Chris X Edwards

One of the more useful ways San Diego contributes to society is with world-leading biotech. Even though I’m really a computer specialist, I spent about 15 years working in molecular biology labs there. One does not hang around computational molecular biophysicists that long without learning some basics.

One of the fun benchmarks I used to do is assemble icosohedral hepatitis capsids into the full virus where every atom is properly placed. It’s interesting to see a machine where you know the location of every atom. I was thinking of assembling a COVID19 virus' helical capsid but I don’t think there are any solved structures of the proteins this virus is comprised of.

Searching PDB the only thing that seems to exist at this time is a cryo-electromicroscopy structure of the spike glycoprotein trimer. This is the structure, i.e. the placement of each atom, of the spiky protrusions sticking out of COVID19.

You don’t have to be an expert to see that this is hasty work. This is a trimer, three identical protiens in a trigonal symmetry. But one of them clearly isn’t like the others, is it? They provide excuses in the paper.

While looking at that one thing caught my eye, a video titled Fighting Coronavirus With Soap. One thing that has always intrigued me is soap. How does it work? I mean how does it really work? The video is only a couple of minutes and graphically quite well done.

Watching the video, I was a little uneasy about the message. Let’s learn more about soap’s molecular physics and think this through.

This is how the video is representing a soap molecule.

Here is a more technical representation of stearic acid which is found in many common soaps.

The white spheres are hydrogen, the black spheres are carbon, and the red are oxygen. The carbon chain is a hydrophobic fat. This is why soap has some similarities to oily stuff; for example soap can be used to lubricate things.

So let’s say that you have dispersed a bunch of these molecules into water and the important property of the lipid tail is that it hates getting wet. Of course at molecular levels the idea of "wet" isn’t exactly a thing, but that’s fine. The tails of soap molecules are what’s called "hydrophobic" — if there’s a way for them to avoid water and bond to something else, they will. The heads are "hydrophilic", they love water!

Now let’s say you have some surface that is covered in oily lipids. The video illustrates such a situation like this.

The brown strands are just like the soap’s tails. The idea — and indeed molecular fact — is that when the soap tails get near these oil residue tails it is more "comfortable" (electrochemically) backing its soap tail into the lipids to get away from the water.

If enough of this activity happens, the soap and lipid cluster can form a little ball called a micelle.

This ball is the most comfortable configuration (minimal energy state) for the soap and any lipids it gets near to avoid the water. Once the lipids are bound up in a little ball whose outside surface is happy to swim around in water, it turns out that it is easy to rinse the whole assembly away. This is why if you put soapy water in greasy cookwear, the stubborn residue can finally be rinsed clean. The oils of your food are generally the same stuff for the purposes of this topic.

We’ve seen soap form into little balls called micelles. There are other configurations such molecules can take. This Wikipedia image is called "phospholipids_aqueous_solution_structures".

There’s the micelle as described. Then there are the bilayer types. These form as shown when two sheets are arranged tail to tail, again neatly avoiding the tail getting "wet". Next to think about are liposomes. Liposomes are small little spheres of this molecular configuration. Researchers are trying to figure out how to pack them with therapeutic agents in order to sneak drug metabolites into a patient in a way that otherwise would dissolve in water. They hope it can be a clever way to sneak something into some place it doesn’t usually go.

This is exactly how a virus works! A virus envelope (the round sphere you see in all the images of the covid 19) is the same topological bi-layer organization of lipids as a liposome — it is just somewhat bigger.

It is also interesting to note that soap bubbles are formed by the same mechanics, just sort of in reverse. This diagram illustrates it well.

The video shows the virus' envelope bilayer sheet like this.

What exactly is that phospholipid layer of virus envelope made of? Wikipedia says "The envelopes are typically derived from portions of the host cell membranes (phospholipids and proteins)…" Did you catch that? Imagine two kids playing with a limited collection of Legos — one takes a break and returns to find their construction half-destroyed and the other’s now greatly expanded. Viruses steal your cell membranes to make their own membranes! At an atomic level virus skin is the exact same stuff as your skin! Well, the "skin" of your skin — and any other handy tissue — meaning the cell membranes. Viruses are perfectly effective even when they destroy their hosts' cellular machinery. And when cells fail and disintegrate, what is conveniently lying around in abundance for an ambitious virus to use? Your cells' membrane lipids!

And now we get to the problem. If soap can polarize bilayer lipid proteins of virus envelopes, well, I’ve got some bad news for you about what it will be doing to the membranes of your skin cells. Yes, viruses exposed to soap in high enough concentrations for long enough periods of time may start to become unstable for effectively the same reasons that sandpaper, battery acid, and open flames all can destabilize viral envelopes (i.e. the wrong energy in the wrong place) but I do not think this is what the essence of soap hygiene is all about.

I can accept that the action of soap can be a little rough. You certainly don’t like to eat it and it can irritate other sensitive areas like your eyes. An interesting property of skin cells (which are called keratinocytes) is that they usually are completely dead on the very outside of your body. You are covered in dead skin which protects you by absorbing damage that chemical assaults like soap entail.

Now we have some important facts that can help us understand the best way to use soap.

So what could this mean for washing and dangerous pathogen mitigation? Here are some things to consider.

That’s all pretty normal sounding, right? You won’t be surprised to learn I have some more controversial notions. Of course I do!

The FDA goes on to say:

Wash your hands — and other parts — the way that is best for your well-being. With a little biochemistry understanding, you hopefully can make some better guesses about what exactly that way is. Soap is a tool — use it correctly, in the right circumstances, and it will be good to you.

Thanks to the brilliant and kind biophysics professor, Ruben Abagayan for reviewing this topic with me. All errors are mine!

Last year I sent this to a friend who works in the cloud storage business as an idea for a good way to show off that product.

That was just a very rough idea of what would be required but other people were apparently thinking of this more seriously. Check out this video describing a project that has successfully built a 1 to 1 scale model of the entire earth in Minecraft!

The special thing about MC is that it is actually quite coarse. That is why such a massive project is feasible. A map of this scale in some other kind of engine would have to be very sparse and even then it would be uncomfortably rough (like MC, but not in a pleasant structured way) and empty.

In ancient times (the early 1990s) AutoCAD shipped with a neat demo file containing a full scale 1:1 model of the entire solar system. They had a 1km object on the moon (ours) and all the other objects of our solar system were roughed in to scale. That demo was quite interesting to get a sense of what the capabilities and scale of computer floating point numbers were (2 to the 32 power is around 4.3 billion and that is about how many km Pluto is from the sun at perihelion).

In games like Space Engineers which have some minimal terraforming capabilities, you’re deforming a sparse shell. In MC, it’s real volume. This means that this Minecraft model of the earth is ready to incorporate bathymetric surveys of the ocean depths and subterranean geotechnical data (from petroleum exploration, for example).

Here is a wonderful project from the British Geological Survey that has modeled the real geology of Britain in Minecraft.

To jump an order of magnitude linearly from 1m resolution to 10cm is harder than a 10x increase in resources — it’s 1000x because of this volumetric quality. But a decimeter model of the earth in real scale would be pretty amazing and useful. And probably in our future!

At least the kids now have something as useful as school to work on!

UPDATE 2020-04-01

Check out the wave of projects that students are working on to recreate their closed schools in Minecraft.

Campus is closed, so college students are rebuilding their schools in Minecraft

Frankly this is the best use of practical shared virtual reality I have seen.

I was in Iran just months before the hostage crisis. I had purchased plane tickets just before 2001-09-11. I was watching the economy closely in 2007 because I wanted to buy a house — I did not because of the subprime mortgage fiasco that ravished the world’s economy.

I’ve seen some shit! But I have never seen anything like this. Wow.

This novel coronavirus pandemic has been shocking. Well, not really. I’ve actually seen absolutely no evidence of any direct effects of the illness personally.

What has blown my mind is the response. That is affecting me personally quite a bit. But you knew that because the astonishing thing about this historical event is that it is affecting literally everybody.

The response has been so unbelievable that I don’t feel alone in being shocked and somewhat overwhelmed by it. I’m just reading the news and it’s a bit like 9/11 in that a lot of people are dying, and that’s obviously bad, but you can’t help realize that the real situation is much, much bigger and will have serious ramifications well into the future.

As the flood of profoundly unexpected news comes in, I can barely keep up. Here is a collection of thoughts I’ve jotted down. Better to post them now rather than wait for the thousand page book when this thing is all over. If it ever ends.

Telecommuting

Let’s start with some personal hobby horses.

For 15 years or so, Google tried to recruit me and I was very enthusiastic. However, I was stuck in a technology backwater (San Diego) with no Google offices and would need to work remotely. I was assured this was impossible. So Google, which is it: 1. You are evil? 2. Or your work-from-home products are incompetent and/or ill-conceived? It must be one of those. I don’t mean to just pick on Google - all the stupid Silicon Valley companies who should be better at using networked computers yet who stupidly pack computer nerds into tech bro mosh pits in a region with a terrible quality of life also deserve opprobrium.

Of course I’m talking about whoever is making these high level management decisions at tech companies. The people keeping the internet turned on deserve thanks and recognition which I know from first hand experience they are unlikely to get.

I understand that people who are more socially excitable than I am might need to go chat at a physical water cooler or fetch sticks together or smell each other’s butts during meetings or whatever. But I’ve been horrified by the terribleness of that system since I first really didn’t want to live where the other computer nerds had to live — for at least 20 years now.

If this virus can get even the moronic Google (come on now, let me stress the point again: they make work from home tools) to get a clue and allow remote work ( "Google tells staff to work at home due to coronavirus"), well, that is somewhat of a silver lining to me.

Of course if you’re a white collar worker enjoying this transition to remote work, make sure you’re literally one of the best in the world at what you do because the next transition will feature you competing with those people directly.

On-line education

Just as the virus was entering the news and many schools knew they were going on-line (UB has moved all classes online) an extremely surreal event happened to my wife. She got a call from an HR person at a famous university in New York looking to hire on-line education experts, which has been my wife’s profession for many years. We are not interested or able to move to the city where this university is located and astonishingly they would not consider hiring someone to work remotely! That is as bad as the Google example! And at this point in history, I suppose even worse. Once again, these are supposed to be ostensibly intelligent people.

Ask yourself how many hours of live stage plays you have sat through in the last year and divide that by the number of hours of recorded dramatic entertainment you’ve watched. Or the number of hours of live concerts you’ve listened to versus the number of hours of recorded music. Why are we still using the live performance stage play model for education? It is apparent that no one but the performers care for this style of delivery on the whole, and maybe not even them. It’s just that kids don’t get to make sensible decisions about education. Can society finally move out of the 19th century with respect to education? I’m guessing the answer is… maybe. It’s looking more promising than ever which is another silver lining.

I feel that this virus will highlight what schools are really doing for families — baby sitting. That’s fine and a real need society has, but let’s call it what it is. Or I’m wrong and the future is doomed because of what rote attendance in schools formerly provided. Either way, all of San Diego schools seem closed indefinitely now.

Remote Service

Apparently even people smarter than me have finally figured out what I’ve know since I first saw a Skype video call: a huge number of trips to the doctor are now no longer essential or even beneficial - they are recklessly toxic. Why did it take this event to get people to notice that nosocomial infections are bad? Remember what I said about people with white collars needing to compete with international players if they did things efficiently?

I’ve always respected people who make remote services effective. One example I like very much was a fantastic guitar player who posted instructional videos on Youtube. Even though he lived in the serious middle of nowhere, he had no trouble filling his schedule with good paying students from all over the world - over Skype.

I wish I my attorney lived in the same town as me because she lives in Anchorage, Alaska (and I would love to return to there). Remote services can work!

One example I’m faced with right now is a need to visit to the DMV. Who are now closed with no recourse. (I have thought about making a license plate-sized sign saying "PULL ME OVER IF YOU CAN TELL ME HOW TO GET PLATES".) Yes, they need me to prove I’m really me, I understand that. But take it from me — faking an entire on-line video conversation is actually harder than having an imposter actor show up live. So why on earth are we waiting in line at the DMV for such tasks? Honestly, driving tests can even be done remotely too by now. I’m hoping that this calamity will spawn all kinds of creative thinking to improve situations where I didn’t really want to be standing in line for hours with masses of other people anyway.

VR

I’ve been interested in virtual reality for a long time. (Mark Zuckerberg and) I have always felt that it could provide a really compelling way for people to collaborate remotely. I’m not going to make any predictions because the best prediction one can make about VR is: won’t live up to hype. However, it really seems plausible that it could do some good if everyone was as keen as Mark and I. And I’m not sure you have a choice these days.

Vegetarianism

My personal reasons for minimizing meat consumption are: catastrophic environmental problems, dubious health effects (antibiotics and other residual veterinary drug metabolites), hard to clean messes in my kitchen, and generally poor value - other people have other reasons. This virus highlights another very sensible reason: livestock practices seem related to big pandemics. The penultimate paragraph of this NIH article talks about how SARS and other diseases made the jump to humans because of "animal husbandry and marketing practices". Not saying it’s true but an idea to think more about than you did a few weeks ago.

Unsustainability

I do not find the direct victims of this illness especially interesting. Flu. Like always. Maybe twice as bad this year. Old people should be twice as worried as they were before. Other than that there doesn’t seem much to say. I’m sorry if that sounds insensitive and awful but consider that in December I did have pneumonia and was lucky to survive — for all anyone knows, I could have had the famous virus! Any worse off, I’d have been dead and being dead is bad. I get that and so I totally understand what the victims are going through. But my little brush with such an illness and the other putative (stats are very bad at this point) victims of the illness are not what’s really impressing me.

What is really blowing my mind is the response. My response to the response is: There is no fucking way we can sustain everyone simultaneously taking dozens of consecutive vacations. That is the end times. This Atlantic article describes the non-health aspect of current events as "a consumer-economy apocalypse". And, "…not a recession…an ice age." A Bloomberg article says "…the economy is headed toward its worst quarter in records since 1947." Etc.

I’m not usually one to care much about the markets or GDP etc., but you can’t have all humans just stop contributing to civilization. I’m sorry — that is worse than a bunch of old people dying because it also includes a bunch of old people dying.

Of course it’s not all humans that must put aside any productivity. Remote workers are still working. And so are "essential" workers. This made me wonder, who likes being called "non-essential"? Ouch. Isn’t capitalism supposed to tell us who is essential? I think what they mean to say is "essential during an actual emergency". But emergencies, pretty much by definition can’t last a long time. Just as you can stop breathing if you encounter an underwater emergency, we can stop all kinds of things in the economy for a short while. But if people think that’s going to work for months… I am very skeptical.

I saw this anonymous comment somewhere and thought it was kind of funny: "The irony of COVID is that medical bills is the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US so its fitting that the whole country will soon be bankrupt because of a medical emergency. Nothing could be more American." Unfortunately the problem is not just related to the bad health care idiosyncrasies of the USA.

Politics

This kind of a stress test on civilization is a great time to re-evaluate priorities in our elected representatives. Will Americans get their shit together and elect people who respect science, facts, and the complexity of the world? Will public health care become a priority in the USA, the backwater of public health care? Will public transportation (and air travel) become even less fun than it already is?

I mentioned the DMV and (non-hypothetically) that without the government functioning, I can not secure property rights; will "libertarians" get a clue? Well, of course not. But they should!

Contrarian Thoughts - Virus As A Blessing?

Unlike the characters in this absurdly prescient satire, I don’t want to see Baby Boomers dying but I can’t help feel that the most powerful generation in history made their own bed on this one to some extent.

Remember, 2.9 million Americans will die this year just because people die at the end of their lives. Boomer deaths by normal mechanisms (such as respiratory infections) will seem statistically out of place because the entire Boomer cohort was statistically out of place. Will we call it a pandemic? We’ll all be very annoyed if this turns out to be a statistics mistake. We’ll only know once actual data is collected — still waiting on that!

Another interesting thing to think about is population immunity based on interactions. Not just to novel corona viruses. It could be that once we reintegrate, we, as a population, are much weaker because we have all been isolated. I have speculated that handshaking, for all its obvious cootie potential, may also serve as a mild form of inter-human inoculation. Will handshakes become permanently uncool in the future?

It occurred to me that this virus is a big social Darwinism experiment. Introverts will presumably be reproducing at the same rate they always have (improbably, some how), but one can imagine a slowdown in the phenotype of humans who can only reproduce as a result of large drunken gatherings. And as far as I can tell, that’s most of them in countries that speak European languages.

I’ve seen lots of reports in the pseudo-press about this virus saving lives overall because of reduced air pollution. I can affirm that with much less traffic out there, the air quality on my bike ride this morning was better than it ever has been. Think also about the number of people taking a healthy walk outside who now have vastly fewer other entertainment options. How many lives will that save?

And on the topic of "saving lives" by sticking a huge stake into the heart of the economy? I’m not sure that WEIRD people want to go there. Let’s… Talk… About…

Cars!!!! No this has been long enough and that deserves its own post!

Prognosis

I believe there is no way a complete shutdown of society globally can last more than a few months. I also believe that society can not shutdown completely enough to confidently suppress a very virulent virus. I am guessing that this disease will mysteriously disappear in a few months. This has happened in many of the pandemics of the last century. Of course no one knows what’s ahead and it’s quite likely any and all of those predictions are wrong. Whatever happens, we’re in uncharted territory and it’s going to be interesting. And hopefully not in the worst way it could go.

Stay well!

UPDATE 2020-03-27

I just remembered Google Flu Trends. That was actually a reasonable data set to analyze. Let’s put that creepy surveillance capitalism to use! Sure the data is terrible, but there is so damn much of it. Of course with the massive reaction, the data are going to be tricky to understand. Here is another interesting project along the same lines: https://healthweather.us/ Surely companies like this and this are collecting interesting data about exactly how feverish their customers are.

A loyal reader sent me this image of a house which is about 20 miles from mine. Full story.

It is apparently right on the Lake Erie shore which is why my house looks nothing like that. What happened here?

This has been a very strange winter. Although it has been uncharacteristically warm, that is actually what caused this ice build up. A few days ago, we had some very high winds while the temperature dipped down to the low 20sF. This created big waves on the lake and the splash and spray on the shore was able to travel horizontally quite a bit more than usual. That’s how that house got coated in ice.

To see why it is extraordinary and why the generally warm temperatures caused this, take a look at this image from April 30, 2019.

This shows the ice boom which is deployed every winter at the end of Lake Erie. This prevents too much ice from damaging the Niagara River shoreline or overwhelming the power plant intakes at Niagara Falls. That image shows they are just releasing the ice.

Now compare it to this morning, nearly two months earlier in the season.

It was foggy, but you can see the boom is still strung together in its winter configuration and yet there is absolutely no ice this year at all! None. This is why that house on the shore was seeing more water spray. Usually there is shore ice that keeps that house separated from water spray. (You can see a bit of shore ice on the Canadian shore, but it’s very light.)

You can also see a boat in today’s photo; that boat is preparing to remove the boom.

NASA points out that on February 14, the Great Lakes should be 41% covered with ice and this year they were 17%. Definitely some interesting weather.

I just finished reading The Body - A Guide For Occupants by Bill Bryson. Bryson is a genius and a delightful writer who makes reading a real pleasure. If you’re interested in the human body — and you are an owner of one, so yes, you are — this book is worth reading. There you go, that’s all the review you need.

But this post has a deeper purpose. I spent about 15 years working in the top levels of biomedical research. I had an extraordinary ringside seat to watch the show of how medical progress is produced. If you’re young enough to not be dead from old age and if you’ve ever visited a doctor in the USA, the overwhelming odds are that you were told to eat some magic beans. I was able to see where those magic beans come from — not physically, but rather the idea forge of the conceptual chemistry behind it all, pharmacology.

I had a special place in pharmacology — I was not an expert but I provided technical engineering support to some of the world’s most competent and knowledgeable molecular biochemistry experts. I did not have to compete with them by writing papers or begging for their grant money. I believe this gave me a more realistic view of this work.

I worked with some incredible and brilliant super geniuses. I was always impressed with their ability to attack absurdly complex problems as if they were going to succeed. However, the entire time I was involved in the life sciences, everything I saw and experienced led to a coherent and strong impression which was this: humans know nothing about biology.

When I say that, think of filling your pockets with sand — you may think that with bulging pockets you’ve got a lot of sand. But if you’re standing on a beach, well, no, that’s probably a poor way to describe it. To say you have any sand when looking out over the vast sand-lined ocean would seem slightly pathetic. So it is for saying we humans know anything about anything related to molecular biophysics, biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, physiology, neurology, zoology, oceanography, and so on. It is probably more hubris than truth to not accept our profound ignorance.

Rather than me opine about it, I’ve excerpted quotes from this book which (incidentally!) make the case pretty clear.

Also mentioned: One notable study has shown that people who have their tonsils removed while young had a 44% greater chance of suffering a heart attack later in life. Who knew? The point is, apparently no one.

Discussing an opiorphin found in the mouth:

Taste buds are actually present in the roof of the mouth, in the throat, in the stomach, heart, lungs, and even testicles. Why? No one knows.

This classic lack of a falsifiable hypothesis is what makes most of health care unscientific. Generally, only epidemiological studies, as opposed to explicit individual patient interactions, can even plausibly qualify as topics of proper scientific investigations. I believe senseless pharmacology is today’s therapeutic bleeding. The new field of pharmacovigilance could change that, but the fact is that pharmacology clearly quacks like quackery precisely because that field finally exists and is so new.

Does this make them vitamins? No. Is the concept of a vitamin stupid? Yes.

He addresses an ontological problem I’ve always found confusing: why is some E.coli bad and yet…

But is the problem now resolved and I have some kind of sensible answer? No. There are good strains and bad strains — the difference between them seems to be, tautologically, that one is good and one is bad. Later (p258) he points out that, "Two strains of E.coli have more genetic variability than all the mammals on Earth put together." Not helping!

On the topic of the composition of poop:

Examples: phenylpropanolamine, Hismanal, Pondimin, and Ambien.

This is quoting Mary Roach’s book Bonk and doesn’t say if anything more is known today.

Discussing two large surveys that showed from 1950 to 1997 the length of an erect penis went from 6 inches to nearly 1 inch shorter:

Also on sperm production:

If you think that was fun times in the history of medical care, check out Walter Freeman jamming icepicks in the eyes of 2500 people to give them lobotomies.

I like to point out that the cost of childbirth as "health care" is absurd when you consider that a human being can not be more healthy than to have just given birth.

Holy shit. Can that be true? More of the devastation of our horrific transportation mess.

Almost! I’ll return to that topic.

E.g. Radithor.

But at least it is a lot of fun for women and costs society nothing! Not!

See the relatively new field of polypharmacy for the full mess.

Reviewing the animals that experience menopause: sheep, humans, narwhals, and humans:

That’s a lot of stumbling in the dark!

I would like to dig into one area of obnoxious ignorance a little more carefully because it is something I am forced to take personally: antioxidants. Have a look at this depressing situation.

Ok, fine, some suckers waste their money on useless supplements — what’s the big problem? The problem for me is that people believe antioxidants are categorically beneficial for health and I know for a fact that is not correct. I know this because antioxidant preservatives will reliably trigger devastating migraines in my head.

What is very insidious is that "vitamin" E is one such molecule. The so-called vitamin E is something almost no humans ever have a deficiency of. Ingesting huge quantities can not make any sense at all when promoting health. However, at a high enough concentration, this kind of molecule (tocopherols) has the property of killing microbes. This is why it is liberally added to many processed foods.

I always read the ingredients of everything I eat and if I ever see vitamin E or any kind of tocopherols I will not eat it. While the quote from the book says that migraines are almost wholly a mystery, I have at least figured out exactly what cause mine and it’s garbage not-food like tocopherols. One of the things you often see next to the tocopherol item in an ingredients list is in parentheses: "(for freshness)".

I strongly advise anyone to avoid eating anything which has on its ingredient list "for freshness". (Especially TBHQ, BHT, BHA, and vitamin E aka d-tocopherols). Sure, unlike me, you may be able to not have your next 20 hours destroyed by pain far worse than any other you’ve ever imagined. But consider when a packaged food company has to add that crap, the product is definitely not fresh. Or wholesome in any way. It really is quite suspect. By avoiding such garbage, you will find that you’re eating real food that is simply higher in quality and better for you in all ways.

Some people believe that you can ignore those weird mystery ingredients in processed food. I however believe that you can have only one of the following two beliefs about small molecule chemistry.

Or!

Common sense and I lean heavily toward the latter. The complication is that even when a small molecule ligand binds correctly with its targeted receptor perfectly, it is inevitable that it will also bind with other unintended receptors. Which ones? As with almost everything that could be known about biochemistry and biology in general: we just do not know.

UPDATE 2020-02-20

Although this website has a bit of the character of a crazy homeless person on the bus, this description of the essential function of what antioxidants (endogenous and otherwise) decompose make it clear that simplistically getting rid of all reactive oxygen species (free radicals) may not be such a brilliant plan.

Even though the presentation of this material on this website is bizarre it seems reasonably well grounded and as factual as it can be. If nothing else this website is interesting and shows clearly that things are more complex than a simple "unlimited antioxidants are always good" narrative.

UPDATE 2020-03-11

You don’t have to read the article or the paper it’s writing about. Just check out the title and subtitle.

Bacteria in our guts break down dozens of popular drugs - Study suggests drugmakers should consider bacterial metabolism when designing and testing new drugs

The point there is that no matter what drugs you ingest, the metabolites that slosh around your system after your microbiome finishes randomly modifying them are going to be individual-specific and very hard to usefully predict. Let’s not even think about the implications to the endeavor I spent a lot of my career working on, rational drug design.

And…

My blog post here may answer a question posed in the title of another article I found today: Why Doctors Still Offer Treatments That May Not Help.

Regarding medical treatments initiated by doctors, the article says…

Note that this says "some" benefit, not a cure!