One of my interests is in science that happens along the fringes. Out in the borderlands of science, far off from the mainstream, you get the psychedelic revolutionaries and the cryptozoological explorers, the quantum cosmologists and the free energy entrepreneurs… the people who struggle against overwhelming social pressures (and occasional bouts with insanity) to make every little discovery. But just a little closer in to the mainstream, you’ll also occasionally happen across some real weirdness.
Here’s a collection of a few ideas that don’t make a lick of sense – but once you test them, actually seem to work.
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HORMESIS
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My job just brought me in contact with a kinda cool concept: hormesis -- the capacity for toxins or radiation to actually improve health and quality of life. In other words, things that kill you actually make you healthier, in moderation.
One of the leading researchers in the field is Edward Calabrese of the University of Massachusetts, who was as surprised as anyone when he first noticed the effects in mint plants he accidentally treated with an overdiluted herbicide. Instead of wilting, the plants grew "green and luxuriant."
Later experiments found the same principle worked on all kinds of substances.
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If Calabrese is right, a wide range of toxic chemicals and dangerous rays do not follow the linear dose/response curve that has long been taken as gospel in environmental science. "Linear" here means that if a certain dose kills 5% of the lab rats (or people) exposed, then a hundredth of that dose will kill 0.05%. Calabrese says that many poisons follow, instead, a U-shaped curve: The death rate goes down as the dose climbs from zero to a certain small amount, what you could call the optimal exposure. Only at larger doses does the mortality curve change course and head upward. This theory of toxicity goes by the name "hormesis."The phenomenon has been known to laboratory scientists for many years: Rats exposed to slightly higher than natural doses of radiation live longer than ones with natural exposure. A plausible explanation is that small doses of carcinogens whip cellular defense systems into shape, repairing mutations in an animal's DNA caused by either this toxin or any of the other insults that flesh is heir to.
People get all twitchy around Calabrese's research because it basically says that leaky x-ray machines and dribbles of dioxin in your drinking water can be good for you – that industrial polluters are, paradoxically, improving our health.
What’s interesting is that the same principle seems to hold true for a wide variety of nasties… that really aren’t that nasty.
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PARASITE CURES
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According to a more recent study in New Scientist, there’s a new cure for irritable bowel syndrome: drinking worms.
Mmm.
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At the moment the concoction cannot be stored for long, so doctors or hospitals would have to prepare fresh batches of the eggs for their patients. But a new German company called BioCure, whose sister company BioMonde sells leeches and maggots for treating wounds, hopes it will soon solve the storage problem.It plans to launch a product called TSO, short for Trichuris suis ova. Chief executive Detlev Goj says the company will apply for approval by the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products as soon as the product is ready.
The pig whipworm was chosen as it does not survive very long in people. Patients would have to take TSO around twice a month. The human whipworm, which infects half a billion people, can occasionally cause problems such as anaemia.
The researcher noted that the rise in IBS and Crohn's disease over the past few decades correlated with our increasing success at wiping out intestinal parasites.
So he thought they might be good at stopping the diseases, and he was right.
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The remission rate was 50 per cent for ulcerative colitis and 70 per cent for Crohn's, says gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock of the University of Iowa, who devised the treatment.
This therapy seems like a close cousin to probiotics, using germs to fight germs in your gut... like the “good bacteria” used to keep chicken healthy in this study in Nature.
The gist of it is that the same bugs in yogurt that help you kick food poisoning once you’ve gotten it can also defeat those same germs in the chickens before they’re food. Leaving aside the whole factory farming as unhealthy enterprise thing, the method is the same as using whipworms to treat Crohn’s: infect to cure.
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HOMEOPATHY
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This branch of science is generally laughed at by medical researchers and well-educated laypeople alike. On the face of it, it makes no sense to dilute a substance to make it more potent. But it should be pointed out that this is exactly how Pasteur invented the first modern vaccines. He was following principles laid out by Samuel Hahnemann, which seem like pleasant enough lunacy to us now, two centuries further along.
But then, maybe we don’t understand dilution as much as we like to think we do.
At least, that's according to a remarkable project reported in The New Scientist, 9 Nov 2001:
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What he discovered was a phenomenon new to chemistry. "When he diluted the solution, the size of the fullerene particles increased," says Geckeler. "It was completely counterintuitive," he says.
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Dilution typically made the molecules cluster into aggregates five to 10 times as big as those in the original solutions. The growth was not linear, and it depended on the concentration of the original.
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But the finding may provide a mechanism for how some homeopathic medicines might work - something that has defied scientific explanation till now. Diluting a remedy may increase the size of the particles to the point when they become biologically active.
There’s still a wide gap between noticing that dilution makes large particles and explaining how tiny bits of nux vomica can ease nausea. But it does go some way to explaining how some double-blind studies have shown homeopathic treatment actually does work. At least some of the time.
