Feynman told us clearly: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Check anything from first principles and experience, ignoring no logical holes, and that is science. Cargo Cult Science arises when the opposing arguments aren’t emphasized. Experts then form and pass down firm beliefs that are delusions. Cargo Cult science is like a perfect replica radio made all of wood: it may have all the trappings of degrees and chairs and journals, but it is missing the key ingredient and won’t function.[1][2]
Vaccine science is cargo cult science according to Feynman’s definition. There are a ton of peer reviewed papers demonstrating that vaccine aluminum is damaging, that vaccines are full of contaminants, that they can disrupt brain and immune system development, that the smallpox vaccine was ineffective, the polio vaccine is of questionable utility, other vaccines’ immunity wanes after only a few years. They never rebut as you can easily verify yourself by examining the citation list here for opposition and then searching the vaccine survey pdfs for the cites. They just ignore it.[3][4][5]
Climate science is cargo cult science. Climate “scientists” have been known to “hide” their own most interesting data, the data contradicting the prevailing theory which is what Feynman said a scientist should emphasize most prominently[6][7]. Alternative theories and methodological objections are ignored or white washed. (Search the IPCC reports for discussion of the opposition.) To say a science is cargo cult science is not to say that there are no papers published in it that are science, but it is to say one should repose zero or negative confidence in any pronouncement one has not personally verified from first principles.
http://TruthSift.com supports Feynman’s model of science applied to everything. Just as in mathematical practice, you can post proofs and refutations. But nothing is considered established unless every proposed refutation has an established counter-refutation. No proposed refutation can be ducked, and anybody who believes they have a rational objection may post it (and see the establishment statuses reflect the objection in real time). Try it out. Check out (and please contribute to) the ongoing diagrammings of the vaccine/climate science etc literatures. When they have passed through true logical review, confronting all the opposing arguments, what remains will be a genuine science.
[1] Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968) http://www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/diaz/img_diaz/feynman_what-is-science_68.pdf [2] Richard P Feynman, CARGO CULT SCIENCE (adapted from Caltech Commencement Address 1974) https://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm [3] Eric Baum The Top Ten Reasons I Believe Vaccine Safety Is an Epic Mass Delusion (2016) https://lifeboat.com/blog/2016/06/the-top-ten-reasons-i-believe-vaccine-safety-is-an-epic-mass-delusion [4] TruthSift Topic: Are Vaccines Safe? (2016) http://truthsift.com/search_view?statement=Vaccines-are-Safe&id=406&nid=4083 [5] TruthSift Topic: The Evidence is Weak Vaccines Have Saved More Lives than They Have Cost (2016), http://truthsift.com/search_view?topic=The-Evidence-Is-Weak-That-Vaccines-Have-Saved-More-Lives-than-They-Have-Cost–&id=520 [6] Climate data hidden both early (data showing very rapid rise before 1500) and in 20th century (showing decline): https://climateaudit.org/2011/03/21/hide-the-decline-the-other-deletion/ [7] More data contradicting theory hidden. https://climateaudit.org/2011/12/01/hide-the-decline-plus/
“Appearances have always played a much more important part than reality in history, where the unreal is always of greater moment than the real.“ –Gustav LeBon, The Crowd (1895)
I’ve gotten no substantive response to my last post on vaccine safety– neither in the comments, nor the TruthSift diagram, nor anywhere else, nor have the papers I submitted to two medical journals… but I have gotten emails telling me I’m delusional and suggesting I seek psychiatric attention. And this of course is integral to the explanation of how such delusions as vaccine safety persist so widely when it is so demonstrably a delusion: the majority who believe the majority must be right because its the majority are emotionally unwilling to confront the evidence. They assume the experts have done that, and they rely on the experts. But the experts assume other experts have been there. Ask your Pediatrician if he’s personally read Bishop et al and formulated an opinion on vaccine aluminum. Neither has the National Academy, except perhaps their members have and decided, perhaps tacitly, not to review the subject. Their decision not to review the animal literature was not tacit, they said they explicitly decided to omit it, although elsewhere they say they couldn’t find human evidence that addressed the issues. So everybody is trusting somebody else, and nobody has picked up the ball. And can you blame them? Because when I pick up the ball, what I receive in return is hate mail and people’s scorn. The emotional response cuts off any possible inspection of the logic.
On most questions where a majority with authority is facing a minority of dissenters or skeptics, the majority is delusional. In other words, you are living in the matrix; much of what you and people believe is fundamentlaly wrong.
Reason 1, as above, is that the majority forms its view by circular reasoning, and rejects any attempt at logical discussion without considering it seriously, so it is prone to delusion. Once the crowd concluded vaccines are safe and effective, for example, the question of whether the aluminum is damaging can apparently no longer be raised (even as more gets added to vaccines). And when I or others try to raise it, we are scorned and hated, and ineffectual in changing the opinion supported by circular reasoning. When new research papers appear that call it into question, they are ignored, neither cited in the safety surveys nor influencing medical practice in any way. This paragraph is all simple reporting of what has repeatedly happened.
Reason 2 is a minority wouldn’t be holding out without a good reason, because they are punished for their opposition with scorn and hatred at least. Except perhaps for explicitly religious issues, the usual reason they are so stubborn is they are defending rational truth.
Reason 3 is there’s often big money to be made or political power to be gained by influencing the majority opinion, and experts given good budgets appear to be pretty good at influencing majority opinion, especially with the aid of mass media, covertly staged stunts, and in many areas time enough to have long ago started from kids and education. On the other hand, rationality and reality don’t usually have press agents or forward looking media strategies, and there’s little or no money in swaying the minority position.
Show me a question with a majority with authority facing a minority where the majority isn’t delusional, and I’ll show you a minority that’s being paid under the table or planted to discredit rationalists in other controversial areas. At least I’ll suggest you strongly consider that as an alternative theory of what you see. The only one I can think of off hand are flat-earthers.
Mass Delusions were famously studied in 19th century first by Charles Mackay in Popular Mass Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1852) but more interestingly IMO in Gustave Le Bon, (1895) The Crowd. This latter was arguably the single book that had the most influence on the shape of the twentieth century. By their own accounts “The Crowd” was on Theodore Roosevelt’s bedside table, and dogeared by Mussolini. Lenin and Stalin took from it, and “Hitler’s indebtedness to Le Bon bordered on plagiarism” in the words of historian and Hitler-biographer Robert G. L. Waite. Sigmund Freud wrote a book discussing Le Bon, and Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, acknowledged his deep debt, as Goebbels did of Bernays’ reflected insights.
Bernays equally isn’t as widely known as he should be. He invented the field of public relations, the “panel of doctors”, the slogan “making the world safe for democracy”, the diamond engagement ring, broke the taboo on women’s smoking and practically doubled sales by recruiting protesters smoking “torches of freedom”, bacon and eggs, and flouridated water, among many other things. There weren’t any decent safety studies on fluoridated water, and some modern studies say its taking multiple IQ points off the population, and nations and regions that don’t fluoridate have just as good teeth today as nations and regions that do, and putting fluoride in mouthwash and toothpaste rather than the drinking water would plainly have made a lot more sense from the point of view of public safety and health, but one thing you can count on: once he put it in the water supply and convinced everybody it was a health measure, you couldn’t sue for damage from fluoride runoff any more, and potentially multi-asbestos scale class action suits against the Government and aluminum manufacturers disappeared. Since Bernays got done, just raising the issue of fluoride gets you branded fruitcake and shunned to this day.
They are also still “making the world safe for democracy”, which he coined for WW1. But is this what they are doing, or is that another widely held delusion? Bernays also wrote the book Propaganda which begins: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
I’ve quoted from and summarized and discussed Le Bon extensively before so I will give only a brief flavor here. “It is not necessary that a crowd should be numerous for the faculty of seeing what is taking place before its eyes to be destroyed and for the real facts to be replaced with hallucinations unrelated to them….
“To return to the faculty of observation possessed by crowds, our conclusion is that their collective observations are as erroneous as possible, and that most often they merely represent the illusion of an individual who, by a process of contagion, has suggestioned his fellows.”
“The events with regard to which there exists the most doubt are certainly those which have been observed by the greatest number of persons. To say that a fact has been simultaneously verified by thousands of witnesses is to say, as a rule, that the real fact is very different from the accepted account of it.”…
“By the mere fact that an individual forms part of a crowd, his intellectual standard is immediately and considerably lowered….
“The inferior reasoning of crowds is based, just as is the reasoning of a high order, on the association of ideas, but between the ideas associated by crowds there are only apparent bonds of analogy or succession. The mode of reasoning of crowds resembles that of the Esquimaux who, knowing from experience that ice, a transparent body, melts in the mouth, concludes that glass, also a transparent body, should also melt in the mouth… The characteristics of the reasoning of crowds are the association of dissimilar things possessing a merely apparent connection between each other, and the immediate generalization of particular cases. It is arguments of this kind that are always presented to crowds by those who know how to manage them. They are the only arguments by which crowds are to be influenced. A chain of logical argumentation is totally incomprehensible to crowds…”
“When these convictions [of crowds] are closely examined,…, it is apparent that they always assume a particular form which I can not better define than giving it the name of a religious sentiment… Intolerance and fanatacism are the necessary accompaniments of the religious sentiment. They are inevitably displayed by those who believe themselves in the possession of the secret of earthly or eternal happiness. These two characteristics are to be found in all men grouped together when they are inspired by a conviction of any kind. The Jacobins of the Reign of Terror were at bottom as religious as the Catholics of the Inquisition, and their cruel ardour proceeded from the same source. The convictions of crowds assume those characteristics of blind submission, fierce intolerance, and the need of violent propaganda which are inherent in the religious sentiment, and it is for this reason that it may be said that all their beliefs have a religous form.
Whether the feelings exhibited by a crowd be good or bad, they present the double character of being very simple and very exaggerated… a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty.”
The Red pill
So, now what’s in the red pill? Why, its a placebo. You can use any old red jelly bean. But if you swallow it and believe that the majority may be totally delusional about anything, and start looking into practically any subject with dissenters with an open mind, then I predict if you are skilled at critical thinking, you will shortways find the majority is in fact delusional, that is, you are indeed living in the matrix.
Much more widely than you are likely to imagine. For example, the news is basically propaganda, in lockstep among all the mainstream media, who accept whatever the government and political correctness tells them to believe uncritically. Was the passenger plane over Ukraine brought down by missile or strafing? Did the CDC conspire to hide a vaccine autism connection? Is the congress being run behind the scenes by a uniparty? You won’t find any of those subjects discussed unless to whitewash in the US mainstream media. What you want in a media system is ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity. –Joseph Goebbels The history books are no better, as Le Bon observed. The banking system is all based on smoke and mirrors and a healthy skim. Etc.
I don’t expect TruthSift.com to convince the masses they are delusional, because Le Bon assures me logic will never sway a crowd, but I offer it as a tool to shortcut a lot of work for those who swallow the red pill. Rather than having to study a field in detail for years as I have with vaccines and needing to be able to supply PhD level understanding of what you are reading and needing the confidence of your convictions against the many, you can much more rapidly peruse a diagram and find what the real situation is, assuming the diagram has been created and debated. So I beg readers here to create such diagrams on TruthSift for any topic you are interested in. Of course, they are fun and interesting too.
I also commend TruthSift to corporations and others wanting to escape the kind of crowd think delusions so well characterized by Le Bon, and achieve actual rationality in your decisions. Use it on Private Diagrams. Everybody in your organization will be able to contribute to the document, if you invite them, exactly where its pertinent. It will naturally divide and conquer your problems in ways where different people can address different problems, achieving true collaboration. Nobody will be able to get confused or pursue some other agenda without being transparently refereed. The answer will be far more rationally derived and argued for than what you are doing now. You can allow people to contribute under pseudonyms if you want. http://TruthSift.com
“So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs. Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race[’s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition…Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.“ –Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968)[1]
TruthSift.com is a platform designed to support and guide individuals or crowds to rationality, and make them smarter collectively than any unaided individual or group. (Free) Members use TruthSift to establish what can be established, refute what can’t be, and to transparently publish the demonstrations. Anyone can browse the demonstrations and learn what is actually known and how it was established. If they have a rational objection, they can post it and have it answered.
Whether in scientific fields such as climate change or medical practice, or within the corporate world or political or government debate, or on day to day factual questions, humanity hasn’t had a good method for establishing rational truth. You can see this from consequences we often fail to perceive: Peer reviewed surveys agree: A landslide majority of medical practice is *not* supported by science [2,3,4]. Scientists are often confused about the established facts in their own field [5]. Within fields like climate science and vaccines, that badly desire consensus, no true consensus can be reached because skeptics raise issues that the majority brush aside without an established answer (exactly what Le Bon warned of more than 100 years ago[6]). Widely consulted sources like Wikipedia are reported to be largely paid propaganda on many important subjects [7], or the most popular answer rather than an established one [8]. Quora shows you the most popular individual answer, generated with little or no collaboration, and often there is little documentation of why you should believe it. Existing systems for crowd sourced wisdom largely compound group think, rather than addressing it. Existing websites for fact checking give you someone’s point of view.
Corporate or government planning is no better. Within large organizations, where there is inevitably systemic motivation to not pass bad news up, leadership needs active measures to avoid becoming clueless as to the real problems [9]. Corporate or government plans are subject to group think, or takeover by employee or other interests competing with the mission. Individuals who perceive mistakes have no recourse capable of rationally pursuading the majority, and may anyway be discouraged from speaking up by various consequences[6].
TruthSift is designed to solve all these problems. TruthSift realizes in your browser the Platonic ideal of the scientific literature, but TruthSift applies it to everything, and makes it tangible and lightweight, extended to a much lower hurdle for publishing. On a public TruthSift diagram, members (or on a Private diagram, members you have invited), who believe they can prove or refute a statement, can post their proof or refutation exactly where it is relevant. TruthSift logically propagates the consequences of each contribution, graphically displaying how it impacts the establishment status of all the others, drawing statements established by the combined efforts in thick borders, and statements refuted in thin. Statements are considered established only when they have an established demonstration, one with every posted challenge refuted. Fig 1: An example topic. The topic statement n0 is currently refuted, because its only proof is refuted. The statement menu is shown open in position to add a proof to this proof. The topic statement is gold, pro statements are blue, con statements are red. Proof connectors are black, challenges red, remarks purple, assumptions (not shown) blue. Statements show the title. On the actual Topic the body can be seen by selecting the statement and “View Statement” or hovering the mouse. What is a proof? According to the first definition at Dictionary.com a proof is: “evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true, or to produce belief in its truth.” In mathematics, a proof is equivalent to a proof tree that starts at axioms, or previously established results, which the participants agree to stipulate, and proceeds by a series of steps that are individually unchallengeable. Each such step logically combines several conclusions previously established and/or axioms. The proof tree proceeds in this way until it establishes the stated proved conclusion. Mathematicians often raise objections to steps of the proof, but if it is subsequently established that all such objections are invalid, or if a workaround is found around the problem, the proof is accepted.
The Scientific literature works very similarly. Each paper adds some novel argument or evidence that previous work is true or is not true or extends it to establish new results. When people run out of valid, novel reasons why something is proved or is not proved, what remains is an established theory, or a refutation of it or of all its offered proofs.
Fig 2: The view focused on the topic statement of a Topic diagramming the discussion in: Galileo’s: Dialogues Concerning the Two Chief World Views. The black triangle indicates other incoming edges not shown. For complex diagrams, it is often best to walk around in focused view centered on each statement in turn.
TruthSift is a platform for diagramming this process and applying it to any statements members care to propose to establish or refute. One may state a topic and add a proof tree for it, which is drawn as a diagram with every step and connection explicit. Members may state a demonstration of some conclusion they want to prove, building from some statements they assert are self-evident or that reference some authority they think trustworthy, and then building useful intermediate results that rationally follow from the assumptions, and building on until reaching the stated conclusion. If somebody thinks they find a hole in a proof at any step, or thinks one of the original assumptions need further proof, they can challenge it, explaining the problem they see. Then the writer of the proof (or others if its in collaboration mode) may edit the proof to fix the problem, or make clearer the explanation if they feel the challenger was simply mistaken, and may counter-challenge the challenge explaining that it had been resolved or mistaken. This can go on recursively, with someone pointing out a hole in the proof used by the counter-challenger that the challenge was invalid. On TruthSift the whole argument is laid out graphically and essentially block-chained, which should prevent the kind of edit-wars that happen for controversial topics on Wikipedia. Each challenge or post should state a novel reason, and when the rational arguments are exhausted, as in mathematics, what remains is either a proof of the conclusion or a refutation of it or all of its proofs.
As statements are added to a diagram, TruthSift keeps track of what is established and what refuted, drawing established statements’ borders and their outgoing connectors thick, and refuted statements’ borders and their outgoing connectors thin so viewers can instantly tell what is currently established and what refuted. TruthSift computes this by a simple algorithm that starts at statements with no incoming assumptions, challenges, or proofs, which are thus unchallenged as assertions that prove themselves, are self evident, or appeal to an authority everybody trusts. These are considered established. Then it walks up the diagram rating statements after all their parents have been rated. A statement will be established if all its assumptions are, none of its challenges are, and if it has proofs, at least one is established. (We support challenges requesting a proof be added to a statement which neither has one added nor adequately proves itself.) Otherwise, that is if a statement has an established challenge, or has refuted assumptions, or all of its proofs are refuted, it is refuted.
To understand why a statement is established or refuted, center focus on it, so that you see it and its parents in the diagram. If it is refuted, either there is an established challenge of it, or one of its assumptions is refuted, or all of its proofs are. If it is not refuted, it is established. Work your way backward up the diagram, centering on each statement in turn, and examine the reasons why it is established or refuted.
Fig 3: An example topic.
Effective contribution to TruthSift diagrams involves mental effort. This is both a hurdle and a feature. TruthSift teaches Critical Thinking. First you think about your Topic Statement. How actually should you specify Vaccine Safety or Climate Change, so it covers what you want to establish or refute, and so it is amenable to rational discussion? There is no place you could go to see that well specified now, and can you properly assure it without properly specifying it? Next you think about the arguments for your topic statement, and those against it, and those against the arguments for, and those for the arguments for, and the arguments against the arguments against, and so on until everybody runs out of arguments, when what is left is a concise rational analysis of what is established and why. The debate is settled point by point. The process naturally subdivides the field into sub-topics where different expertise’s come into play, promoting true collective wisdom and understanding.
For TruthSift to work properly, posters will have to respect the guidelines and post only proof or challenge statements that they believe rationally prove or refute their target and are novel to the diagram (or also novel additional evidence as assumptions or remarks or tests, which are alternative connector types). Posts violating the guidelines may be flagged and removed, and consistent violators as well. Posts don’t have to be correct, that’s what challenges are for, but they have to be honest attempts, not spam or ad hominem attacks. Don’t get hung up on whether a statement should be added as a proof or an assumption of another. Frequently you want to assemble arguments for a proposition stating something like “the preponderance of the evidence indicates X”, and these arguments are not individually necessary for X, nor are they individually proofs of X. It is safe to simply add them as proofs. They are not necessary assumptions, and if not enough of them are established, the target may be challenged on that basis. The goal is a diagram that transparently explains a proof and what is wrong with all the objections people have found plausible.
For cases where members disagree on underlying assumptions or basic principles, stipulation is available. If one or more statements are stipulated, statements are shown as conditionally true if established based on the stipulations and as conditionally false if refuted based on the stipulations. The challenges to the stipulation are also shown. TruthSift supports reasoning from different fundamental assumptions, but requires being explicit about it when challenged. Probability mode supports the intuitive construction of probabilistic models, and evaluates the probability of each statement in the topic marginalizing over all the parameters in the topic. With a little practice these allow folding in various connections and evidence. These could be used for collaborative, verified, risk models; to support proofs with additional confidence tests; to reason about hidden causes; or many other novel applications
Fig 4: Detail from a topic showing an established conclusion some may find surprising. Please Rebut it if you can. Dashed edges represent citation into the literature. Title is shown for each statement, on actual topic select “View Statement” to see body.
Basic Membership is free. In addition to public diagrams, debating the big public issues, private diagrams are available for personal or organizational planning or to exclude noise from your debate. Private diagrams have editing and/or viewing by invitation only. Come try it. http://TruthSift.com
TruthSift’s mission is to enable publication of a transparent exposition of human knowledge, so that anyone may readily determine what is truth and what fiction, what can be established by valid Demonstration and what can’t, and so that anyone can read and understand that Demonstration. We intend the process of creating this exposition to lead to vastly increased understanding and improved critical thinking skills amongst our members and beyond. We hope to support collaborative human intelligences greater than any intelligence previously achieved on the planet, both in the public domain and for members’ private use.
1. Richard P Feynman, What is Science? (1968) http://www-oc.chemie.uni-regensburg.de/diaz/img_diaz/feynman_what-is-science_68.pdf 2. Assessing the Efficacy and Safety of Medical Technologies, Office of Technology Assessment, Congress of the United States (1978) http://www.fas.org/ota/reports/7805.pdf 3. Jeannette Ezzo, Barker Bausell, Daniel E. Moerman, Brian Berman and Victoria Hadhazy (2001). REVIEWING THE REVIEWS . International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, 17, pp 457-466. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=101041 4. John S Garrow BMJ. 2007 Nov 10; 335(7627): 951.doi:10.1136/bmj.39388.393970.1F PMCID: PMC2071976 What to do about CAM?: How much of orthodox medicine is evidence based? http://www.dcscience.net/garrow-evidence-bmj.pdf 5. S. A. Greenberg, “How citation distortions create unfounded authority: analysis of a citation network”, BMJ 2009;339:b2680 http://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2680 6. Gustav Le Bon, The Crowd, (1895), (1995) Transaction Publishers New Edition Edition 7. S Attkisson, “Astroturf and manipulation of media messages”, TEDx University of Nevada, (2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bYAQ-ZZtEU 8. Adam M. Wilson , Gene E. Likens, Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale 2015 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0134454 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0134454 9. Kiira Siitari, Jim Martin & William W. Taylor (2014) Information Flow in Fisheries Management: Systemic Distortion within Agency Hierarchies, Fisheries, 39:6, 246-250, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03632415.2014.915814
“The point of this excursion into tech history is that a technology often produces its best results just when it’s ready to be replaced — it’s the best it’s ever been, but it’s also the best it could ever be.”
Bioquark, Inc., (http://www.bioquark.com) a company focused on the development of novel biologics for complex regeneration and disease reversion, and Revita Life Sciences, (http://revitalife.co.in) a biotechnology company focused on translational therapeutic applications of autologous stem cells, have announced that they have received IRB approval for a study focusing on a novel combinatorial approach to clinical intervention in the state of brain death in humans.
This first trial, within the portfolio of Bioquark’s Reanima Project (http://www.reanima.tech) is entitled “Non-randomized, Open-labeled, Interventional, Single Group, Proof of Concept Study With Multi-modality Approach in Cases of Brain Death Due to Traumatic Brain Injury Having Diffuse Axonal Injury” (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02742857?term=bioquark&rank=1), will enroll an initial 20 subjects, and be conducted at Anupam Hospital in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand India.
“We are very excited about the approval of our protocol,” said Ira S. Pastor, CEO, Bioquark Inc. “With the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we are poised to delve into an area of scientific understanding previously inaccessible with existing technologies.”
Death is defined as the termination of all biological functions that sustain a living organism. Brain death, the complete and irreversible loss of brain function (including involuntary activity necessary to sustain life) as defined in the 1968 report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School, is the legal definition of human death in most countries around the world. Either directly through trauma, or indirectly through secondary disease indications, brain death is the final pathological state that over 60 million people globally transfer through each year.
While human beings lack substantial regenerative capabilities in the CNS, many non-human species, such as amphibians, planarians, and certain fish, can repair, regenerate and remodel substantial portions of their brain and brain stem even after critical life-threatening trauma.
Additionally, recent studies on complex brain regeneration in these organisms, have highlighted unique findings in relation to the storage of memories following destruction of the entire brain, which may have wide ranging implications for our understanding of consciousness and the stability of memory persistence.
“Through our study, we will gain unique insights into the state of human brain death, which will have important connections to future therapeutic development for other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states, as well as a range of degenerative CNS conditions, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease,” said Dr. Sergei Paylian, Founder, President, and Chief Science Officer of Bioquark Inc.
Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. However, once humans transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible”, they are technically no longer alive, despite the fact that human bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.
“We look forward to working closely with Bioquark Inc. on this cutting edge clinical initiative,” said Dr. Himanshu Bansal, Managing Director of Revita Life Sciences.
About Bioquark, Inc.
Bioquark Inc. is focused on the development of natural biologic based products, services, and technologies, with the goal of curing a wide range of diseases, as well as effecting complex regeneration. Bioquark is developing both biological pharmaceutical candidates, as well as products for the global consumer health and wellness market segments.
About Revita Life Sciences
Revita Life Sciences is a biotechnology company focused on the development of stem cell therapies that target areas of significant unmet medical need. Revita is led by Dr. Himanshu Bansal MD, PhD. who has spent over two decades developing novel MRI based classifications of spinal cord injuries as well as comprehensive treatment protocols with autologous tissues including bone marrow stem cells, dural nerve grafts, nasal olfactory tissues, and omental transposition.
I have spent the last 30 years in various aspects of the biopharmaceutical industry, which for the most part has been a very rewarding experience.
However, during this time period, having been immersed many different components of therapeutic development and commercialization, one thing has always bothered me: a wide array of promising research never makes it off the bench to see the translational light of day, and gets lost in the historical scientific archives.
I always believed that scientific progress happened in a very linear narrative, with each new discovery supporting the next, resulting ultimately in an eventual stairway of scientific enlightenment.
What the reality turned out to be was much more of a fragmented, research “evolutionary tree”, with dozens of potential pathways, only very few branches of which ever resulted in scientific maturity, and not always the most fruitful ones by any means.
The premature extinction of these promising discovery pathways were the result of a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, funding priorities, competing industrial interests, “out of vogue” concepts, lack of intellectual properties, non-existent regulatory models, conflicted legislative initiatives, and even religious implications.
In 2016, as in previous years, we continue to see these “valleys of death” swallow up pathways of scientific possibility, with few popular segments attracting the majority of attention and support.
The preponderance of resources focused on the somatic mutation model of carcinogenesis, despite an endless range of research highlighting that the disease is extremely heterogenic and rarely ever follows such a clonal model, is one example that continues to be inappropriately manifested in the oncology system, decades into the “war on cancer”.
On a similar plane, the jettisoning of most studies of the biophysical aspects of human genetics, despite the gross incompleteness offered by the central dogma to explain higher biological form and function, is another example that has become all too pervasive in the research community.
And then there are the areas of human consciousness, memory, and information processing / storage, where in many ways we are still operating in the dark ages, with materialists and dualists battling it out for centuries.
While I am a staunch supporter and advocate of the life-extension / anti-aging movement, I am equally vocal about our need to develop technologies, products, and services that can actually reverse our ultimate transition between the living and dead states, a transition that occurs annually for 60 million humans around the globe.
Death, however, is unfortunately seen by many as a natural, biological progression for human beings, and in many circles, deemed an unnecessary area of scientific research and exploration.
I beg to differ.
Far too often, death arrives too early and too unexpectedly for many of us and our loved ones. And the best modern medicine has to offer today is “Sorry. There is nothing else we can do.”
But what if there was?
There are a variety of species across the natural world that are capable of regenerating and repairing themselves from forms of severe CNS damage that bring them to the transitional grey zone between life and death. Along the evolutionary timeline however, this ability gradually disappeared hundreds of millions of years ago and does not manifest in higher species.
Now, in the 21st century, with the convergence of the disciplines of regenerative biology, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical resuscitation, we may finally be poised to take back these capabilities for humans.
Over the years, clinical science has focused heavily on preventing such life and death transitions and made some initial progress with suspended animation technologies, such as therapeutic hypothermia. But once we transition through the brain death window, currently defined by the medical establishment as “irreversible” (per the 1968 Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School definition), we are technically no longer alive.
To add insult to injury, a human can be declared dead, even while our bodies can still circulate blood, digest food, excrete waste, balance hormones, grow, sexually mature, heal wounds, spike a fever, and gestate and deliver a baby. It is even acknowledged by thought leaders that recently brain dead humans still may have residual blood flow and electrical nests of activity in their brains, just not enough to allow for an integrated functioning of the organism as a whole.
Several prominent cases in the media over the past few years have further served to highlight the current situation, as well as the substantial anatomical and functional differences between the state known as brain death, and other severe disorders of consciousness, such as coma, and the vegetative and minimally conscious states.
It is now time to take the necessary steps to provide new possibilities of hope, in order to counter the pain, sorrow, and grief that is all too pervasive in the world when we experience a loved one’s unexpected or untimely death, due to lesions which might be potentially reversible with the application of promising neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation technologies and therapies.
It is time to undertake the required research, based on 2016 technological knowledge, in order to bring about such transformational change.
My name is Ira S. Pastor and I am the CEO of the biotechnology company Bioquark Inc.
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