more millions of tons of carbon emission, no more global warming.

And how is this miracle going to be accomplished? By genetically engineering bacteria that will break down the hydrocarbons of coal (or oil, for that matter) and convert it into ethanol. This is eminently doable, the technology is already here—all we need to do is change our thinking from big engineering solutions to clean and elegant biological ones.

You ain’t seen nothing yet

In the August 3 2007 issue of Science, an article titled “ Genome Transplantation in Bacteria: Changing One Species to Another” was published by scientists from the Craig Ventner Institute in Bethesda Maryland . (In its previous incarnation as the Celera Corporation, it was one of the two teams that deciphered the human genome). The article begins thus: “ As a step toward propagation of synthetic genomes, we completely replaced the genome of a bacterial cell with one from another species by transplanting a whole genome as naked DNA” (italics mine).

The significance of this simple statement is hard for the layman to fathom. In fact, it is almost impossible to grasp the enormity of the consequences of such a statement. What it means is that it will be possible in the not too distant future to synthesize new organisms. Not preexisting ones—completely synthetic new species! Now think of it:

· Synthetic bacteria whose whole mission in life is to convert coal and oil into ethanol at a rate faster than we could extract the hydrocarbons from the ground. And much cleaner and enormously cheaper, to boot.

· Synthetic bacteria that will consume any pollutant or toxic material we manage to create.

· Synthetic bacteria that will consume prodigious amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and convert it into ethanol—a two’fer.

· Synthetic bacteria that will course our blood vessels and convert LDL into HDL particles, and consume triglycerides while they are at it.

· Synthetic bacteria that will be able to sense glucose levels in the blood and release the appropriate amount of synthetic insulin in response.

Need I go on? The possibilities of this scientific revolution are mind boggling. Our world view will become totally biological. Sounds like science fiction or at least a distant dream: not at all. In an interview Craig Ventner stated that his team will have the first synthetic bacterial “species” in 5-10 years!

There is an ancient Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times”. Science will convert the curse into a blessing.

Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D is in the Biotech industry.

In case you were asleep in the last 10 years, here are two news items:

• The U.S. is getting progressively more stupid in science and engineering.
• We are shooting ourselves in the foot by making the problem even worse.

The grim facts

The facts are well-known.

· Our educational system is in a shambles. Our children score consistently low in international tests in math and science. Some third world countries are ahead of us.

· We are not graduating nearly enough engineers and scientists to satisfy the needs of the technology and biotechnology industries.

· Several technology companies stated that they opened research and engineering centers in countries like Israel, India, and China not because salaries are lower there, but because those countries could provide the brain power they couldn’t find in the U.S. Just ask Bill Gates. Did the country take notice when he issued his dire warning? At the time the media, and the country as whole, were too busy with the scandal de jour of some celebrity.

An unscientific experiment

These facts came to mind when I perused the book of abstracts of papers to be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago June 1-5, 2007; this is the premier meeting of the science and practice of oncology.

During the long years I attended scientific and clinical meetings, I was struck by the increasing proportion of research papers originating in foreign countries, and the proportion of obviously foreign-born scientists presenting papers from U.S. institutions. Going through the thick book of abstracts, I decided to try and semi-quantify my gut feeling. I picked at random 10 pages of abstracts, and counted the proportion of U.S. and foreign institutions per page. Admittedly, this is hardly a scientifically designed study; the book contains 593 pages of abstracts, so 10 pages is only 1.7% of the total—hardly an adequate statistical sample. Still…good enough to our purpose.

And the results…?

The 10 pages contained 40 abstracts. Of those, 36 were from institutions abroad; this is a full 90%! Mind you, the A in ASCO stands for American.

Some specific examples: two pages were from the section on Developmental Therapeutics and Cytotoxic Chemotherapy. One page had abstracts from Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, and Canada. The other page had two abstracts from France, one each from Spain and the U.S. In another section, Breast Cancer—Metastatic, one page contained one abstract each from Italy, Israel, France, and U.S. In yet another section, Breast Cancer—Local-regional and adjuvants, the contributions on the random page were from U.K., Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

My point is not to begrudge the accomplishments of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. On the contrary, I am full of admiration of the huge strides these countries have made. I still remember a European oncology meeting I attended in Paris about 15 years ago. In a conversation with the organizer and chairman of the meeting I was disheartened, but not surprised to be told that the reason I was one of the very few American speakers invited to present their research, was that the Europeans felt inferior to their American colleagues, because of their superior research institutions and the overwhelming wealth of resources they enjoyed.

How did they get from there to here?

The only way to compete and survive in Tom Friedman’s flat world is through innovation. Other countries took this lesson to heart. In my travel in India I was struck by the proliferation of “computer schools” in almost every dusty, decrepit little town. In Israel, every high school offers 2 years of advanced mathematics, molecular biology, biotechnology, and computer science courses.

In countries like Poland, Russia and Indonesia I met amazingly well-informed, dedicated and enthusiastic doctors and scientists eager to participate in international clinical trials. All this was happening around us, while we rested smugly on our laurels of yesteryear.

What is being done about it?

Actually, quite a bit.

· After 9/11 we passed draconian laws that essentially made it impossible for foreign students to come here for advanced studies.

· Listen to some of our ante-deluvian politicians, and you would think that the hordes of “them foreigners” are coming here to suck our resources dry. A quick tour of Silicon Valley tells a different story; an inordinate number of technology and biotechnology companies were founded and are run by foreign-born scientists who came to the U.S. as students. Have you ever bought anything on Ebay? Founded by Indians. Intel? Founded by an Hungarian holocaust survivor who came here as a student. Applied Materials? Founded by an Israeli engineer (full disclosure: a classmate of mine from elementary school). SanDisk ( the biggest maker of flash memory chips)? Another Israeli. And so on, and so on. These are not little boutiques—these are huge companies, employing people in the tens of thousands, each.

· The xenophobic atmosphere created by know-nothing politicians and  radio jock-shocks is harmful to our national well-being. Back to my little experiment. I know two of the research teams, one from California and the other from Texas, that are presenting at ASCO. Of a total of 15 authors, nine are from Taiwan (3), China (2), Korea (3) or France (1). None of them plans to stay after finishing his research. The reason? The atmosphere is better back home, and opportunities are becoming plentiful.

What are the consequences?

If you think that only national pride is at stake here, think again.

• The session on Developmental Therapeutics is where discoveries of new therapies and innovative new drugs are reported. Only 1 in 8 institutions in this section was from the U.S. No wonder the drug pipeline of companies like Pfizer is quite empty.
• Boeing’s CEO predicted today that his company is likely to face its stiffest competition from a company that is not in existence yet—in China.
• While our administration was busy suppressing research on global warming (it actually edited out this term from scientific papers written be government scientists), China has built a huge solar panel industry. One of the richest man in China made his fortune through founding SunTech, a solar power company. Wind power, one of the most promising "green" technologies, is dominated by a Dutch company. Many thousands of people are employed by those companies.

We are losing our scientific edge, and the economic consequences are going to be painful. We need to wake up before it is too late.

Dov Michaeli MD, Ph.D.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read:

• Are Republicans or Democrats made or born:  The biology of political persuasion
• The biology of human altruism:  Are people hard-wired to do good?

I am in Houston. This is not to point a finger at Houston, but merely to point out how our environment is anti-fit and pro-fat. Be prepared. This is a rant, but I will be brief.

I am staying at a very nice Hyatt Hotel. I am on the second floor. I can’t find the stairs to walk up and down between the ground level and my room. Why? Because there aren’t any...at least that is what the woman at the reception desk tells me. She says, “There aren’t any stairs for guests, but the elevators are safe in the case of an emergency.” She looked astonished when I explain that my question is a health question, not a safety question. Apparently, she hasn’t had a lot of guests asking how they can walk up and down the stairs to get from point A to point B.

While I am on the topic of using stairs, instead of the elevator, to go up or down one floor, let me tell you that my current workplace has secure access to the staircase (a safety issue). I finally figured out that my security badge will allow me to get back into the offices if I use the steps (although it took a while, asking a number of different people to determine that). So, today, I took the stairs. They are bare concrete, stained with something brown. They are ugly, in fact, a little creepy. The unspoken message is, only use these stairs if you really, really have to escape from the building in case of emergency.

After work tonight, I parked my car at the hotel and walked to The Galleria -- one of the best shopping centers in the world. But crossing the main street from the hotel to the mall was, frankly. scary. It took forever for the light to signal that a pedestrian could cross. Cars going straight, turning right, turning left, and going fast to wherever they were going. Clearly, pedestrians crossing the street are not a priority in this neighborhood, and, in fact, this action may be hazardous to the health of the brave walker who tries to get to the Galleria on foot.

I wonder why this is the case, but then I noticed that no one else is walking. Ah, now I get it, if there are no pedestrians, why bother to time the signals to help walkers get across the street safely? The unspoken message is that I should have driven the two blocks to the mall, paid to park, and then driven two blocks back to the hotel. This is what the “environment” supports.

Hey folks, why do we have to go to a gym to walk on a treadmill or use a stairmaster in order to move our body parts? Why can’t we get some exercise during our day-to-day activities at work and after work?

I suggest you pay attention to the details of your everyday environment. Is your community designed to make it easy and pleasant to walk or ride you bike from one place to another? Or is it designed to get you and keep you in your cars? Does your workplace encourage body movement and healthy eating or does it have built in barriers to physical activity and healthy eating.

For those of you who have to fly on planes a lot for work (does anyone really do it for pleasure anymore?), ask yourself, what do the airlines want you to do on those 3, 4 or 5 hour flights. Do their procedures keep you trapped in your tiny rented space for hours on end, or do they make it easy to stand up and walk in the aisles?

If this type of stuff bothers you and if you would like to see real health care reform, then I suggest you become a LHE (a local health environmentalist). Let’s not quibble about the name -- if environmentalist sounds too liberal or green for your tastes, then suggest another name, but not another approach. Remember that obesity and physical unfitness are politically agnostic. Liberals get fat, libertarians get fat, and conservatives get fat. Red or blue, Republican or Democrat, we all can benefit from an environmental focus on fitness.

If you want to live in a healthy community, live in a healthy home space and work in a physical environment that promotes your health, then get out of your car and onto your feet and agitate, really agitate, for structural changes in your environment that support fitness.

Pat Salber, MD, MBA

In the January issue of The Scientist ( vol.21, pp. 18-19 ), Stephen Pinchock describes some fascinating research carried out by two political science professors, John Alford from Rice university and John Hibbing from the University of Nebraska. But before we dig into their work, let’s back up a bit, 21 years back, to be exact.

Epidemiology and politics: more than meets the eye.

Nick Martin, an Australian geneticist, studies the epidemiology of disease transmission in twins. Why twins, you might ask? Because twins, fraternal and identical, can point to genetic influences in biology and medicine. For instance, if type I diabetes occurs more frequently in identical twins than in fraternal ones, and the incidence in both is higher than in the general population, then the obvious conclusion is that genetics has a strong influence in this disease.

Obviously, what Martin is interested in is the genetic contribution to disease transmission. But it occurred to him that one can use the twin study approach to study transmission of social attitudes . For this purpose he studied 4,500 pairs of fraternal and identical twins.

And the result? Genetic factors, rather than cultural ones, were mostly responsible for family resemblance in social attitudes . Amazing! These results should have shaken up a lot of sociologists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists. But the bombshell was a dud. The paper ( Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol.83, pp. 4364-4368, 1986 ) was met with a deafening silence.

Enter the political scientists .

Fast forward to 2005. Alford and Hibbing reanalyzed the data in Martin’s paper ( American Political Science Review, vol. 99, 153-167, 2005 ), but with an emphasis on political orientation. They constructed an index of conservatism or liberalism, based on responses to questions on attitudes toward abortion, gun control, death penalty, apartheid, etc.

What they found was that 40-50% of variation in political orientation was genetic, and almost none resulted from parental socialization. But here is the unexpected twist at the end this story: when they analyzed actual political affiliation the results were the reverse— genetics had almost no influence, while shared environment was the key.

What are the implications?

This observation has profound implications for our political and social life.

· Does that mean the ‘genetically liberal’ whites migrating from the Northeast to the South, will start voting Republican?

· And vice versa: will a large influx of ‘genetically liberals’ to the Republican South change the environment so as to induce ‘genetically conservatives’ to switch their voting preferences?

· Is this the answer to Thomas Frank’s anguished question in his book “What’s Wrong with Kansas ? How conservatives won the heart of America ”? Or the broader question that political scientists and politicians grappled with for generations: why do people vote against their own interests? Rich white New Yorkers or rich and famous Hollywood stars should vote Republican in order to maximize their wealth. But by and large they vote Democratic. The farmers of Kansas would have been much better off with large government subsidies, robust safety net, public works projects like highways and irrigation projects-yet, they vote mainly Republican.

· Economists should take note as well. Their economic models are predicated on the theory that people make ‘rational choices’. Not quite; apparently genetics has more to do with their decision making rather than rational analysis does. We’ll examine the neurobiological basis of economic decision making in a future posting.

· Last but not least. Psychologists tell us that when we do or say things that are inconsistent with our core beliefs or knowledge, we experience an emotional discomfort. They coined the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ for this unhappy state of affairs. The political corollary: the more extreme a liberal party becomes- the greater the cognitive dissonance of its ‘genetically conservative’ members, the greater likelihood that they will eventually resolve their discomfort and change their vote. To wit: the Reagan democrats.

And vice versa: the more extreme the Republican party becomes, the greater defections they will suffer. To wit: the latest election results.

Take home lesson:

Things are not as simple as they seem; nothing is linear or straightforward. We are complex animals, sometimes frustratingly so, and that's what makes us so fascinating.

Dov Michaeli, MD, PhD