Ebola Spreads by Contact, Sneezing and Coughing

We do not know, as yet, how Ebola spreads. With more patients dying from the disease, empirical information is growing. Recent studies have shown that the spread of Ebola could resemble ‘flu-like illnesses’. This will make it more difficult to control the disease. There is also a suspicion that Ebola could have begun as a man-made virus, invented for germ warfare.

Whole Turmeric Helps Regenerate Damaged Brain Cells

Turmeric is one of the many powerful therapeutic agents known in ancient Indian medicine. The pharmaceuticals industry now wants to get some extracts of the plant and patent it to make a drug. Following the Western model of taking the active ingredient to sell it as a drug, the industry was after curcumin in turmeric. But their efforts failed.

Now, a new study published in the Journal of Stem Cell Research and Therapy shows that whole turmeric extract contains, in addition to curcumin, a fat-soluble portion, called aromatic tumerone, and many other active ingredients. These have been shown to regenerate damaged brain cells in vitro and in vivo. In the article, titled, “Aromatic-turmerone induces neural stem cell proliferation in vitro and in vivo”, German researchers evaluated the effects of this turmeric-derived compound on neural stem cells (NSCs)—the subgroup of brain cells capable of continuous self-renewal required for brain repair. Brain cell repair was thought to be impossible, until recently.

When Indian laboratories started researching Ayurvedic compounds, they started by looking at the active ingredients and then studying if they have any effect on disease, they called it the ‘Golden Triangle Research’. Even then, I had objected and had explained to some of the leaders in the field that they were barking up the wrong tree. Herbal drugs work as a whole and not in bits and pieces. Reductionism is the bane of Western medicine. Why we want to import Western methods to Ayurvedic drugs is beyond my comprehension.

Science Could Also Be Wrong!

A paper published in Nature reported that ordinary mouse cells could be transformed into pluri-potent stem cells by a simple process of keeping them in an acidic environment. It was later discovered that the study’s results could not be replicated. A similar study conducted earlier, by a group of cancer specialists, had shown that 47 of the 53 studies on cancer could not be replicated. Interestingly, all those studies were funded by the pharmaceuticals industry. The comment by the editors of Nature, when they retracted the paper, is worth noting:

“Underlying these issues, often, is sloppiness, whether in the handling of data, in their analysis, or in the inadequate keeping of laboratory notes. As a result, the conclusions of such papers can seem misleadingly robust. Another contributory factor lies in selection bias behind the data presented, whether implicit because the experiment was not randomized or blinded, or explicit in the deliberate selection of data that, usually with honest good intentions, are judged to be representative.”

This assessment is far short of the truth. Greed for money, boosting citation indexes and awards are the main reasons that science has gone astray. In fact, this kind of science can only be called pseudoscience.