The Salem Conjecture was proposed by Bruce Salem on the newsgroup talk.origins [The Salem Conjecture]. Here's how he described it on Sept. 5, 1996.
My position is not that most creationists are engineers or even that engineering predisposes one to Creationism. In fact, most engineers are not Creationists and more well-educated people are less predisposed to Creationism, the points the statistics in the study bear out. My position was that of those Creationists who presented themselves with professional credentials, or with training that they wished to represent as giving them competence to be critics of Evolution while offering Creationism as the alternative, a significant number turned out to be engineers.
This should not be confused with the "hard" version of the Salem Conjecture (Hypothesis), which says that engineers are more likely to be creationists. Both versions are described in the Wikipedia entry [Salem Hypothesis].
Joshua Rosenau discusses the possibility that the hard version of the Salem Conjecture might be correct and this explains the soft version [The Salem Hypothesis explained!]. Read the comments.
[Photo Credit: I pretty sure this is a photograph of Bruce Salem.]
By all accounts this year's Beyond Belief symposium in San Diego was a lot less exciting than last year's [Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0]. Perhaps it's because Richard Dawkins wasn't there. On the other hand, PZ Myers was there [Speakers].
There's a short review of the highlights in this week's issue of New Scientist [Does God have a place in a rational world?]. From the sounds of it, the lack of clear-headed atheists led to some very sloppy thinking.
The first firebrand is lobbed into the audience by Edward Slingerland, an expert on ancient Chinese thought and human cognition at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "Religion is not going away," he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs.
Oops. I've got news for you, Prof. Slingerland, you can't count yourself as a rationalist if you think that morality requires religion. And you can't lay claim to being a scientist if you think that moral values are unscientific. That's two strikes.
Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are universal come from? "Humans' rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity," he told the audience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. "You can't do a CT scan to show where humans' rights are, you can't cut someone open and show us their human rights," he pointed out. "It's not an empirical thing, it's just something we strongly believe. It's a purely metaphysical entity."
Strike three. It's a good thing Dawkins wasn't there or this kind of sloppy thinking would have been exposed.
Who said we all have a conviction that human rights are universal? Not me, that's for sure. I can't think of a single "human right" that qualifies. Furthermore, those human rights that we generally agree upon in the 21st century are not mysterious to me. They're mostly common sense designed to maximize our ability to live in groups. It's an empirical thing—and we're still working on the best compromises between absolute rights and qualified ones.
The mood at this follow-up conference was different. Last year's event was something of an "atheist love fest" said some, who urged a more wide-ranging discourse this time round. While all present agreed that rational, evidence-based thinking should always be the basis of how we live our lives, it was also conceded that people are irrational by nature, and that faith, religion, culture and emotion must also be recognised as part of the human condition. Even the title of this year's meeting, "Beyond Belief II: Enlightenment 2.0", suggested the need for revision, reform and a little more tolerance.
Hmmm ... I guess I can go along with that. I've known for some years that people are attracted to irrationality and superstition—we call it religion. We tolerate those who ignore rationality and evidence-based thinking but that doesn't mean we shouldn't criticize those who think that way, right? Tolerance doesn't mean the same as acceptance, does it?
There's one comment in that paragraph that puzzles me. Is it true that people are irrational by nature and it's part of human nature? My observations suggest the opposite. It seems to me that most humans strive to be rational as opposed to irrational. They may get confused from time to time about what is rational and what isn't but over the centuries rationalism tends to win out over superstition. Why do we have to concede that superstition is here to stay because it's pat of the human condition. That doesn't make sense.
Such was the message from evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton University, New York. He suggested that humans' religious beliefs may have evolved over time, thanks to the advantages they conferred as a sort of social glue holding together groups that developed them.
Wilson was not saying religion is good or bad, simply that it has evolved to be hard-wired into our brains, and therefore cannot be ignored. "Adaptation is the gold standard against which reality must be judged," he said. "The unpredictability and unknown nature of our environment may mean that factual knowledge isn't as useful as the behaviours we have evolved to deal with this world."
Hmmm ... if irrationality and superstition are hard-wired into our brains then how come it's so easy for many of us to escape from this sort of thinking?
I often wonder whether people like Wilson have thought seriously about what they're saying. Does he imagine a time when primitive humans didn't have religion because it hadn't yet evolved? How did those groups manage to survive? I wonder what went on in their brains when they couldn't think about supernatural explanations?
Or did the religion allele(s) arise before the hominid lineage? Have chimps got religion and that's what what makes them stick together? (Instead of sex.) What about gorillas? Who do they worship? Howler monkeys? Meerkats?
Chemist Peter Atkins of the University of Oxford, one of the more hard-line atheists in the room, did not let this go unchallenged. He chided fellow participants for not being sufficiently proud about what science can accomplish. Given time and persistence, science will conquer all of nature's mysteries, he said.
I'm glad to see there was at least one rationalist present.
So can scientific and religious world views ever be reconciled? Harris, author of The End of Faith, declared that they could not, and provided an uncompromising exposition on the evils of religion.
Away from the meeting, philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, told New Scientist that as irrational as human minds may be, calm, firm introduction of reason into the world's classrooms could over time purge them of religion.
Maybe there were more rationalists present than the author of the piece is willing to admit?
Greta Christina has a blog called Greta Christina's Blog (naturally). She posts lots of interesting stuff about atheism and other things. Today she strayed into science and posted a video about macroevolution (see below) [Macro-evolution" Vs. "Micro-evolution": More Video Fun]. Greta introduced it with ...
First, just so everyone's clear: "Macro-evolution" and "micro-evolution" are made-up words concocted by creationists to make themselves sound scientific. Biologists don't use them. They're scientifically meaningless. They're just different stages in the evolutionary process; "macro" is just "micro" over a longer period of time.
I posted this comment on her blog.
I'm afraid you have been mislead. Microevolution and macroevolution are perfectly good scientific terms and they are used by evolutionary biologists all the time.
There is legitimate scientific debate about whether macroevolution is more than just lots of microevolution or whether macroevolution encompasses mechanisms not seen in microevolution. It's the sufficiency of microevolution argument.
I happen to be one of those scientists who agree with Stephen Jay Gould that there are many levels of evolution (hierarchical theory). Thus, macroevolution cannot be sufficiently explained by lots of microevolution. There are other things going on at the higher levels [Macroevolution].
The video is very misleading because it assumes a simplistic version of macroevolution. There aren't any evolutionary biologists who believe in that kind of macroevolution. Thus, I have to conclude that the makers of the video are as ignorant of evolution as the creationists they mock.1
1The video was made by cdk007 who claims to have a Masters degree in Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Neuroscience.
Photosynthesis is a process where light energy is captured and converted to chemical energy in the form of ATP. The basic process is similar to that in membrane-associated electron transport. In both cases an energy source (light or reducing equivalents respectively) is used to create a proton gradient across a membrane. The dissipation of this gradient as protons move back into the cell drives the synthesis of ATP.
In addition to ATP, most types of photosynthesis can also be coupled to synthesis of NADPH. The chemical energy molecules derived from photosynthesis (ATP and NADPH) are used in many different biochemical pathways such as DNA synthesis, protein synthesis, fatty acid synthesis and carbohydrate synthesis.
Most photosynthetic organisms can fix carbon dioxide and make carbohydrates using ATP and NADPH [The Calvin Cycle] [Fixing Carbon: the Rubisco Reaction]. Many nonphotosynthetic organisms can do this too. In photosynthetic bacteria and photosynthetic protists this pathway uses only a small part of the chemical energy created by photosynthesis. In large plants the synthesis of carbohydrates can use up a significant portion of the ATP and NADPH generated by photosynthesis.
The fixation of CO2 and the synthesis of carbohydrates used to be called the "dark reactions" of photosynthesis back in the days when all we knew about were big plants. We didn't know anything about the biochemistry of photosynthetic bacteria or other species. Because our attention was focused on big plants, it was thought that photosynthesis was always coupled to the carbohydrate synthesis pathways. Now we know that this isn't true, so the old-fashioned equation,
is just not a valid representation of photosynthesis. The real products of photosynthesis don't even appear in the equation and, furthermore, those products are used for many different purposes inside the cell (especially in bacteria). Not only that, in some photosynthetic bacteria the electron donor isn't water but some other inorganic molecule like H2S and S2 is produced instead of oxygen. The equation is very misleading on many levels and should be abandoned.
Greg Laden has posted the video shown below and commented on the fact that the word "miracle" is used [The Photosynthesis Song ... Bad Word Choice?]. I'm much more worried about the misleading science in the video than I am about one instance of the word "miracle."
This is really quite incredible. Brain Kilmeade is the co-host of of the Fox and Friends morning news program. He thinks the USA should support terrorists inside Iran who will set off car bombs in Tehran. The conservative right really doesn't get it, do they?
The war against Iran is coming soon to a theater near you.
The first meeting is going to be held in conjunction with a series of lectures sponsored by CFI. The speaker happens to be me, talking about Evolution as a Theory and a Fact. If you haven't had enough of me on this blog, then come out to the Centre for Inquiry on Wednesday November 28 at 7 pm or McMaster University on the evening of November 27th. The McMaster event is sponsored by the McMaster Association of Secular Humanists.
This CNN report tells us about a supermouse created by Hansen's group at Case Western Reserve University (Hakimi et al. 2007). They inserted an extra copy of the PEPCK gene into the mouse genome and drove expression of that gene in muscle cells. The mice with extra PEPCK in their muscle cells were seven times more active than normal mice. As you can see in the CNN report, they can run on a treadmill for much longer times than mice without the extra PEPCK.
I'm sure most of know about Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxykinase (PEPCK) because it's a really important enzyme. For the very few who don't know their biochemistry pathways, here's a brief lesson.
Here's a simplified overview of the main biosynthesis pathways. The important ones are gluconeogenesis (the biosynthesis of glucose) and the citric acid cycle. Various intermediates in the citric acid cycle are used for synthesis of amino acids. One of them, oxaloacetate, is the substrate for PEPCK in a reaction that converts oxaloacetate to phosphoenolpyruvate.
This is a way to use the carbon atoms of citric acid cycle intermediates in the synthesis of glucose. Under normal circumstances the intermediates in the citric acid cycle don't change very much but their concentration can increase when amino acids are degraded in the reverse of the amino acid synthesis pathways shown here.
The activity of the supermouse is explained by increases in the number of mitochondria in muscle cells and more efficient utilization of oxygen. It is not clear why an increase in PEPCK levels causes such a drastic effect. It could be due to the fact that the mammalian version of PEPCK uses GTP ...
and one of the reactions in the citric acid cycle requires GDP. This could increase flux in the citric acid cycle leading to greater synthesis of ATP in the mitochondrial membranes. (The greater the flux, the more NADH is produced, and every mole of NADH makes 2.5 moles of ATP.)
Alternatively, the increase in stamina could be due to the fact that oxaloacetate is removed from the pool of citric acid cycle intermediates and this results in increased flux since the pools don't become too large when amino acid are broken down to citric acid cycle intermediates.
Finally, increased PEPCK activity could produce more phosphoenolpyruvate which is readily converted to acetyl CoA that can be used in the synthesis of triglycerides (fatty acids) [THEME: Pyruvate Dehydrogenase]. The storage of fatty acids supplies an energy-rich source that can be used up during exercise. In normal mice, the energy is derived from glucose molecules stored as glycogen but fatty acids are better.
All these possibilities are discussed in the paper but no definite conclusions are reached. Richard Hansen has been working on this enzyme for thirty years and it's truly remarkable that we still don't have a good idea about its role in mammalian metabolism. PEPCK is found in all species and it seems clear in most species that it plays a role in the biosynthesis of glucose from fatty acids. In species other than mammals, the citric acid cycle is short-circuited by the glyoxylate pathway which provides a route for acetyl CoA to be converted to glucose. Acetyl CoA is produced when fatty acids are degraded. Mammals don't have the glyoxylate pathway enzymes.
Hakimi, P., Yang, J., Casadesus, G., Massillon, D., Tolentino-Silva, F., Nye, C.K., Cabrera, M.E., Hagen, D.R., Utter, C.B., Baghdy, Y., Johnson, D.H., Wilson, D.L., Kirwan, J.P., Kalhan, S.C. and Hanson, R.W. (2007) Overexpression of the Cytosolic Form of Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase (GTP) in Skeletal Muscle Repatterns Energy Metabolism in the Mouse. J Biol Chem. 282:32844-32855. [PubMed]
Some people, who shall remain nameless, sleep with a bar of Ivory soap in their beds. Now why in the world would anyone do this? Well, it turns out that the bar of Ivory soap prevents you from having leg cramps at night.
I kid you not. People swear by it.
After a little investigation it turns out that there are just as many people who swear that it has to be Dove soap and not Ivory soap. Then there are those who say it can be any kind of soap as long as it's not Dove. Some people say the soap has to be in its original wrapper and others say it has to be unwrapped.
The snopes.com website hedges their bets on this one since there are so many people who claim that it works [Soap Dope]. On the other hand, they do list it under "Old Wives Tales."
I'm not so hesitant. There's no possible scientific explanation that could explain how a bar of soap would prevent leg cramps. It sounds like a placebo effect, at best, and an overactive imagination, at worst.
Matt Nisbet is still puzzled over opposition to framing. He doesn't understand why some of us don't like the idea very much. Personally, I don't think it's much different than "spin."
If the blog debate that ensued after publication of our article at Science showed anything, it was just how widely misunderstood the concept of framing might be. Not surprisingly, many bloggers offer strong opinions about framing and its relationship to science communication but have very little actual knowledge or expertise in the area.
Yes, that must be the answer. We don't understand framing but as soon as we do we'll get right to it. Not.
Matt, you've explained the concept as well as you can—which isn't very well as it turns out. On your website you give us some fine examples of framing [What Is Framing?]. Here they are in case anyone doesn't get it.
Frame devices are used strategically in almost any policy debate. Consider just a few prominent and successful examples of such devices that have been used to alter the focus of policy:
1. Republicans have used the frame device "death tax" to recast estate tax policy in populist terms and to trigger wider public concern.
2. Democrats have used the phrase "gun safety" to shift the traditional debate over "gun control" away from a focus on civil liberties and instead toward an emphasis on public health.
3. Greenpeace has used the term "frankenfood" to redefine food biotechnology in terms of unknown risks and consequences rather than the industry-promoted focus on solving world hunger.
4. Religious conservatives have relabeled the medical procedure know as "dilation and extraction" as "partial birth abortion," pushing decision-making on whether to use the procedure away from doctors and into the hands of Congress and the courts.
5. Anti-smoking advocates have promoted the term "big tobacco," a headline-friendly phrase that immediately emphasizes considerations of corporate accountability and wrongdoing.
6. Anti-evolutionists have coined the slogan "teach the controversy," which instantaneously signals their preferred interpretation that there are holes in the theory of evolution and that teaching rival explanations for life's origins is really a matter of intellectual freedom.
I get it. I don't want any part of that kind of "framing."
Matt says that scientists should engage in framing. I say they shouldn't, and it's not because I don't understand what framing is all about. These are the "successful" examples, in Matt's opinion, and he's supposed to be the expert. Why is he surprised at the opposition to framing? Why should scientists attempt to mimic these examples of misleading and highly deceptive spin?
Is framing just false spin? What may have led to this misperception is that several examples of highly effective messaging have originated from groups or individuals with special interests. While the content of some of these messages such as Greenpeace's "Frankenfood" is debatable, these messages have been more effective in reaching key audiences than many efforts that originated from the scientific community.
In other words; yes, successful framing can be the same as false spin. Thanks for explaining that, Matt.
Succinate dehydrogenase is one of the enyzmyes of the citric acid cycle. It catalyzes the following reaction .....
Students in my biochemistry class will recognize this as a classic oxidation-reduction reaction where succinate is oxidized to fumarate and quinone (Q) is reduced to quinol (QH2). (The green carbons are the ones originally derived from the acetyl group that starts the cycle.)
The succinate dehydrogenase complex is also complex II in membrane-associated electron transport. This is the electron transport process that's coupled to ATP formation—part of what used to be called oxidative phosphorylation or respiration. The complexes are found in the inner membranes of mitochondria in eukaryotes and the inner plasma membrane in bacteria.
Within the complex, electrons are passed from succinate to FAD and then to three different iron-sulfur ([Fe-S]) clusters and finally to a molecule of quinone (Q) bound to the active site in the membrane (Q and QH2 are only soluble in the membranes.)
The reverse reaction, where electrons flow from QH2 to fumarate is common in bacteria. It is usually catalyzed by a separate enzyme called fumarate reductase. The two complexes (succinate dehydrogenase and fumarate reductase) are very similar in structure and the various subunits of the complexes are homologous.
The structure of succinate dehydrogenase from Escherichia coli was solved at good resolution some years ago [PDB 1NEK]. It reveals the presence of a heme b group in the membrane-bound part of the complex. The binding site for QH2 is located close to the third [Fe-S] cluster near the inner side of the membrane.
The role of this heme is highly controversial. It's not present in fumarate reductase, demonstrating that it plays no role in electron transport for the reverse reaction. It seems as though the heme group might not be involved in the transfer of electrons from succinate to QH2 either but it has been difficult to rule this out.
Tran et al. (2007) have investigated the role of heme b in a paper that has just appeared in the online version of PNAS. They created mutant enzymes that could not bind the heme b molecule and examined the effect of these mutations. Mutant bacteria grew normally under conditions where the activity of succinate dehydrogenase was essential. The levels of enzyme activity of two different mutant enzymes were only 6% and 30% lower than the levels of the wild-type enzymes.
These results demonstrate that the heme b group is not required for the chemical reaction. This confirms a lot of previous work that pointed to the same conclusion. However, the mutant enzymes are less stable than the wild-type enzyme; they tend to lose activity during purification. This indicates that the heme group helps to stabilize the complex although whether this is significant in vivo remains an open question.
The result is further proof that not every feature has adaptive significance—or, at least not the significance you would normally assign. When the heme b molecule was first detected it was assumed to be involved in the chemical reaction since that's what heme groups do in most other complexes. Now we know it is not required for electron transfer but may play a small role in stabilizing the enzyme. Maybe there used to be a heme in the primitive ancestor of succinate dehydrogenase (SQR) and fumarate reductase (QFR) but it has been lost in QFR and rendered almost obsolete in SQR. Perhaps it used to be an essential component of the reaction in the ancestor enzyme or perhaps a primitive heme b enzyme that bound quinone just happened to evolve a binding site for another enzyme containing [Fe-S] clusters and succinate oxidation properties.
The more we study these molecular machines, the more we are coming to realize that the evolutionary pathway leading to their formation was somewhat haphazard and accidental. These are not cases where the final product is so well designed that a very precise series of improbable events had to happen in order for them to exist at all. Instead, proteins that may have originally served another purpose are co-opted and modified in newly evolving complexes.
Modern enzyme complexes may contain fossil evidence of their evolutionary history (e.g. heme b) that has very little to do with their current function. It's like biochemical junk.
Tran, Q.M., Rothery, R.A., Maklashina, E., Cecchini, G. and Weiner, J.H. (2007)Escherichia coli succinate dehydrogenase variant lacking the heme b. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA) published online November 7, 2007, 10.1073/pnas.0707732104 [PNAS]
The complete show will be available on the website [Watch Online] after November 14th. In the Toronto area we can watch it on WTVS Detroit (channel 163) on Tuesday Nov. 13th at 8pm or on WCTS Seattle (channel 164) at 11pm our time. Most people probably don't get these channels because they're part of a special timeshifting package. I find that WNED Buffalo, the regular PBS channel in this area, often doesn't show the documentaries I want to watch on PBS. It doesn't broadcast NOVA documentaries, for example. I assume they're too expensive.
Here's the trailer. The show looks really cool even if ultimately the trial will have very little effect on the creationist movement and may even have strengthened it.
Rachel Marsden is officially a Canadian although most Canadians would prefer than this not be widely known. She's currently based in New York city. Here's how she describes her upbringing in Vancouver [About Rachel Marsden].
Born in suburban Vancouver, British Columbia, Rachel grew up listening to Jack Webster, who pioneered combative political talk-radio long before it ever spread to the USA.
Fully bilingual in both French and English, Rachel survived growing up in Canada during the socialist regime of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, best known for his close friendship with Fidel Castro, decimation of the Canadian military, a wife who partied at Studio 54 with the Rolling Stones, and doing pirouettes behind the Queen of England's back.
Always a capitalist at heart, Rachel spent her childhood on her parents' farm selling eggs from the family driveway. To ensure the operation looked legit and to score an advantage over the competition (the neighborhood Safeway), she would hold her pet chicken, Brenda (named after her Sunday school teacher), on her lap as proof that the eggs were truly "farm fresh".
Here's a clip of Rachel Marsden on CNN from just last week. She's defending the torture of so-called terrorists1—one of her favorite topics—while getting skewered by Jack Cafferty. One of her most famous recent quotes comes from this broadcast, "One man's torture is another man's CIA-sponsored swim lesson."
Marsden used to write a weekly column for the Toronto Sun. one of Canada's most idiotic right-wing rags. This relationship is now over according to her website [RachelMarsden.com].
Attention terrorists and Islamofascists: You can now read the Toronto Sun without having your delicate sensibilities offended, as my weekly column is no longer with Sun Media. I am currently exploring US syndication and other venues for the column. In the meantime, you can continue to read it here at RachelMarsden.com, every Monday. And yes (to respond to some of your queries), after more than 2 years of writing weekly for the Sun, I've been under a new Editor-in-Chief, Lou Clancy, since October 5th, who comes from Canada's most liberal newspaper: The Toronto Star. My column about Islam was spiked on his first day at the job. Best of luck to any principled conservatives who remain.
Now, the remarkable thing about this is that even the Toronto Sun has had enough of Rachel Marsden. Who woulda thunk?
I guess she'll just have to sell her brand of "principled conservatism" south of the border from now on. No doubt she'll find plenty of buyers. I understand that the USA is about to appoint an Attorney General who approves of torture.
When asked about it during a recent CNN appearance, I suggested that "one man's torture is another's CIA-sponsored swim lesson." In case anyone thought I was being facetious -- I wasn't.
I suppose that those who object to terror suspects getting water up the nose would say that, as a young competitive swimmer, I was also tortured. It was called "hypoxic training" -- swimming underwater and holding our breath until we passed out. Our coaches didn't call it torture, just an exercise in "mental toughness." So think of it this way -- terror suspects are getting some free mental toughness training courtesy of the U.S. government.
Here's another idea to make the concept more palatable to objectors: Call the place where waterboarding is performed "The CIA Centre For Aquatic Excellence," give all participants an "I survived training camp" T-shirt with the centre's logo on it, and treat them to a couple of carbo-loading pancake breakfasts. It worked for us.
Judge for yourselves.
1. All of the people who are being tortured are merely "accused" of doing something wrong. Many of them are innocent. Very few of them are real terrorists.
"for his work on the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland"
Emil Theodor Kocher (1841-1917) received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering that the thyroid gland was an essential organ. It secreted a component that was required for proper development and daily metabolism. We now know that the secretion consists of two iodine-containing hormones; thyroxine and triiodothyronine [Monday's Molecule #50].
The Presentation Speech was given by Professor the Count K.A.H. Mörner, Rector of the Royal Caroline Institute, on December 10, 1909.
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen.
The Nobel Medical Prize has been awarded this year to the famous surgeon, Professor Theodor Kocher of Bern, in recognition of his work concerning the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid gland.
The thyroid gland, thyroidea, is one of the structures in the organism whose significance has only been made clear during the last few decades. At the close of the 1870's it was still stated in the physiology text-books that the function of this gland was a complete mystery. It was even questioned that it had an actual physiological significance, for the adult organism at least. On the other hand it was a common experience that it could be the site of pathological changes; in the course of these, considerable trouble could result, as, for example, when the pathologically enlarged gland exerted pressure on neighbouring parts, especially on the trachea.
Yet it was hardly right that this gland should have been undervalued, not to say disdained, for so long. Astley Cooper, who was working about a hundred years ago, had already observed disturbances in animals after removal of the thyroid. These were specified with greater precision by J. M. Schiff in Bern. He found that animals in which the thyroid had been extirpated, often died in circumstances which suggested that this gland might be of great importance to the organism; however, he did not gain any deeper insight into the gland's function. Unfortunately, these observations did not receive the necessary attention and development. It was only after similar results had been obtained with human beings that the question of the thyroid's significance was analysed successfully. Observations made by surgeons were the cause of this.
The disturbances which occur with a pathological enlargement of the thyroid are often so grave that people had already for many years been extirpating the thyroid occasionally to relieve them, despite the difficulty and dangers which the operation then presented. Indeed, in the days before the introduction of antisepsis it often happened that the patients died of the immediate results of the operation. After the introduction of antisepsis a significant improvement took place in this respect. As a result, the number of operations of this kind, in which the whole gland was removed, increased considerably. In the meantime it was gradually noticed that the position was by no means satisfactory, even if the operation itself and the subsequent healing had gone well. Not infrequently, after a period of apparent health, significant disturbances in the general health made their appearance. The conscientious investigation of these cases of illness resulted in the establishment of a new syndrome called «cachexia strumipriva», which was characterized by muscular weakness, swelling of the extremities and of the face, anaemia, decline in intelligence, and finally death from exhaustion. Once attention had been drawn to this condition, enthusiastic and productive research into the significance of the thyroid followed in many different centres. In this, reliance was placed on clinical observations on humans as well as on animal experiments. From this research an understanding of the physiology of the thyroid has evolved which is comprehensive, even if not complete in all respects.
We now know that this gland is a vital organ, whose total removal in experimental animals infallibly causes death within the course of a few days or weeks. The gland is of great importance in the general nutrition of the adult, and especially in individuals still undergoing development. The loss of thyroid function results in serious disturbances in this nutrition. Metabolism is significantly diminished; growth ceases; the skin and the subcutaneous tissues are the site of mucous infiltration; degenerative processes occur in internal organs; serious disturbances make their appearance in the functions of the nervous system and muscles. It became clear that the gland acts by elaborating a secretion, which reaches the various parts of the body. It is, as the expression goes, an internal «secretion». Later it became evident that such processes of internal secretion are of exceptionally great importance. Not only the thyroid, but also various other glands such as the adrenals and the pancreas play a characteristic part in the processes within the organism by elaborating a secretion peculiar to each gland, which is not excreted, but is diffused throughout the organism and is of the greatest importance to it.
The knowledge of the physiology of the thyroid has brought a valuable increase in our understanding within the field of pathology. Through it new light has been thrown on hitherto mysterious morbid conditions. Pathological changes in the gland can lead to suppression or decrease of its function. Various morbid conditions are explained by this, among which are cretinism and myxoedema. On the other hand one looks for the explanation of various other disturbances such as those in morbus Basedowi in abnormally increased or possibly qualitatively abnormal activity of this gland.
This briefly outlined important and momentous development, which has benefited medicine during the past 25 years, was brought into being, as I mentioned before, as a result of observations which have been made by surgeons. In this respect, the first public utterance was made in September, 1882, by Professor J. L. Reverdin in Geneva. At this time his colleague in Bern, Professor Kocher, had also turned his attention to the same subject, and in April, 1883, the latter gave a comprehensive exposition, which has been of fundamental importance to the later development of thyroid surgery as well as to other important areas of our knowledge of this gland. Through Kocher's exposition it became quite clear that complete extirpation of the thyroid is reprehensible. A portion of the gland which is capable of functioning, must be left behind at operation. This very important principle of surgical intervention has always been observed from that time onwards. With regard to the surgery of the thyroid, Kocher has subsequently continued to occupy a leading position. It should be possible to omit on this occasion a report concerning the development of the methods of operation and the suitability of the various types of intervention in different cases. It should suffice to recall that there are now several thousand people who owe their regained, lasting health directly to him after a goitre operation which he has successfully performed. A far greater number, which cannot be estimated, owes him a debt of gratitude indirectly for similar results. Fatal cases or secondary illnesses have become more and more of a rarity in goitre operations.
However, it is not only the treatment of the goitre which has been the subject of Kocher's research on the goitre. He has also carried out extensive investigations into the causes of the endemic occurrence of goitre in certain regions and into the cretinism connected with disturbances in thyroid function.
In the thyroid, as already indicated, other diseases can occur in addition to those which arise with the ordinary goitre. To these as well Kocher has devoted successful work, as a result of which it has been possible to define with more and more certainty the method of treatment best suited to each case; in addition, on the basis of Kocher's work a broader, deeper knowledge of the pathology of the thyroid has been achieved.
Through his research, which we have briefly described here, Kocher has carried out pioneering work of an enduring nature which is of the greatest importance to medical science and of the greatest value in the service of suffering humanity. It is this work which the Staff of Professors of the Caroline Institute has wished to honour by awarding him this year the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The Salem Conjecture was proposed by Bruce Salem on the newsgroup talk.origins [The Salem Conjecture]. Here's how he described it on Sept. 5, 1996.
