Day: 05/26/2015

Su-Jok: Pain Relief through Hand Acupuncture

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Su-Jok: Pain Relief through Hand Acupuncture

In a modern world like ours, we are prone to a variety of ailments, because we have drifted far away from our priority of respecting the piousness of our body, mind and soul. As we grow busier and busier, our chairs become more and more uncomfortable, and our body goes through unwanted strain and stress.

Pain Inducers:

Wrapped in this stressful veil of work hours, mortgages, debts and worries, we have the tendency to ignore the most important thing of all: our physical and spiritual health. When stress manifests itself physically, we experience pain, inflammations or dysfunctions. Our bones are tired, our muscles are tense, and our blood doesn’t quite circulate as good. And then, our heads hurt, and our necks feel odd. We are a machine in urgent and constant need of service and repair.

We turn to modern, conventional medicine to rid us of our aches and pains. We tell our doctors where it hurts, the doctor, being a busy man, in a poorly organized system, gives you something for your pain (but not the cause of your pain), and then he sends you home. After a cyclic set of iterations you suddenly find yourself trying to cope up with not just the pain but the other side effects that the medications dumped on you along the way.

Alternate Curative Methods:

Alternative practices, such as meditation, acupuncture, Yoga are available to everyone, and are fairly very well known for their success rate, and have almost no side effects. One of these alternative treatment methods is the science of Su Jok. Considering the treatment targets acu-points on your hands, you can label this as a compact form of acupressure.

Su Jok literally stands for “hands and feet” – it is an easy way to combat pain, and it only requires your ability to feel pain, and something to help you push through those points in your hand and feet that correspond to a affected part of your body.

Watch the video. URL: https://youtu.be/VOccPn-CkQM

How Much Does It Cost to Go To Mars?

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Money is not the only major cost when it comes to space exploration. Time is another huge factor when it comes to viable space programs. It simply takes years and years to make major accomplishments in this field. Engineers and scientists at the top of the field are working aggressively to develop technology needed. And while private companies are now getting into the space industry, determined to lower the financial costs of space travel, we are still a long way off. Still, as Trace makes the case here, it’s worth every penny.

https://testtube.com/testtubeplus/is-space-travel-worth-the-money/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=dnewssocial&utm_campaign=owned

Hepatitis B Infection 100% Eliminated With Cancer Drug Combination In Preclinical Model

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the liver

A new drug trial has promising results for hepatitis B treatment. 

A cancer drug was 100 percent successful in clearing away hepatitis B infections in preclinical models for an Australian study. If researchers successfully replicate the results in human clinical trials, the drug may become the first-ever cure to the hepatitis B virus and may serve as a model for treating other viruses, such as HIV and herpes.

Researchers at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia used a combination of the cancer drug birinapant and the antiviral drug entecavir to completely eliminate hepatitis B infections in “hundreds of tests in preclinical models,” lead researcher Dr. Marc Pellegrini explained in a press release. Human trials began in December 2014, and drug testing has currently moved on to a phase 1/2a in clinical trials.

Hepatitis B is a viral infection that attacks the liver. It is transmitted via contact with infected blood or bodily fluids and causes chronic liver infection, which may lead to life-threatening cirrhosis or liver cancer. According to the World Health Organization, there are an estimated 240 million people who are chronically infected with hepatitis B, and around 780,000 people die from complications due to their infection each year.

Although a vaccine against the virus has been available since 1982, treatment of those who are already infected is limited. This is because the virus is able to override the liver’s self-preservation mechanism. Normally, at the sign of infection, the liver will switch on a signal that tells cells to self-destruct in order to prevent further infection, Pelligrini explained. The hepatitis B virus destroys this communications switch and tells the cells to ignore rather than fight the infection. Birinapant is able to reverse this viral override, and restore the liver’s natural infection-fighting defense.

“Birinapant flips the cell survival ‘switch’ used by the virus, causing the infected cell to die,” Pelligrini said.

The team also found that when birinapant was used in combination with entecavir, the infection was cleared twice as fast.

Drug resistance is an ever-present challenge for doctors when it comes to treating viruses. A virus learns to adapt to drugs and then becomes resistant to their defense. However, because the new combination indirectly attacks the virus by changing the way the body responds, this problem will most likely not exist.

“The virus relies on the survival mechanisms of the host, so if it can’t exploit them, it dies. Such a monumental change in the virus’s environment may be too big a hurdle for it to adapt to,” Pelegrini added.

The team believes the unique method in which the drug works could be used to explore effective treatments for other viruses such as HIV, herpes, dengue fever, and even bacterial infections such as tuberculosis.

Pellegrini, Dr. Greg Ebert, and their colleagues at the institute have published their research on the new drug combination in two papers in the online journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Patients are being recruited to partake in the clinical trials in hospitals located in Perth and Adelaide, Australia.

Source: Pellegrini M, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015.

We’re getting ready to fish plastic soup from the oceans starting in 2016

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he oceans pretty much suck at the moment. Not necessarily for us, though it’s certainly getting there, but for the sea’s original inhabitants. The problem is this: plastic bags are clogging up whole swaths of ocean like a synthetic soup, though in no way edible and entirely deadly. (So not very much like a soup at all…)

We’re doing something about it

The Ocean Cleanup, an initiative set up by Dutchman Boyan Slat, is poised to set up a system in the area between Japan and South Korea to “catch” and deal with the carrier bag bouillon that’s threatening oceanic wildlife.

The monster cleanup system spans over a mile in breadth and is made possible through crowdfunding.

If the initiative proves effective, more problem areas around the world could be addressed next, though at an even greater scale. There are plans for a “plastic catcher” of more than 100km in length, allowing much greater areas at a time to be rendered soup-free.

We can’t really do this Nobel-worthy project justice in these few words, so why not check out the details at the source?

SUDDEN ONSET OF ICE LOSS IN ANTARCTICA SO LARGE IT AFFECTS EARTH’S GRAVITY FIELD

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A glacier system on Livingstone Island located near the Antarctic Peninsula, discharging ice into the ocean Credit: Dr Alba Martin-Español

A group of scientists, led by a team from the University of Bristol, UK has observed a sudden increase of ice loss in a previously stable region of Antarctica. The research is published today inScience.

Using measurements of the elevation of the Antarctic ice sheet made by a suite of satellites, the researchers found that the Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change up to 2009. Around 2009, multiple glaciers along a vast coastal expanse, measuring some 750km in length, suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion litres of water, each year.

This makes the region the second largest contributor to sea level rise in Antarctica and the ice loss shows no sign of waning.

Dr Bert Wouters, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Bristol, who lead the study said: “To date, the glaciers added roughly 300 cubic km of water to the ocean. That’s the equivalent of the volume of nearly 350,000 Empire State Buildings combined.”

The changes were observed using the CryoSat-2 satellite, a mission of the European Space Agency dedicated to remote-sensing of ice. From an altitude of about 700km, the satellite sends a radar pulse to Earth, which is reflected by the ice and subsequently received back at the satellite. From the time the pulse takes to travel, the elevation of the ice surface can retrieved with incredible accuracy. By analysing roughly 5 years of the data, the researchers found that the ice surface of some of the glaciers is currently going down by as much as 4m each year.

The ice loss in the region is so large that it causes small changes in the gravity field of the Earth, which can be detected by another satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

“The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise to us,” continued Dr Wouters. “It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years the dynamic regime completely shifted.”

Data from an Antarctic climate model shows that the sudden change cannot be explained by changes in snowfall or air temperature. Instead, the team attributes the rapid ice loss to warming oceans.

Many of the glaciers in the region feed into ice shelves that float on the surface of the ocean. They act as a buttress to the ice resting on bedrock inland, slowing down the flow of the glaciers into the ocean. The westerly winds that encircle Antarctica have become more vigorous in recent decades, in response to climate warming and ozone depletion. The stronger winds push warm waters from the Southern Ocean poleward, where they eat away at the glaciers and floating ice shelves from below.

Ice shelves in the region have lost almost one-fifth of their thickness in the last two decades, thereby reducing the resisting force on the glaciers. A key concern is that much of the ice of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula is grounded on bedrock below sea level, which gets deeper inland. This means that even if the glaciers retreat, the warm water will chase them inland and melt them even more.

Dr Wouters said: “It appears that sometime around 2009, the ice shelf thinning and the subsurface melting of the glaciers passed a critical threshold which triggered the sudden ice loss. However, compared to other regions in Antarctica, the Southern Peninsula is rather understudied, exactly because it did not show any changes in the past, ironically.

“To pinpoint the cause of the changes, more data need to be collected. A detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial to tell how much longer the thinning will continue.”

INTUITIVE CONTROL OF ROBOTIC ARM USING THOUGHTS ALONE

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Giving himself a drink for the first time in 10 years, Sorto says, "This study has been very meaningful to me. As much as the project needed me, I needed the project. The project has made a huge difference in my life. It gives me great pleasure to be part of the solution for improving paralyzed patients' lives." Credit: Spencer Kellis and Christian Klaes/Caltech

Paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a gunshot wound when he was 21, Erik G. Sorto now can move a robotic arm just by thinking about it and using his imagination.

Through a clinical collaboration between Caltech, Keck Medicine of USC and Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, the now 34-year-old Sorto is the first person in the world to have a neural prosthetic device implanted in a region of the brain where intentions are made, giving him the ability to perform a fluid hand-shaking gesture, drink a beverage, and even play “rock, paper, scissors,” using a robotic arm.

Neural prosthetic devices implanted in the brain’s movement center, the motor cortex, can allow patients with paralysis to control the movement of a robotic limb. However, current neuroprosthetics produce motion that is delayed and jerky–not the smooth and seemingly automatic gestures associated with natural movement. Now, by implanting neuroprosthetics in a part of the brain that controls not the movement directly but rather our intent to move, Caltech researchers have developed a way to produce more natural and fluid motions.

Designed to test the safety and effectiveness of this new approach, the clinical trial was led by principal investigator Richard Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, neurosurgeon Charles Y. Liu, professor of neurological surgery, neurology, and biomedical engineering at USC, and neurologist Mindy Aisen, chief medical officer at Rancho Los Amigos.

Andersen and his colleagues wanted to improve the versatility of movement that a neuroprosthetic can offer to patients by recording signals from a different brain region other than the motor cortex, i.e., the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), a high-level cognitive area. In earlier animal studies, the Andersen lab found that it is here, in the PPC, that the initial intent to make a movement is formed. These intentions are then transmitted to the motor cortex, through the spinal cord, and on to the arms and legs where the movement is executed.

“The PPC is earlier in the pathway, so signals there are more related to movement planning–what you actually intend to do–rather than the details of the movement execution,” Andersen says. “When you move your arm, you really don’t think about which muscles to activate and the details of the movement–such as lift the arm, extend the arm, grasp the cup, close the hand around the cup, and so on. Instead, you think about the goal of the movement, for example, ‘I want to pick up that cup of water.’ So in this trial, we were successfully able to decode these actual intents, by asking the subject to simply imagine the movement as a whole, rather than breaking it down into a myriad of components. We expected that the signals from the PPC would be easier for patients to use, ultimately making the movement process more fluid.”

The device was surgically implanted in Sorto’s brain at Keck Hospital of USC in April 2013, and he since has been training with Caltech researchers and staff at Rancho Los Amigos to control a computer cursor and a robotic arm with his mind. The researchers saw just what they were hoping for: intuitive movement of the robotic arm.

Sorto, a single father of two who has been paralyzed for over 10 years, was thrilled with the quick results: “I was surprised at how easy it was [to control the robotic arm],” he says. “I remember just having this out-of-body experience, and I wanted to just run around and high-five everybody.”

The Surgery

The surgical team at Keck Medicine of USC performed the unprecedented neuroprosthetic implant in a five-hour surgery on April 17, 2013. Liu and his team implanted a pair of small electrode arrays in two parts of the posterior parietal cortex, one that controls reach and another that controls grasp. Each 4-by-4 millimeter array contains 96 active electrodes that, in turn, each record the activity of single neurons in the PPC. The arrays are connected by a cable to a system of computers that process the signals, to decode the brain’s intent and control output devices, such as a computer cursor and a robotic arm.

“These arrays are very small so their placement has to be exceptionally precise, and it took a tremendous amount of planning, working with the Caltech team to make sure we got it right,” says Liu, who also is director of the USC Neurorestoration Center and associate chief medical officer at Rancho Los Amigos. “Because it was the first time anyone had implanted this part of the human brain, everything about the surgery was different: the location, the positioning and how you manage the hardware. Keep in mind that what we’re able to do–the ability to record the brain’s signals and decode them to eventually move the robotic arm–is critically dependent on the functionality of these arrays, which is determined largely at the time of surgery.”

The USC Neurorestoration Center’s primary mission is to leverage partnerships to create unique opportunities to translate scientific discoveries into effective therapies.

“We are at a point in human research where we are making huge strides in overcoming a lot of neurologic disease,” says neurologist Christianne Heck, associate professor of neurology at USC and co-director of the USC Neurorestoration Center. “These very important early clinical trials could provide hope for patients with all sorts of neurologic problems that involve paralysis such as stroke, brain injury, ALS and even multiple sclerosis.”

The Rehabilitation

Sixteen days after his implant surgery, Sorto began his training sessions at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, where a computer was attached directly to the ports extending from his skull, to communicate with his brain. The rehabilitation team of occupational therapists who specialize in helping patients adapt to loss of function in their upper limbs and “redesign” the way patients do tasks with the function they have left, worked with Sorto and the Caltech team daily to help Sorto visualize what it would be like to move his arm again.

“It was a big surprise that the patient was able to control the limb on day one¬¬¬–the very first day he tried,” Andersen says. “This attests to how intuitive the control is when using PPC activity.”

Although he was able to immediately move the robot arm with his thoughts, after weeks of imagining, Sorto refined his control of the arm. Now, Sorto is able to execute advanced tasks with his mind, such as controlling a computer cursor; drinking a beverage; making a hand-shaking gesture; and performing various tasks with the robotic arm.

Aisen, the chief medical officer at Rancho Los Amigos who led the study’s rehabilitation team, says that advancements in prosthetics like these hold promise for the future of patient rehabilitation.

“We at Rancho are dedicated to advancing rehabilitation and to restoration of neurologic function through new technologies, which can be assistive or can promote recovery by capitalizing on the innate plasticity of the human nervous system,” says Aisen, also a clinical professor of neurology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “This research is relevant to the role of robotics and brain-machine interfaces as assistive devices, but also speaks to the ability of the brain to learn to function in new ways. We have created a unique environment that can seamlessly bring together rehabilitation, medicine, and science as exemplified in this study.”

Sorto has signed on to continue working on the project for a third year. He says the study has inspired him to continue his education and pursue a master’s degree in social work.

“This study has been very meaningful to me,” says Sorto. “As much as the project needed me, I needed the project. It gives me great pleasure to be part of the solution for improving paralyzed patients’ lives. I joke around with the guys that I want to be able to drink my own beer–to be able to take a drink at my own pace, when I want to take a sip out of my beer and to not have to ask somebody to give it to me. I really miss that independence. I think that if it were safe enough, I would really enjoy grooming myself–shaving, brushing my own teeth. That would be fantastic.”

“The better understanding of the PPC will help the researchers improve the neuroprosthetic devices of the future,” Andersen says. “What we have here is a unique window into the workings of a complex high-level brain area, as we work collaboratively with our subjects to perfect their skill in controlling external devices.”

OUR BOND WITH DOGS MAY GO BACK MORE THAN 27,000 YEARS

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This image compares an ancient Taimyr Wolf bone from the lower jaw to a modern pipette. Credit: Love Dalen

Dogs’ special relationship to humans may go back 27,000 to 40,000 years, according to genomic analysis of an ancient Taimyr wolf bone reported in the Cell Press journalCurrent Biology on May 21. Earlier genome-based estimates have suggested that the ancestors of modern-day dogs diverged from wolves no more than 16,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age.

The genome from this ancient specimen, which has been radiocarbon dated to 35,000 years ago, reveals that the Taimyr wolf represents the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and dogs.

“Dogs may have been domesticated much earlier than is generally believed,” says Love Dalén of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. “The only other explanation is that there was a major divergence between two wolf populations at that time, and one of these populations subsequently gave rise to all modern wolves.” Dalén considers this second explanation less likely, since it would require that the second wolf population subsequently became extinct in the wild.

“It is [still] possible that a population of wolves remained relatively untamed but tracked human groups to a large degree, for a long time,” adds first author of the study Pontus Skoglund of Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute.

The researchers made these discoveries based on a small piece of bone picked up during an expedition to the Taimyr Peninsula in Siberia. Initially, they didn’t realize the bone fragment came from a wolf at all; this was only determined using a genetic test back in the laboratory. But wolves are common on the Taimyr Peninsula, and the bone could have easily belonged to a modern-day wolf. On a hunch, the researchers decided to radiocarbon date the bone anyway. It was only then that they realized what they had: a 35,000-year-old bone from an ancient Taimyr wolf.

The DNA evidence also shows that modern-day Siberian Huskies and Greenland sled dogs share an unusually large number of genes with the ancient Taimyr wolf.

“The power of DNA can provide direct evidence that a Siberian Husky you see walking down the street shares ancestry with a wolf that roamed Northern Siberia 35,000 years ago,” Skoglund says. To put that in perspective, “this wolf lived just a few thousand years after Neandertals disappeared from Europe and modern humans started populating Europe and Asia.”

THIS ONCE-STABLE ANTARCTIC REGION HAS SUDDENLY STARTED MELTING

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This once-stable Antarctic region has suddenly started melting

Antarctica’s glaciers have been making headlines during the past year, and not in a good way. Whether it’s a massive ice shelf facing imminent risk of collapse, glaciers in the West Antarctic past the point of no return, or new threats to East Antarctic ice, it’s all been rather gloomy.

And now I’m afraid there’s more bad news: a new study published in the journalScience, led by a team of my colleagues and I from the University of Bristol, has observed a sudden increase of ice loss in a previously stable part of Antarctica.

The Antarctic Peninsula.

The region in question is the southernmost half of the Antarctic Peninsula, a section of the mainland which extends 1300km into the Southern Ocean. Its northern half is the continent’s mildest region and the climate effects there are clear. We already knew for instance that the glaciers of the Northern Antarctic Peninsula were in trouble following the disintegration of some of its ice shelves, most famously Larsen A and B.

Further to the west, the massive glaciers feeding into the Amundsen Sea have been shedding ice into the ocean at an alarming rate for decades. Out of the blue, the Southern Peninsula filled up the gap between these two regions and became Antarctica’s second largest contributor to sea level rise.

Using satellite elevation measurements, we found the Southern Antarctic Peninsula showed no signs of change up to 2009. Around that year, multiple glaciers along a vast 750km coastline suddenly started to shed ice into the ocean at a nearly constant rate of 60 cubic km, or about 55 trillion litres of water, each year – enough water to fill 350,000 Empire State Buildings over the past five years.

Some of the glaciers are currently thinning by as much as 4 metres each year. The ice loss in the region is so large that it causes small changes in the Earth’s gravity field, which can be detected by another satellite mission, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE).

So sudden even the supply ship seems to have been caught out.
J Bamber, Author provided

Is this an effect of global warming?

The answer is both yes and no. Data from an Antarctic climate model shows that the sudden change cannot be explained by changes in snowfall or air temperature. Instead, we attribute the rapid ice loss to warming oceans.

Many of the glaciers in the region feed into ice shelves that float on the surface of the ocean. They act as a buttress to the ice resting on bedrock inland, slowing down the flow of the glaciers into the ocean. The westerly winds that encircle Antarctica have become more vigorous in recent decades, in response to climate warming and ozone depletion. The stronger winds push warm waters from the Southern Ocean poleward, where they eat away at the glaciers and floating ice shelves from below.

Ice shelves in the region have lost almost one-fifth of their thickness in the last two decades, thereby reducing the resisting force on the glaciers. A key concern is that much of the ice of the Southern Antarctic Peninsula is grounded on bedrock below sea level, which gets deeper inland. This means that even if the glaciers retreat, the warm water will chase them inland and melt them even more.

Cause for concern?

The region’s melting glaciers are currently adding about 0.16 millimetres to global sea levels per year, which won’t immediately make you run for the hills. But it’s yet another source of sea level rise, about 5% of the global total increase. What might be a bigger source of concern is that the changes occurred so suddenly and in an area that was behaving quietly until now. The fact that so many glaciers in such a large region suddenly started to lose ice came as a surprise. It shows a very fast response of the ice sheet: in just a few years everything changed.

The Southern Antarctic Peninsula contains enough ice to add 35 cm to sea level, but that won’t happen any time soon. It’s too early to tell how much longer the ice loss will continue and how much it will contribute to future sea level rise. For this, a detailed knowledge of the geometry of the local ice shelves, the ocean floor topography, ice sheet thickness and glacier flow speeds are crucial.

But the ice on Antarctica is like a sleeping giant. Even if we would stop emitting greenhouse gases as of today, or the inflow of warm water would stop, this inert system would take a long time to find an equilibrium again.

THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN: HOW ARCHETYPAL MYTHS SHAPE THE WAY PEOPLE THINK ABOUT SCIENCE

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“One doesn’t expect Dr Frankenstein to show up in a wool sweater,” wrote political commentator Charles Krauthammer, ominously, in the March 1997 issue of Time magazine. He was referring to British scientist Dr Ian Wilmut, who eight months earlier had successfully created Dolly, the world’s most famous sheep, by cloning her from another adult sheep’s cell.

Krauthammer’s criticism was unsparing. “This was not supposed to happen,” he insisted. Dolly was “a cataclysmic” creature. But PPL Therapeutics, the company responsible for funding the science behind Dolly, was undeterred, and four years later produced five cloned female pigs. Again, the news provoked outrage. Lisa Lange, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, echoed Krauthammer when she dismissed justifications of cloning: “There’s always a reason given to validate these Frankenstein-like experiments.”

Frontispiece to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein published by Colburn and Bentley, London 1831
By Theodor von Holst via Wikimedia Commons

Invoking Mary Shelley’s myth of Frankenstein is standard fare in arguments over controversial science. In 1992, Boston College English professor Paul Lewis coined the term “Frankenfood” in a letter to the New York Times that argued for stricter FDA regulation of genetically modified foods. “If they want to sell us Frankenfood,” he wrote, “perhaps it’s time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle.” Dr William Davis, author of the bestselling book Wheat Belly, refers to modern strains of wheat as “frankenwheat,” and then blames them for nearly every chronic illness imaginable. And 19 years before Dolly, in-vitro fertilization pioneer Dr Patrick Steptoe tried to preempt such criticism when he defended his role in the birth of Louise Brown, the world’s first “test-tube” baby. “I am not a wizard or a Frankenstein,” he pleaded.

Steptoe was wise to dissociate himself from Frankenstein. Research suggests that story archetypes – encoded in powerful, culturally pervasive myths – may play a crucial role in how people process new information. In their studies of jury verdicts, for instance, psychologists Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie found that jurors made decisions, in part, by fitting the evidence into previously defined narrative structures.

The persuasive power of these structures has led Rutgers law professor Ruth Anne Robbins to argue that attorneys should represent their clients as “archetypal heroes” (her example of choice is from another modern myth, Harry Potter). Heroes are more likely to be perceived sympathetically, while villains – Dr Frankenstein and Dr Steptoe alike – will be perceived as criminals, independent of the evidence.

Adam and Eve
Lucas Cranach the Elder, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, myths appear to lead consistently away from the truth, not toward it. Researchers from the University of Oregon have found that pairing statistics with narratives detracts from accurate evaluations of risk. And in a 2014 British study of vaccination intentions, subjects exposed to the powerful narrative archetype of a conspiracy – complete with “secret acts of powerful, malevolent forces” – were more likely to fear vaccines, despite access to evidence of vaccine safety.

The Frankenstein myth is particularly potent, since it recapitulates elements of the world’s most famous myth. Temptation leads Adam and Eve, like Dr Frankenstein, to acquire forbidden knowledge, which results in a cataclysmic fall from grace.

The potency of this narrative – the sinful knowledge seeker who departs from nature – worries New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan, who believes it can shut down rational, nuanced dialogue. He told me:

You have to be very careful about deploying these powerful myths. There’s no reason to believe that technology, in general, is inherently dangerous or out of control. Not only that, Frankenstein can narrow our focus to biological and reproductive science. Other technologies, weaponized satellites and military technology, those don’t attract the same kind of criticism.

People don’t just live by archetypal myths – they are constituted by them. Group identity, from religion to politics to race, depends on an investment in the truth of a few indispensable stories, which in turn serve as shorthand justifications of one’s preferred moral and social order. “When you tell a story about your client, you pick a storyline that people can identify with,” Robbins explains of her approach. This helps explain why mythically justified beliefs are so resistant to evidence: changing them means changing oneself.

The biasing power of myth is disconcerting, but it also points to a potential solution. If, in some cases, narrative can trump scientific evidence, perhaps literary criticism can come to the rescue.

Take the myth of Frankenstein. As Krauthammer, Lewis, and Davis tell it, genetically modified organisms are dangerous, unnatural and disgusting, and those who oppose them are the archetypal heroes. The villains are foolish, power-hungry scientists like Wilmut and Steptoe, whose unchecked hubris threatens to plunge mankind into darkness.

In the original tale, however, Dr Frankenstein’s creation is no monster, but rather a kind, gentle Creature. Tragically, the Creature soon learns to fear humans, who, terrified by his appearance, drive him away with stones and never come to understand his true identity.

The real villain in Shelley’s story is neither Dr Frankenstein nor his creation – it is the intolerant, torch-wielding villagers. Only after experiencing their cruelty does the Creature become a monster, exacting revenge on those who refused to give him a chance. This is the real myth, the original myth, and it suggests a radically different moral and social order than the more familiar version. If we embrace it, maybe the evidence about controversial science will start to tell a different story.

Pneumomediastinum and pneumopericardium

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5 week old ex-preterm with sudden onset of respiratory distress following intubation and insertion of a feeding tube.

A large amount of air is seen on both sides of the thin pericardium and below the heart with a small amount of air tracking along the soft tissues of the neck.  The air within the pericardial space indicates the pneumopericardium while that outside indicates the pneumomediastinum.

Also note the low-lying position of the endotracheal tube, however, the feeding tube is correctly positioned with its tip in the stomach.

Complete opacification of the both lungs is also seen in keeping with the history of respiratory distress.

Also note absence of ossification of the humeral head epiphyses in keeping with the preterm state.