Category: BLOG

(Derek Thompson Substack) – The quantified life has become a modern religion. But many of us are measuring life the wrong way.

In the late 19th century, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously criticized religion in part because he claimed its worshippers allowed an external system of values to stand in the place of the messy, beautiful work for discovering their own genius and agency. I have mixed feelings about Nietzsche’s critique of religion, but I think it applies profoundly to the state of life metrics. The quantified life has become a modern religion: a system of values that takes us over and instills deep values in us, even as it sometimes keeps us from living our own values and building the life we want.

C. Thi Nguyen is the author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. In today’s conversation, we talk about metrics, the games of life, and how to listen to the parts of our self that cannot be reduced to numbers. (Read More)

(WSJ) – The psychedelic-like anesthetic is at the heart of a booming online industry that promises relief from depression but has also led to harm

Just a few years ago, ketamine had mostly a dual existence: as an anesthetic to sedate patients in operating rooms and as a street drug known as “K” that can deliver out-of-body experiences. 

That changed after 2019, when the FDA approved a drug for treatment-resistant depression that shares some chemical similarities with ketamine. The drug, marketed under the brand name Spravato, must be administered in a specially certified doctor’s office or clinic. Patients are then placed under observation for at least two hours. 

Those hurdles drove more people to seek out ketamine itself, which can be prescribed for any use a doctor deems medically appropriate. It is FDA-approved only as an anesthetic, and its use for psychiatric conditions is “off-label,” meaning its safety and efficacy hasn’t been vetted by the FDA for that purpose. (Read More)

(Wired) – Researchers in Japan pioneered reprogrammed cells 20 years ago. Now the country has given the first-ever authorizations to manufacture and sell medical products based on the technology.

SMaRT, located in Suita City, Osaka Prefecture, is responsible for the production of Amshepri and is the world’s first commercial manufacturing facility dedicated to regenerative medicine and cell-based drugs derived from donor iPS cells. The iPS cells used as raw material for the product come from a stock provided by the Kyoto University iPS Cell Research Foundation, and the differentiation induction and manufacturing technologies are based on proprietary technologies from Kyoto University and other institutions. (Read More)

(Wired) – Evidence suggests reactivations of the varicella-zoster virus may accelerate aging and raise dementia risk. Now scientists want to know if vaccines and antivirals could help protect the brain.

This remarkable case study, published in 2016, has inspired neurovirologists to look deeper into the connection between shingles and brain aging. For decades, shingles has been predominantly associated with a form of nerve pain known as postherpetic neuralgia, which can be so severe that it was once cited as the leading cause of pain-related suicide in the elderly. Now, research is starting to reveal the devastating impact that shingles can have on brain health.

According to Andrew Bubak, assistant professor of neurology at the University of Colorado Anschutz, the true burden of varicella-zoster “is totally underestimated. But it’s a very treatable virus.” (Read More)

(NYTs) – For two decades now, social media companies have been virtually untouchable, profitably floating above accusations that they normalize propaganda, addict children and degrade our character. Legally and politically, platforms like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube have been protected by an idea that they and others have promoted: that they are not just innovative technologies but also speech platforms, so that imposing any limits on them would amount to both censorship and a drag on technological progress.

That protection is finally starting to weaken, thanks to a growing realization that social media is also a matter of public health. Seen this way, social media appears as something less newfangled and more familiar: a defective, hazardous product. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – A Dutch psychiatrist gave lethal injections to patients with mental suffering, some of them teenagers. Does that make him a hero—or something else?

Oosterhoff’s patient had no physical illness, fatal or otherwise; he concluded, rather, that she was “mentally terminal.” An administered death would be preferable, he thought, to prolonged suffering or the possibility of unassisted suicide. To comply with the law’s requirement of “due care,” he consulted another psychiatrist and convened a “moral case deliberation session.”

Telling me about his internal conflict at that moment, Oosterhoff’s previously casual tone became more intense. At the age of 70, he is no longer an adherent of the strict Dutch Calvinism he’d learned as a child, but he said he felt haunted by the idea of “final judgment” in the afterlife; his patient’s request for euthanasia made him think, God is testing me. (Read More)

(The Atlantic) – Welcome to the golden age of gray-market drugs.

Vyleesi has never been approved for men. Some clinics advertise that they’ll prescribe the drug to men off-label, but even that is often not necessary for men to get ahold of it. Vyleesi is now readily available without a prescription. Many online retailers sell vials of the drug under the guise that they are for “research use only” and not for human consumption—a disclaimer that technically makes the drugs legal.

Americans are relying on this technicality to get hold of all kinds of drugs—some that, like Vyleesi, are supposed to require a prescription and others that aren’t even approved in the United States at all. (Read More)

(The Times) – Millions are au fait with GLP-1s for weight loss — but now, other peptide injectables with supposed life-extending properties are exploding in popularity

The success of GLP-1 jabs such as Ozempic and Wegovy has proved that peptides can bring impressive benefits — and it has helped to normalise the idea that self-injecting is a safe and acceptable part of a wellness regime. “Many of the anti-ageing and wellbeing peptides have been around for a long time,” says Adam Taylor, a professor in anatomy at Lancaster University. “But the association with GLP-1 drugs has triggered a greater interest in peptides and for people to assume that all peptides are beneficial.” (Read More)

(Gizmodo) – While speaking with Adebayo Ogunlesi (who happens to be a member of OpenAI’s board of directors), Altman said, “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter,” which conjures up the nightmarish image of someone being unable to pay their intelligence bill. Altman expanded on this idea, stating that his company has a “fundamental belief in abundance of intelligence” and arguing, “One of the most important things in the future is that we make intelligence, to borrow an old phrase from the energy industry that didn’t quite work: ‘Too cheap to meter.’” (Read More)

(Straight Arrow News) – A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted Thursday to recommend including a viral strain of the flu, subclade k, in vaccines beginning this fall.

It’s something that the World Health Organization also suggested, as the variant is likely one reason flu vaccines were less effective this year. (Read More)

(Nature) – ‘Cryosleep’ remains the preserve of science fiction, but researchers are getting closer to restoring brain function after deep freezing.

Researchers attempting the cryogenic freezing and thawing of brain tissue from humans and other animals — mostly young vertebrates — have already shown that neuronal tissue can survive freezing on a cellular level and, after thawing, a functional one to some extent. But it has not been possible to fully restore the processes necessary for proper brain functioning — neuronal firing, cell metabolism and brain plasticity

A team in Germany has now demonstrated a method for cryopreserving and thawing mouse brains that leaves some of this functionality intact. (Read More)

(Plough) – As laws permitting medically assisted death advance, how will we learn to accept diminishment rather than kill ourselves?

I share this experience with Jens because I have been mulling over a parenting challenge, and I think the way I let Jens down that day points to a solution. As I have seen the slow advance of laws permitting medically assisted death, I have begun wondering how I can raise my children to grow into the sorts of people who would rather choose to endure the painful, humiliating loss of health and bodily function than to die by suicide. I believe that part of the answer to this parenting challenge is found by examining the problem of polite dishonesty when it comes to the ways we burden and are burdened by one another. These two experiences – being a burden and being burdened – are not the same, but for any who will resist the seduction of suicide as an escape from the reality that human life is burdensome, being a burden and bearing burdens must be taught and practiced. And I believe the first step is overcoming the polite dishonesty that denies people are burdens at all. (Read More)