Category: SCIENCE

Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough

(Blog:awalkingdelight)
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Why Time Flies

Written by: Alan Burdick

Narrated by: George Newbern

Time is a mystery.  Alan Burdick speculates on a definition of time in “Why Time Flies”.  In some respects, Burdick’s story is enlightening; in others, time escapes his and an audience’s understanding.

Time appears to be a construct of mind and consciousness, both of which are equally mysterious.  No one really knows what mind and consciousness are but recent experiments suggest they are a state of being that offers versions of reality; i.e. not objective truth but subjective understanding.  Experiments show that the mind deconstructs what we see and reassembles it to have meaning in an individual’s consciousness.

Burdick shows, through recounted experiments, that time does not slow down when we experience traumatic events like a car crash or a bungee jump.  What our mind does is reconstruct an accident or bungee jump through a consciousness that makes it seem time slows down.  Our consciousness remembers or manufactures events as though they occurred in slow motion; i.e. we remember seeing our car flipping over, the top being crushed, and our effort to use a seat belt to steady our movements.  All of this happens within a minute but we remember it in detail as though a slow-motion camera records the accident.

Burdick notes that time only flows in one direction.  As common experience tells us, we cannot un-break an egg.  Life begins young and grows older.  Through manipulation of images, we can reverse time but we know it is an illusion.

Various experiments show that time can be slowed down as speculated by Einstein, and later proved by others.  The slowing of time is due to the speed of objects in relation to the unchanging and constant speed of light.   Because a human in space is traveling at a faster speed ( in relation to the unchanging speed of light), he/she ages less than a person on earth.  But even in Einstein’s theory, time is never shown to go backward.  That is why time travel to the past is considered impossible.

Burdick notes that time is always now.  It has no past.  It has no future.  Time is “in the moment”.  Burdick’s recognition is not helpful in understanding time.  Time is never clearly identifiable because it is either becoming a history or a future.  How does one define a moment?  It seems to be something between history and future but what is time’s physical marker?  Maybe its consciousness but no one knows what consciousness is and every person’s consciousness is personal and subjective; not universal.

At best, Burdick’s story only deepens the mystery of time.

Audio-book Review
By Chet Yarbrough

Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Drug Hunters

Written by: Donald R. Kirsch, Phd, Ogi Ogas, Phd

Narrated by: James Foster

 

Donald Kirsch and Ogi Ogas recount the origin and history of drug discovery in THE DRUG HUNTERS.  Kirsch and Ogas explain how drugs evolved from shamanistic ritual and magic to plant extraction and modern synthetic drug creation.  They argue that the complexity of myth, elemental plant extraction, and animal metabolism make the search for effective drugs a casino exercise.

Kirsch and Ogas reveal how scientists, entrepreneurs, and corporations make big bets; garnering wins and losses wrapped in luck and circumstance.  Like gamblers, drug hunters lie to themselves about continuing research on busted bets with bigger financial and emotional investments.  Sometimes they win but usually they lose–no breakthrough is made.  The drug does not work as expected.

The reasons for failure range from false expectation of drug hunters to impure abstraction (or creation) of ingredients.  They add to the list of potential failures with mistaken methods of administration (topical, pill-form, or injection), chemical bonding miscalculations, and human versus animal metabolism. The paths to error outnumber the highways to success.

In Trump’s treatment for Covid 19, the story of “The Drug Hunters” infers he is on a highway where errors outnumber successes.  Trump’s cocktail of drugs were vetted by a team of doctors who concluded “potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks”.

Americans hope for Trump’s recovery but not necessarily his re-election.

So why do scientists, entrepreneurs, and corporations gamble on research?  Because a win can make billions of dollars.  Kirsrch and Ogas imply corporations are reducing their research departments and changing their mode of drug discovery by purchasing companies that have found new and effective drugs.

A troubling implication is that new drug discoveries will not come from corporations.  That leaves new drug discovery to driven independent scientists, entrepreneurs, and government agencies (funded by tax revenue).

A ten billion dollar investment by NIH is in Moderna’s effort to find a Covid19 vaccine.  Moderna is trying to patent their Covid19 drug with exclusive ownership. The public should be compensated for tax dollars that subsidize private industry research.

Kirsch and Ogas offer fascinating stories of how therapeutic drugs were discovered.  From aspirin to penicillin to birth control; to psychiatric treatment and cancer remediation, they explain how difficult, expensive, and serendipitous the search for effective drugs have been.