Thursday Things: Faster, Please Edition
6 February 2020. Vol 2 No 6. By Dan McGirt. #26
Welcome to Thursday Things! This week’s edition is lighter and later than usual, so let’s get to it!
Thursday Things is brought to you each week by coffee. Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash
Scientists Accidentally Discover Immune Cells That Can Kill Most Cancers. Some of the greatest scientific and medical discoveries of all time have been accidental, perhaps providential, but certainly serendipitous. So it is with news that “British scientists have reportedly discovered a new type of immune cell that kills most cancers”:
They reportedly discovered a new type of T-cell that carries a receptor that latches onto human cancers but ignores healthy cells.
In fact, the receptor is said to be capable of killing several cancers, including lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer.
I’m always skeptical of claims of universal (or near universal) cures for dreaded diseases, but also hopeful this discovery will prove to be of lasting value in eliminating cancer. The Telegraph has a longer article, which I can’t read behind their paywall, but if you’re a subscriber, check it out. The full details are in Nature Immunology, also behind a huge paywall: ‘Genome-wide CRISPR–Cas9 screening reveals ubiquitous T cell cancer targeting via the monomorphic MHC class I-related protein MR1’
Caffeine has been a boon for civilization, Michael Pollan says. But it has come at a cost. Michael Pollen wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which I haven’t read, and other books about food and drugs. He has a new audiobook out, Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World. In this interview he shares some of his findings and thoughts about caffeine:
"For most of us, to be caffeinated to one degree or another has simply become baseline human consciousness," Pollan writes, well, reads in "Caffeine." "Something like 90% of humans ingest caffeine regularly, making it the most widely used psychoactive drug in the world and the only one we routinely give to children, commonly in the form of soda. It's so pervasive that it's easy to overlook the fact that to be caffeinated is not baseline consciousness but, in fact, is an altered state."
Full disclosure: my consciousness is being altered by caffeine right now.
Born Kind? Researchers Prove Altruism Begins In Infancy: I roll my eyes at a lot of social science research, and you should too, especially when the findings are all too pat. In this experiment, which supposedly proves that altruism is innate or begins in infancy without being taught, researchers dropped fruit on the floor, pretended they could not reach it, and then recorded how many infants (I assume old enough to crawl…) retrieved the fruit and offered it to the adult, rather than doing nothing or eating the disgusting floor blueberry themselves.
The study’s authors, a group of researchers from the University of Washington’s Learning & Brain Sciences division (I-LABS), say their findings effectively prove that altruistic behavior begins in infancy. Furthermore, they believe their work suggests social experiences very early in one’s life can shape their behavior towards others later on in adolescence and adulthood.
For this study, fruits were used (blueberries, bananas, and grapes), and each infant was placed in a room with an adult researcher they had never met before sitting across from them at a table. The infants were separated into a control group and an experimental group. In the control setting, the researcher then threw a piece of fruit on to the floor out of their own reach, but easily attainable for the baby. After that the researcher didn’t react at all, or try to grab the fruit at all. In the experimental setting, the researcher pretended to accidentally drop the fruit out of their own reach and then made failed attempts at retrieving the snack. This scenario was repeated with each infant multiple times, using a different fruit each time.
Are babies — and thus human beings — naturally altruistic and thus innately good? Maybe. I would like to think so. But I’m not sure this experiment really proves that. Maybe the babies were laughing at the incompetent adults who couldn’t pick up a banana even a baby could reach. Maybe the baby gave the fruit to the adult because it seemed like a fun game. Are dogs altruistic because they fetch a tennis ball? Or do they just want you to throw it again for their amusement? And, again, maybe the baby didn’t want to eat the clumsy adult’s dirty, disgusting floor fruit. More research needed!
Thank you for reading Thursday Things! See you next Thursday.