Research says yes, so why are the FDA and NIH standing in the way?

Like Steve Jobs, Hitchens is gone, early, at 62, hastened to his end at the hands of modern medicine, the inevitable tragic outcome of barbaric treatment that cannot save many esophageal cancer patients from death and, owing to its horrendous side effects, probably accelerates their demise.

As in the case of Steve Jobs, it is appropriate to ask whether alternative medicine may have ameliorated his decline or even saved him, given the accumulation of promising results from the armory of (plant derived) phytochemicals now proven potent in killing cancer cells in the lab and in animal studies. Though not as yet in human trials, owing to the anachronistic prejudice of the FDA whose personnel seem as illiterate as most cancer specialists in the latest research, freely available to them as well as the general public at PubMed.

If so, they have cut short the life of a heroic heretic, one willing to attack hypocrisy and stupidity from Mother Theresa to God itself. What some may not have realized is that Hitchens was on the side of life and freedom, the greatest values of all.

“If you’re at Vanity Fair and you’re talking about some of the things that Christopher has taken on, at the top of the list is going to be Mother Teresa,” said Graydon Carter, editor at Vanity Fair and a longtime friend.

In 1994, Hitchens co-wrote and narrated a documentary on her called Hell’s Angel.

“This profane marriage between tawdry media hype and medieval superstition gave birth to an icon which few have since had the poor taste to question,” he said in it.

Hitchens wrote about her for the magazine, too. Carter said it didn’t go over so well.

“That’s a tough topic to go after,” he said. “It was quite negative, and we had hundreds of subscription cancellations, including some from our own staff.”

Hitchens’ killer charm

We always appreciated Hitchens for his remarkable capacity to charm his intellectual victims and the audience with a joking verbal twist as he thrust his dagger in. Only Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) matches him in his capacity to poleaxe the peddlers of nonsense without personally offending them or the onlooker, who was free to revel in the language Hitchens employed with Wildean wit and Johnsonian sense.

The only thing we found hard to take was the fact that Hitch liked the sound of his own voice as much as everyone else did, and was fairly deaf to information that came from outside the oral culture of his Washington insider club. We got nowhere trying to enlighten him about science and the self serving behavior of scientists willing to sell the public a bill of goods, but again, that is par for the course for left wing liberals, who generally seem incapable of understanding, let alone questioning science and scientists. The fact that the one time Trotskyite Hitchens grew tough mindedly rightwing on Iraq for the sake of pushing back what he saw as the Islamic threat to Western freedoms didn’t seem to make any difference. But then, as Oscar himself remarked, “One should never listen. To listen is a sign of indifference to one’s hearers.”

As far as “God” is concerned, the great contributi­on Hitchens made was to encourage others to straightfo­rwardly reject the prima facie ridiculous notion of a personal God who “loves” humanity and will somehow (never detectably­) protect us from misfortune and if we are good elevate us out of our bodies to a heaven (precisely why this place serves as a reforming attraction to the faithful remains a mystery greater than the Virgin birth. since an eternity there must be hellish – no physical pleasures or other sensations at all, presumably, and no basis in events for social communication. Is there a more reliable basis for utter boredom? Thank God – in a manner of speaking – we are headed for the other place.)

Instead of being sensitive to the need of the fearful to believe in God and not to have their fond fairy tale shattered, Hitchens robustly advocated use of the faculty of reason “God” gave us. Publish and be damned – just as he did. Thank “God” for someone who had the strength of mind and the spine to tackle the problems of life lived, with all its joys and sorrows, and not take refuge in fantasy, and not apologize for his realism and his sense.

This kind of straightshooting seems unkind to some. Yes, there is something so anti-life about convention­al religion – the milquetoas­t and childish leaning on the hope of succor from the supernatur­al that the religiousl­y inclined are sold on and try to sell us. But is it not cruel to try to remove the pillar on which the weak lean?

On the face of it Hitchens’s intellectual assault on emotional comfort food may seem ruthless. Most of us prefer pussyfooti­ng on the issue in case we hurt the feelings of the religious. But Christophe­r was quite justified in attacking religion because his unkindness actually promoted the opposite – celebratin­g the precious experience of existing, for however brief a span.

In this sense Hitchens was not a threat to the happiness of people who look to “God” as somehow providing the purpose and value they cannot see in life in itself.

On the contrary, he actually pointed in a moving and honest way to what they should be doing – loving life, not “God”, and each other, not long dead Christ, and all people, not just those belonging to Christiani­ty, Islam or some other religious tribe.

What’s more, this is actually what Christ taught, it seems clear. The irony is that Hitchens was more genuinely Christian than the Church which peddles all the guff about God up above and angels in heaven saving us from ourselves.

Christopher’s new religion

The biggest irony is the tragic one, however, where one of the most famous skeptics in modern public life staunchly resisted the blandishments of the Church of God only to fall, in his physical vulnerability, into the hands of the Church of Science, which proceeded to sacrifice him on the altar of Trials of Promising but Toxic New Drugs.

That of course is the problem of human vulnerability, it leads us to run into the arms of whoever we conceive to be our rescuer. In the case of the Christian Church, or Synagogue or Mosque, we rush to sign up from our deathbed, on the principle that no man is an atheist in a foxhole, or as Pascal advised, bet on God’s existence, that way, if you are wrong there is no penalty.

NIH Deathwatch

In the case of physical frailty, apparently you can be the greatest skeptic in the world but if your incessant smoking and drinking leads to esophageal cancer (cancer of the item lower than the throat on the way to the stomach) you rush to put your welfare in the hands of your friend Francis Collins, the Pope of modern medicine in this country, the head of the NIH.

You will, it seems, question everything in human society and up in Heaven, but not modern medicine, or at any rate, the High Priests of the Church of Modern Medicine, in whose care you entrust your life without ever examining their Bible to check and see if everything is up to date.

So Christopher Hitchens, champion skeptic, iconoclast and debunker, once he was terrified by the diagnosis of esophageal cancer, crumbled into a devout disciple of the NIH, its commandments and its works, and took refuge with Collins, who apparently used his influence to shoehorn Hitchens into the latest trials of supposedly promising drugs aimed we are told at whatever genes the oncogene cowboys had decided were the wolves which eat the sheep alive.

Meanwhile Hitchens publicly dismissed any advice he was offered by those pointing to the promise of alternative medicine as crackpottery purveyed by worms who emerge from the woodwork whenever anyone famous gets cancer. He preferred the company of his new mentor Collins, top general of the established army, bemedaled with clinking decorations and politically and socially renowned for his proven, peer reviewed knowledge, if not his genius.

Anyone thinking of steering Hitchens in a different direction therefore drew back, as we did, knowing that our advice was discredited in advance. The result was that Hitchens bravely slogged on under increasingly savage assault from standard chemotherapy, with any contribution from natural palliatives not only ignored but probably barred by his caretakers, lest they interfere with the supposed benefit of the standard drugs he was given, or the potential effect of the new, genetically targeted ones he was given in the trials.

The latter were reportedly tried one after another, to see what happened, and in the end they killed him, with the aid of his cancer, by defeating his immune system, wreckage which in other circumstances would be called AIDS. Indeed, it is not inaccurate to conclude that Christopher Hitchens was partly or wholly brought down by iatrogenic AIDS, that is, AIDS induced by his doctors and their drug testing ministrations.

In this regard it is noteworthy that Phase 1 clinical trials have as their chief purpose to test the toxicity of a drug, which is primarily measured by how rapidly it kills the patient at what dose.

What Hitchens didn’t know

What did Hitchens evidently ignore, in his understandable vulnerability and rush into the embrace of the heroic figure of Collins, at the helm of the vast passenger liner of established medicine? What icebergs loomed that he was unaware of, what land could he have sighted, rather than drown in the slowly sinking ship he embarked upon?

The first might be the fact that for thirty years our research and understanding of cancer has been fruitless because it has been steered in quite the wrong direction. The Titanic has been ploughing through the sea of ignorance directly towards the iceberg of futility, rather than towards land.

The fashion for thirty years has been to look for specific genes or gene groups to blame for particular cancers, the so-called oncogene paradigm, which has seen its leading adherents award each other more than one Nobel prize.

The assumption of this line of research is that if you identify which gene or gene group has somehow gone wrong, you have identified the way to potentially target it more accurately, and slow the cancer, stop it or even cure it.

The only problem is that it has led nowhere fast – cancer cure rates (once separated from the manipulation of data based on the oncogene assumption) have generally not improved much in thirty years.

Why is this the case? Apparently because the cause of cancer is not spontaneous gene error or mutation but massive disruption of the genome, caused by the familiar threats of radiation or chemicals (including chemotherapy, by the way, in that chemo can reduce the body’s own capacity to curb cancer).

Such massive disruption results in cancer cells typically having quite the wrong number of chromosomes, sometimes as many as double the norm. Technically this is known as aneuploidy, and is well known to cancer researchers, but it has been largely ignored as a research avenue or even by textbooks ever since it was uncovered a hundred years ago by Boveri (in 1914; David von Hansemann suggested it even earlier, in 1890).

Cancer cul-de-sac or highway

Only recently has it been the focus of renewed attention in what may be a sea change in cancer research led by the remarkable Peter Duesberg at Berkeley. Duesberg has always been a total skeptic as regards the usefulness of the oncogene approach in cancer, and he has devoted more than a decade of research into aneuploidy and the part that it plays in cancer.

Recently he brought out a paper which very specifically outlines this avenue and why it is far more likely to lead to results than the thirty year old cul de sac of oncogene study, despite the Nobels that have accrued, most notably to Harold Varmus who is now in charge at the NCI.

What the paper points out most notably is the failure of the oncogene theorists to produce any evidence for it after sampling tens of thousands of cancers, an embarrassment for the Nobel winners and a signal that skeptics who have followed Duesberg in questioning the approach are right.

We will detail the situation in a later post on Duesberg’s revolutionary paper, but the lesson is clear. Those who fed Christopher Hitchens one drug after another targeting the genes of his cancer as the potential key to its cure produced only one useful result: they were able to see the damage caused, each attempt another step towards the grave of the notable polemicist.

Hitchens, skeptic and investigator par excellence in politics and culture, would have found out all this if he had troubled to ask. But such is the nature of established medicine in an age where only specialist researchers read the papers available to all on PubMed, and health officials, researchers and practitioners confine their enquiries updating their knowledge outside their field to their oral culture (the “Joe-says-pedia”) that no one among his consultants knew to tell him, and he rejected outsiders as unreliable.

A decade of mainstream hints

Unaware of how myopic and blinkered the cancer establishment remains even after a decade or two of remarkably promising research into plant based or “phyto”chemicals, Hitchens seems to have allowed them full rein in directing him away from nature and its curative cancer armory and towards artificial drugs, the one without side effects in reasonable doses and the other with horrendous effects particularly on the immune system, the body’s own defense against cancer.

Would phytochemicals have saved him? Given the commercial apathy towards mounting expensive clinical trials for substances that cannot regain the expense in high prices and large profits, not to mention the outright hostility of the FDA and drug companies towards nature’s compounds, which are scormed as the unproven offerings of quackery, and a threat to the pharma economy, it is impossible currently for science to say.

But there are a slew of studies which suggest that if the right phytochemicals can be administered to impact esophageal cancers in patients as effectively as they can be in the lab or in animal studies, and lethal chemotherapy withheld, there is a distinct possibility that the cancer can be stopped in situ and even reversed. For this is what the studies in lab dish and rats have shown.

Red and black berries

In Columbus at Ohio State , for example, researchers have won noteworthy data on seven kinds of berries which actually reduce tumors in the rat esophagus. Their latest paper, Multiple berry types prevent N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine-induced esophageal cancer in rats, published in Jun last year, found all seven inhibited tumor progression – black or red raspberries, strawberries, noni, acai and wolfberry.

Seven berry types were about equally capable of inhibiting tumor progression in the rat esophagus in spite of known differences in levels of anthocyanins and ellagitannins. Serum levels of IL-5 and GRO/KC (IL-8) may be predictive of the inhibitory effect of chemopreventive agents on rat esophageal carcinogenesis.

Such results need to be confirmed of course, but as the latest of a series of papers over the last 15 years it suggests that flavonoids – the phytochemicals associated with pigment, in this case red and purple – have great potential in rolling back esophageal cancer in people, whom it kills at the rate of over 14 thousand a year in the US.

Beneficial effects have also been found by the same group for red beetroot food color (Drinking water with red beetroot food color antagonizes esophageal carcinogenesis in N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine-treated rats, and for circumin, an ingredient of turmeric, which promotes apoptosis – cell suicide – in esophageal cancer cells in the lab dish, according to the University of Michigan Medical School last year (Curcumin promotes apoptosis, increases chemosensitivity, and inhibits nuclear factor kappaB in esophageal adenocarcinoma, and also kills them independently of apoptosis, according to the Cork, Ireland Cancer Research Centre two years ago (Curcumin induces apoptosis-independent death in oesophageal cancer cells.

Reasonable people may ask themselves -and the cancer establishment – whether it is possible that, rather than lose the invaluable mind of one of the most prominent public social critics of our time, it might have been that we were able to save him by getting him to drink copious beetroot pigment in his drinking water, or even his vodka, and to feast on black and red raspberries four times a day.

The point is, we have no certain idea, and it cannot be ruled out as an alternative to certain death through the treatment he did get. Presumably his diagnosis was typical in being late, the factor which keeps the five year survival rate in this country down at 15%. Most die painfully within the year. Anything which avoids this appalling fate is worth trying, especially for smokers and drinkers like Hitchens who refuse to reform.

There is even the possibility that the great heir to the tradition of articulate public comment founded by Samuel Johnson might never have contracted the illness in the first place, if only he had developed a taste for green tea.Urinary tea polyphenols in relation to gastric and esophageal cancers: a prospective study of men in Shanghai, China, the 2002 study from the University of Southern California which found

“direct evidence that tea polyphenols may act as chemopreventive agents against gastric and esophageal cancer development”

is one large piece of evidence for this, even though it was criticized along with 51 others involving 1.6 million participants by a German meta-review of green tea studies in 2009, Green tea (Camellia sinensis) for the prevention of cancer. Their objections to the procedures followed didn’t convincingly vitiate the many substantive results reported, including ones which appeared more recently which confirm anti cancer effect of green tea against esophageal cancer.

The reason for this was that, like other Cochrane metareviews it was premature – not to say absurd – in discounting lab evidence which was not yet confirmed by Phase III clinical trials. This is standard for the Copenhagen data base, which is international and contains much positive evidence from lab studies for the effectiveness of phytochemicals against cancer. But it notoriously lacks Phase III clinical trials, for the simple reason that these are virtually impossible to fund for unpatentable natural substances. Researchers producing positive results in the lab for green tea and other substances offered by Mother Nature frequently lament this omission, when such trials otherwise automatically follow promising lab studies for synthetic compounds.

We wonder for example whether they included the remarkable result achieved at the Mayo Clinic a couple of years ago, so far unreported by the mainstream media, where a tiny group of four, later expanded to a clinical trial of 24, was able to eradicate or shrink lymphomas apparently through (in one woman’s case) merely doubling the number of green tea bags she used.

So what does it all boil down to? Should Hitchens have woken up to flavonoids (phytochemicals found in fruits and vegetables, especially in their colorful skins)? Those interested might choose the following review for their bedtime reading:

Phytochemicals in cancer prevention and therapy: truth or dare?
Russo M, Spagnuolo C, Tedesco I, Russo GL.
Source
Institute of Food Sciences, National Research Council, 83100, Avellino, Italy; Email: mrusso@isa.cnr.it (M.R.); carmela.spagnuolo@gmail.com (C.S.); idolo@isa.cnr.it (I.T.).
Abstract
A voluminous literature suggests that an increase in consumption of fruit and vegetables is a relatively easy and practical strategy to reduce significantly the incidence of cancer. The beneficial effect is mostly associated with the presence of phytochemicals in the diet. This review focuses on a group of them, namely isothiocyanate, curcumin, genistein, epigallocatechin gallate, lycopene and resveratrol, largely studied as chemopreventive agents and with potential clinical applications. Cellular and animal studies suggest that these molecules induce apoptosis and arrest cell growth by pleiotropic mechanisms. The anticancer efficacy of these compounds may result from their use in monotherapy or in association with chemotherapeutic drugs. This latter approach may represent a new pharmacological strategy against several types of cancers. However, despite the promising results from experimental studies, only a limited number of clinical trials are ongoing to assess the therapeutic efficacy of these molecules. Nevertheless, the preliminary results are promising and raise solid foundations for future investigations.

In other words, eat colorful fruits and veggies (especially red, purple and black), and gird for political action to force the FDA to back off from discouraging or even blocking Phase 3 clinical trials and the NIH to fund Phase 3 clinical trials. As Hitchens himself might now say, if he has found to his surprise there is an after life, “Occupy FDA!”

Given that supplements may be needed to administer color phytochemicals in the dose required to have an effect in humans, the cry may be “Occupy Congress!” too. The alarm that supplements may be banned from being sold in retail stores without a prescription is raised by some, who point to legislation lurking in the background in Congress to enforce this rule.

Americans may be surprised to find themselves barred from freely buying vitamin and other supplements in the near future, they say, just as the British were caught off guard by a similar move a while back.

But more on this while topic – and other cancers – soon.

Clearsighted critic of standard evolutionary mechanism tried to complete it

Teresi achieved fine Discover interview to cap her legacy, ignoring 9/11 embarrassment

One of the most forceful personalities and minds in science was suddenly taken from us by a stroke today (Tues Nov 22 2011). Lynn Margulis was an unusually strong character and for a biologist she had an unusually muscular mind, and her early marriage to Carl Sagan was the least of her accomplishments. She was very young when she began to demonstrate the lameness of the standard idea of how evolution works and the origin of species, ie that random tiny mutations are converted by Darwininian competition to emerge as dominant features if these are advantageous to survival, and can even give rise to new major forms or species if they are particularly helpful.

Margulis was one of the few scientists who immediately see that this theory is conceptually inadequate at the fundamental level and not much more than a silly biological version of modern capitalist thinking a la Ayn Raynd, where nature is wholly a jungle where only the strongest survive, and that evolution at the level of creating new species (which standard Darwinism still utterly fails to explain) was far more likely a cooperative venture of some kind.

From single cells to humans

This revisionism took shape in her ideas about symbiogenesis where at the most basic stratum of life in which single celled forms existed at the beginning, it was likely that such cells merged, and that explained the appearance of cells with a nucleus of which most larger life forms are now made up, including ourselves. From the Margulis point of view we are all essentially agglomerations of cooperating bacteria, and that explains also how new species can arise – from the merging of disparate cells which thus form new living entities with more powerful survival processes than either progenitor.

This obituary in the Times suggests that the details of her thinking are still obscure to the average Timesman and other non specialists, but it is very clear in giving her the credit she deserved after years in the trenches fighting for her truths. No less a fellow heretic than Richard Dawking famously complimented her highly on her determined resilience in the fact of the standard hostility and envy of lesser minds who occupied higher positions in the ruling system when she started out as a young woman of originality and superior sense.

Seasoned skeptic

In other words, Margulis was a heretic of great ability who could be counted on to guide lesser mortals as to other heretics in science who were or are bone fide future Nobelists and who are fueled by too much skepticism and imagination for common acceptance. In this respect she was one of the first to recognize the distinction of one of the most eminent naysayers in science, Peter Duesberg of Berkeley, who has been subjected to political attacks for a quarter century for pointing out from the beginning that as the putative cause of AIDS HIV is in fact a non starter, as every year that passes confirms.

Margulis saw immediately that Duesberg’s analysis was correct and that HIV/AIDS is a nonsense from every point of view, and she had no compunction in saying so. How rare is her kind of unrestrained seeking after better truths in science and how sorely we need more of it was never better shown than in her life of great achievement in the face of mass conformity and political resistance, the new world of institutionalized and now corporate science that has grown into an almost immovable pyramid since the Second World War.

Now we have lost one more rare voice of skeptical creativity.

Lynn Margulis, Evolution Theorist, Dies at 73
By BRUCE WEBER
Published: November 24, 2011

Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.

She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.

Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.

The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.

Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.

“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”

The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”

A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.

“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”

Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.

She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.

Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.

Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.

In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.

“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”

Humans are clumps of bacteria: Margulis’s ideas in a nutshell

Further reading: Dick Teresis (ex OMNI editor) talks to Margulis, a neighbor in:
Discover: April 2011 issue; published online June 17, 2011

The best brief guide to Margulis’ thinking in her own words came in April when her neighbor, ex-OMNI-editor Dick Teresi, captured an interview for Discover, almost the only mainstream outlet for material which even hints that the ideas of science heretics of stature like Margulis or Duesberg are worth considering (the other is Scientific American).

Anyone who wants to understand the direction in which smart evolutionary theory must go should read this:

Discover Interview:
Lynn Margulis Says She’s Not Controversial, She’s Right
It’s the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.
by Dick Teresi; photography by Bob O’Connor

A conversation with Lynn Margulis is an effective way to change the way you think about life. Not just your life. All life. Scientists today recognize five groups of life: bacteria, protoctists (amoebas, seaweed), fungi (yeast, mold, mushrooms), plants, and animals. Margulis, a self-described “evolutionist,” makes a convincing case that there are really just two groups, bacteria and everything else.
That distinction led to her career-making insight. In a 1967 paper published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, Margulis suggested that mitochondria and plastids—vital structures within animal and plant cells—evolved from bacteria hundreds of million of years ago, after bacterial cells started to collect in interactive communities and live symbiotically with one another. The resulting mergers yielded the compound cells known as eukaryotes, which in turn gave rise to all the rest—the protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals, including humans. The notion that we are all the children of bacteria seemed outlandish at the time, but it is now widely supported and accepted. “The evolution of the eukaryotic cells was the single most important event in the history of the organic world,” said Ernst Mayr, the leading evolutionary biologist of the last century. “Margulis’s contribution to our understanding the symbiotic factors was of enormous importance.”
Her subsequent ideas remain decidedly more controversial. Margulis came to view symbiosis as the central force behind the evolution of new species, an idea that has been dismissed by modern biologists. The dominant theory of evolution (often called neo-Darwinism) holds that new species arise through the gradual accumulation of random mutations, which are either favored or weeded out by natural selection. To Margulis, random mutation and natural selection are just cogs in the gears of evolution; the big leaps forward result from mergers between different kinds of organisms, what she calls symbiogenesis. Viewing life as one giant network of social connections has set Margulis against the mainstream in other high-profile ways as well. She disputes the current medical understanding of AIDS and considers every kind of life to be “conscious” in a sense.

Margulis herself is a highly social organism. Now 71, she is a well-known sight at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is on the geosciences faculty, riding her bike in all weather and at all times of day. Interviewer Dick Teresi, a neighbor, almost ran her over when, dressed in a dark coat, she cycled in front of his car late at night. On the three occasions that they met for this interview, Teresi couldn’t help noticing that Margulis shared her home with numerous others: family, students, visiting scholars, friends, friends of friends, and anybody interesting who needed a place to stay.
Most scientists would say there is no controversy over evolution. Why do you disagree?
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred—that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution?
And you don’t believe that natural selection is the answer?
This is the issue I have with neo-Darwinists: They teach that what is generating novelty is the accumulation of random mutations in DNA, in a direction set by natural selection. If you want bigger eggs, you keep selecting the hens that are laying the biggest eggs, and you get bigger and bigger eggs. But you also get hens with defective feathers and wobbly legs. Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create.
That seems like a fairly basic objection. How, then, do you think the neo-Darwinist perspective became so entrenched?
In the first half of the 20th century, neo-Darwinism became the name for the people who reconciled the type of gradual evolutionary change described by Charles Darwin with Gregor Mendel’s rules of heredity [which first gained widespread recognition around 1900], in which fixed traits are passed from one generation to the next. The problem was that the laws of genetics showed stasis, not change. If you have pure breeding red flowers and pure breeding white flowers, like carnations, you cross them and you get pink flowers. You back-cross them to the red parent and you could get three-quarters red, one-quarter white. Mendel showed that the grandparent flowers and the offspring flowers could be identical to each other. There was no change through time.
There’s no doubt that Mendel was correct. But Darwinism says that there has been change through time, since all life comes from a common ancestor—something that appeared to be supported when, early in the 20th century, scientists discovered that X-rays and specific chemicals caused mutations. But did the neo-Darwinists ever go out of their offices? Did they or their modern followers, the population geneticists, ever go look at what’s happening in nature the way Darwin did? Darwin was a fine naturalist. If you really want to study evolution, you’ve got go outside sometime, because you’ll see symbiosis everywhere!
So did Mendel miss something? Was Darwin wrong?
I’d say both are incomplete. The traits that follow Mendel’s laws are trivial. Do you have a widow’s peak or a straight hairline? Do you have hanging earlobes or attached earlobes? Are you female or male? Mendel found seven traits that followed his laws exactly. But neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change—led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.
What kind of evidence turned you against neo-Darwinism?
What you’d like to see is a good case for gradual change from one species to another in the field, in the laboratory, or in the fossil record—and preferably in all three. Darwin’s big mystery was why there was no record at all before a specific point [dated to 542 million years ago by modern researchers], and then all of a sudden in the fossil record you get nearly all the major types of animals. The paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould studied lakes in East Africa and on Caribbean islands looking for Darwin’s gradual change from one species of trilobite or snail to another. What they found was lots of back-and-forth variation in the population and then—whoop—a whole new species. There is no gradualism in the fossil record.
Gould used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe what he interpreted as actual leaps in evolutionary change. Most biologists disagreed, suggesting a wealth of missing fossil evidence yet to be found. Where do you stand in the debate?
“Punctuated equilibrium” was invented to describe the discontinuity in the appearance of new species, and symbiogenesis supports the idea that these discontinuities are real. An example: Most clams live in deep, fairly dark waters. Among one group of clams is a species whose ancestors ingested algae—a typical food—but failed to digest them and kept the algae under their shells. The shell, with time, became translucent, allowing sunlight in. The clams fed off their captive algae and their habitat expanded into sunlit waters. So there’s a discontinuity between the dark-dwelling, food-gathering ancestor and the descendants that feed themselves photosynthetically.
What about the famous “beak of the finch” evolutionary studies of the 1970s? Didn’t they vindicate Darwin?
Peter and Rosemary Grant, two married evolutionary biologists, said, ‘To hell with all this theory; we want to get there and look at speciation happening.’ They measured the eggs, beaks, et cetera, of finches on Daphne Island, a small, hilly former volcano top in Ecuador’s Galápagos, year after year. They found that during floods or other times when there are no big seeds, the birds with big beaks can’t eat. The birds die of starvation and go extinct on that island.
Did the Grants document the emergence of new species?
They saw this big shift: the large-beaked birds going extinct, the small-beaked ones spreading all over the island and being selected for the kinds of seeds they eat. They saw lots of variation within a species, changes over time. But they never found any new species—ever. They would say that if they waited long enough they’d find a new species.
Some of your criticisms of natural selection sound a lot like those of Michael Behe, one of the most famous proponents of “intelligent design,” and yet you have debated Behe. What is the difference between your views?
The critics, including the creationist critics, are right about their criticism. It’s just that they’ve got nothing to offer but intelligent design or “God did it.” They have no alternatives that are scientific.
You claim that the primary mechanism of evolution is not mutation but symbiogenesis, in which new species emerge through the symbiotic relationship between two or more kinds of organisms. How does that work?
All visible organisms are products of symbiogenesis, without exception. The bacteria are the unit. The way I think about the whole world is that it’s like a pointillist painting. You get far away and it looks like Seurat’s famous painting of people in the park (jpg). Look closely: The points are living bodies—different distributions of bacteria. The living world thrived long before the origin of nucleated organisms [the eukaryotic cells, which have genetic material enclosed in well-defined membranes]. There were no animals, no plants, no fungi. It was an all-bacterial world—bacteria that have become very good at finding specialized niches. Symbiogenesis recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria.
How could communities of bacteria have formed completely new, more complex levels of life?
Symbiogenesis recognizes that the mitochondria [the energy factories] in animal, plant, and fungal cells came from oxygen-respiring bacteria and that chloroplasts in plants and algae—which perform photosynthesis—came from cyanobacteria. These used to be called blue-green algae, and they produce the oxygen that all animals breathe.
Are you saying that a free-living bacterium became part of the cell of another organism? How could that have happened?
At some point an amoeba ate a bacterium but could not digest it. The bacterium produced oxygen or made vitamins, providing a survival advantage to both itself and the amoeba. Eventually the bacteria inside the amoeba became the mitochondria. The green dots you see in the cells of plants originated as cyanobacteria. This has been proved without a doubt.
And that kind of partnership drives major evolutionary change?
The point is that evolution goes in big jumps. That idea has been called macromutation, and I was denigrated in 1967 at Harvard for mentioning it. “You believe in macromutation? You believe in acquired characteristics?” the important professor Keith Porter asked me with a sneer. No, I believe in acquired genomes.
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“You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.”
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Can you give an example of symbiogenesis in action?
Look at this cover of Plant Physiology [a major journal in the field]. The animal is a juvenile slug. It has no photosynthesis ancestry. Then it feeds on algae and takes in chloroplasts. This photo is taken two weeks later. Same animal. The slug is completely green. It took in algae chloroplasts, and it became completely photosynthetic and lies out in the sun. At the end of September, these slugs turn red and yellow and look like dead leaves. When they lay eggs, those eggs contain the gene for photosynthesis inside. Or look at a cow. It is a 40-gallon fermentation tank on four legs. It cannot digest grass and needs a whole mess of symbiotic organisms in its overgrown esophagus to digest it. The difference between cows and related species like bison or musk ox should be traced, in part, to the different symbionts they maintain.
But if these symbiotic partnerships are so stable, how can they also drive evolutionary change?
Symbiosis is an ecological phenomenon where one kind of organism lives in physical contact with another. Long-term symbiosis leads to new intracellular structures, new organs and organ systems, and new species as one being incorporates another being that is already good at something else. This major mode of evolutionary innovation has been ignored by the so-called evolutionary biologists. They think they own evolution, but they’re basically anthropocentric zoologists. They’re playing the game while missing four out of five of the cards. The five are bacteria, protoctists, fungi, animals, and plants, and they’re playing with just animals—a fifth of the deck. The evolutionary biologists believe the evolutionary pattern is a tree. It’s not. The evolutionary pattern is a web—the branches fuse, like when algae and slugs come together and stay together.
In contrast, the symbiotic view of evolution has a long lineage in Russia, right?
From the very beginning the Russians said natural selection was a process of elimination and could not produce all the diversity we see. They understood that symbiogenesis was a major source of innovation, and they rejected Darwin. If the English-speaking world owns natural selection, the Russians own symbiogenesis. In 1924, this man Boris Mikhaylovich Kozo-Polyansky wrote a book called Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution, in which he reconciled Darwin’s natural selection as the eliminator and symbiogenesis as the innovator. Kozo-Polyansky looked at cilia—the wavy hairs that some microbes use to move—and said it is not beyond the realm of possibility that cilia, the tails of sperm cells, came from “flagellated cytodes,” by which he clearly meant swimming bacteria.
Has that idea ever been verified?
The sense organs of vertebrates have modified cilia: The rods and cone cells of the eye have cilia, and the balance organ in the inner ear is lined with sensory cilia. You tilt your head to one side and little calcium carbonate stones in your inner ear hit the cilia. This has been known since shortly after electron microscopy came in 1963. Sensory cilia did not come from random mutations. They came by acquiring a whole genome of a symbiotic bacterium that could already sense light or motion. Specifically, I think it was a spirochete [a corkscrew-shaped bacterium] that became the cilium.
Don’t spirochetes cause syphilis?
Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I’m right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria are already optimized for sensitivity to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I’m right, the whole system—called the cytoskeletal system—came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?

And yet these ideas are not generally accepted. Why?
Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.
We usually think of bacteria as strictly harmful. You disagree?
We couldn’t live without them. They maintain our ecological physiology. There are vitamins in bacteria that you could not live without. The movement of your gas and feces would never take place without bacteria. There are hundreds of ways your body wouldn’t work without bacteria. Between your toes is a jungle; under your arms is a jungle. There are bacteria in your mouth, lots of spirochetes, and other bacteria in your intestines. We take for granted their influence. Bacteria are our ancestors. One of my students years ago cut himself deeply with glass and accidentally inoculated himself with at least 10 million spirochetes. We were all scared but nothing happened. He didn’t even have an allergic reaction. This tells you that unless these microbes have a history with people, they’re harmless.

Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?
Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the Treponema of syphilis or the Borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you’re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don’t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant “round bodies.” What’s that debate all about?
Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person’s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.
Wait—you are suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?
There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500s until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It’s in our paper “Resurgence of the Great Imitator.” Our claim is that there’s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There’s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis [winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, “There is no such document.”
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“Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don’t. When they understand what I’m saying, they don’t like it.”
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Syphilis has been called “the great imitator” because patients show a whole range of symptoms in a given order. You have a genital chancre, your symptoms go away, then you have the pox, this skin problem, and then it’s chronic, and you get sicker and sicker. The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient’s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.
Is there a connection here between syphilis and Lyme disease, which is also caused by a spirochete and which is also said to be difficult to treat when diagnosed late?
Both the Treponema that cause syphilis and the Borrelia that cause Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases have only 1,000 in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease Borrelia and syphilis Treponema are symbionts—they require another body to survive. These Borrelia and Treponema have a long history inside people. Syphilis has been detected in skull abnormalities going back to the ancient Egyptians. But I’m interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I’m not interested in the diseases.
When you talk about the evolutionary intelligence of bacteria, it almost sounds like you think of them as conscious beings.
I do think consciousness is a property of all living cells. All cells are bounded by a membrane of their own making. To sense chemicals—food or poisons—it takes a cell. To have a sense of smell takes a cell. To sense light, it takes a cell. You have to have a bounded entity with photoreceptors inside to sense light. Bacteria are conscious. These bacterial beings have been around since the origin of life and still are running the soil and the air and affecting water quality.
Your perspective is rather humbling.
The species of some of the protoctists are 542 million years old. Mammal species have a mean lifetime in the fossil record of about 3 million years. And humans. You know what the index fossil of Homo sapiens in the recent fossil record is going to be? The squashed remains of the automobile. There will be a layer in the fossil record where you’re going to know people were here because of the automobiles. It will be a very thin layer.
Do we overrate ourselves as a species?
Yes, but we can’t help it. Look, there are nearly 7,000 million people on earth today and there are 10,000 chimps, and the numbers are getting fewer every day because we’re destroying their habitat. Reg Morrison, who wrote a wonderful book called The Spirit in the Gene, says that although we’re 99 percent genetically in common with chimps, that 1 percent makes a huge difference. Why? Because it makes us believe that we’re the best on earth. But there is lots of evidence that we are “mammalian weeds.” Like many mammals, we overgrow our habitats and that leads to poverty, misery, and wars.
Why do you have a reputation as a heretic?
Anyone who is overtly critical of the foundations of his science is persona non grata. I am critical of evolutionary biology that is based on population genetics. I call it zoocentrism. Zoologists are taught that life starts with animals, and they block out four-fifths of the information in biology [by ignoring the other four major groups of life] and all of the information in geology.
You have attacked population genetics—the foundation of much current evolutionary research—as “numerology.” What do you mean by that term?
When evolutionary biologists use computer modeling to find out how many mutations you need to get from one species to another, it’s not mathematics—it’s numerology. They are limiting the field of study to something that’s manageable and ignoring what’s most important. They tend to know nothing about atmospheric chemistry and the influence it has on the organisms or the influence that the organisms have on the chemistry. They know nothing about biological systems like physiology, ecology, and biochemistry. Darwin was saying that changes accumulate through time, but population geneticists are describing mixtures that are temporary. Whatever is brought together by sex is broken up in the next generation by the same process. Evolutionary biology has been taken over by population geneticists. They are reductionists ad absurdum. Population geneticist Richard Lewontin gave a talk here at UMass Amherst about six years ago, and he mathematized all of it—changes in the population, random mutation, sexual selection, cost and benefit. At the end of his talk he said, “You know, we’ve tried to test these ideas in the field and the lab, and there are really no measurements that match the quantities I’ve told you about.” This just appalled me. So I said, “Richard Lewontin, you are a great lecturer to have the courage to say it’s gotten you nowhere. But then why do you continue to do this work?” And he looked around and said, “It’s the only thing I know how to do, and if I don’t do it I won’t get my grant money.” So he’s an honest man, and that’s an honest answer.
Do you ever get tired of being called controversial?
I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.

Margulis’ solution to AIDS puzzle

Insofar as the so-called AIDS virus HIV has been shown by Nancy Padian to be utterly uninfectious, and yet HIV/AIDS researchers happily produce surveys and studies year after year which use infectiousness as a premise and seem to show it as a result, in changing rates of infection, Margulis is the only major HIV skeptic who has come up with a possibility in syphilis as a cause which accounts for this phenomenon, which otherwise has to be explained by the wide ranging cross reaction achieved by multiple versions of the HIV test.

But though everything else she believed about HIV/AIDS was quite right according to our own research in the literature over a quarter decade, we never quite saw her point on syphilis as being the best answer as to what causes AIDS, since although it might be sufficient it wasn’t necessary, ie the symptoms of syphilis were not as far as we know common to all or even many AIDS patients. Nor has AIDS ever shown any sign of being infectious in the general population. Now at least we have her public answer to this objection, in this exchange.

We congratulate Teresi on making sense of her ideas in his interview, which we would have liked to do ourselves, and planned to do, but Alas found Margulis too preoccupied with her current work when she visited New York, research which was changing biological theory as she did it. She preferred talking enthusiastically about the subtleties of her advanced investigations and wasn’t particularly keen on expressing herself in lay terms, which was why her many good introductory books relied on the writing abilities of her son Dorion Sagan.

Further reading: John Horgan at Scientific American:
R.I.P. Lynn Margulis, Biological Rebel:

Toward the end of our interview, I asked Margulis if she minded always being referred to as a provocateur or gadfly, or someone who was “fruitfully wrong,” as one scientist put it. She pressed her lips together, brooding over the question. “It’s kind of dismissive, not serious,” she replied. “I mean, you wouldn’t do this to a serious scientist, would you?” She stared at me, and I finally realized her question was not rhetorical; she really wanted an answer. I agreed that the descriptions seemed somewhat condescending.

“Yeah, that’s right,” she mused. Such criticism did not bother her, she insisted. “Anyone who makes this kind of ad hominem criticism exposes himself, doesn’t he? I mean, if their argument is just based on provocative adjectives about me rather than the substance of the issue, then…” Her voice trailed off. Like other mavericks I have met, Margulis could not help but yearn, now and then, to be a respected member of the status quo, whose work merely confirmed the prevailing paradigm. But without courageous rebels like her, science would never achieve any progress.

Rebels are lonely hunters

This view of heretics yearning for acceptance beneath it all is a common note sounded by journalists and bloggers, who may like to think that the comfort they find in going along with social norms and common assumptions is evidence of common humanity.

But we like to think that the reason that top level heretics “yearn” to be accepted members of the “status quo” is because they deserve higher standing than most of the members of the pyramid they are trying to move, including most if not all the ones at the tip.

It must be one of the great burdens for any human being to drag through life, the disrespect and antagonism of the great mass of their fellows who should know better, but don’t. Especially when they contemplate who does as a rule gain power in society, and in their fields, especially nowadays, when the scientist of great integrity who follows the most elemental rule of good science, to question yourself, seems to be becoming almost extinct among those that the media likes to celebrate.

A fine remembrance of Margulis as a friend has been written by Celia Farber, the noted literary journalist and science reporter celebrated for her coverage of the HIV/AIDS scientific boondoggle, at her personal blog The Truth Barrier: Lynn Margulis In Memoriam.

Her 9/11 embarrassment

Of course, outside her field of expertise Lynn was as vulnerable to superficially attractive skepticism (which on deeper inspection is probably flawed) as much as any other questioner in life who has learned how much of their own field is ill founded. We’d say that she was a prize specimen of this kind of slip in being overly impressed by 9/11 skeptic David Ray Griffin. There are unexplained anomalies in the 9/11 story, but none seem sufficient to justify an alternative to the core official story.

I arrive at this conclusion largely as the result of the research and clear writing by David Ray Griffin in his fabulous books about 9/11. I first met him when he was a speaker at a scholarly conference unrelated to 9/11. He immediately impressed me as a brilliant, outstanding philosopher – theologian – author, a Whiteheadian scholar motivated by an intense curiosity to know everything possible about the world.

Certainly we don’t agree with Margulis in saying “Certainly, 19 young Arab men and a man in a cave 7,000 miles away, no matter the level of their anger, could not have masterminded and carried out 9/11: the most effective television commercial in the history of Western civilization.” The low tech accessibility of the window the gang found into global attention was the key to their strategy, and they evidently did not expect such a catastrophic collapse of both towers.

Here is her written statement, and here is her video on the topic. Both suggest to us that her research on the topic was quite shallow and her judgment relied heavily on her personal impression of Griffin, a key figure in the field.

But this is understandable. The essential loneliness of heretics leads them to bond enthusiastically with any others they meet who are intellectually up to the mark, and thus they are quickly subject to exactly the same group psychology that glues together those who believe in conventional wisdom in the face of evidence that it flouts both common sense and scientific review.

Her main point seems to have been that Building 7 was brought down by explosives, but this lacks evidence as far as we know, though there were reports of police warning people to steer clear of it, standard procedure for a building which was threatening to collapse. For a list of 9/11 report omissions see Griffin’s list.

For a provocative list of early warnings of 9/11 see Did Some People Foretell the 9/11 Attack on America? at September11News.com

Sixty Minutes interview sketches outline of Jobs’ fate but more data needed

There is something predictable about the way journalists and people with an axe to grind on an issue glom onto the story of an individual hero’s life and death to confirm and promote their own cliched preconceptions, rather than seek the balanced truth.

On the questions surrounding Steve Jobs’ early departure from his very successful life, for instance, we have conventional doctors who are making him an example of someone who ruined his chances by avoiding their always ultimately hopeless ministrations for nine months versus those who appreciate the hitherto neglected but increasingly apparent advantages of nutritional weapons against cancer.

Steve Jobs Bad Boy

Among journalists, on the other hand, there is general agreement that Steve Jobs had a dark side which involved holding those he found lacking to account rather mercilessly, even in public. He typically tonguelashed them for not trying hard or long enough to meet the standards he set, it seems, when in fact they might have been trying very hard and despite themselves were simply not up to speed in skill or mental energy, or had other reasons not to have matched Jobs’ expectations.

But did Jobs’ have a mean streak? We doubt that, even though Steve Jobs didn’t suffer fools gladly. Was it because he wanted to frighten or hurt the objects of his wrath? Surely not. We’d guess he was actually respecting them by treating them as equals, speaking his mind honestly and indignantly, if far too forcefully for timid underlings.

Surely Jobs was too busy chasing the hare of actual achievement to indulge in power plays, particularly cruel ones. One of his most charming quotes has him saying after his first successful IPO for Apple, “I went from not caring about money and being poor to not caring about money and being rich.” Jobs’ visions were founded in reality not fantasy, and he took no pleasure in trappings.

We imagine that on the emotional level he probably couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get with the program, when he was devoting his life to it. It must be hard for a strong minded obsessive to realize that others might be very smart too and have great love and loyalty for him, but still not always be able to produce the goods demanded.

It must be doubly difficult for someone with abandonment issues, as so many detect in Jobs history and behavior, to be a temperate leader, and not see others failing him as abandonment in a life which was marked by other huge abandonments, most significantly after his adoption when Apple cut him loose in in the middle of producing the Lisa, but also his own perpetrated on his girlfriend when she got pregnant. He would be too deeply channeled into leftover infantile rage, would he not? And many ask if Apple would have ever be pulled back from ruin without his slave driving whip.

Noblesse oblige, please, Steve, for sure, but we don’t join the chorus who say you had a cruel streak, however devastating your tongue might have been to gentler souls.

Steve Jobs inventor par excellence

In the same line we also have tired of the incessant mantra of “genius” invoked in every contemplation of Jobs’ savvy of how to turn tangled techware into universal love toy. It was uniquely clever market ball gazing, but as Janet Maslin noted in the Times, it ain’t special relativity. It was invention of a high order typically drawing on ideas which others had left lying around for someone smart and purposeful to use, allied to a very sensible disregard for authority and convention in dreaming up the new and unique.

We believe that Jobs’ main secrets were a) his early intake of LSD, which seems to blast the cobwebs of convention out of the minds of all who try it, if they don’t kill themselves jumping out of a window to fly to the moon, and b) the Syrian carpet salesman gene he must have inherited from his father, who Jobs seems to have taken against for his later abandoning his (Jobs’) natural mother and her daughter, who turned out to be a respected novelist (Mona Simpson).

These factors – liberation from the unconscious authority of convention and the desire to sell to the whole world what he made – are what led to Jobs having the innate sense to try and make ideal products, good looking and usable, instead of the best effort successes made by ordinary tech mortals, and put these objets d’art-tech in the hands of consumers who had no previous idea they wanted them, until they saw their beauty and their simplicity with their own eyes and caressed it hands on.

How could a smart man be so dumb?

Be that as it may (and possibly none of the business of this researched based scientific blog), what of the strange partial record now available of the cause of his death?

With his biography of Steve Jobs hot off the presses tomorrow Walter Isaacson, biographer of Franklin and Einstein, and president of the Aspen Institute talkfest, is the current go to source on all things Jobsian.

He is peddling (as interviewed tonight on 60 Minutes) a fairly standard though well phrased and very full account of the way Jobs lived and behaved and why, one which doesn’t seem from tonight’s interview to vary much from the fairly mundane cliches of all the recent obituaries on Jobs in the New York Times, Time, New Yorker etc, though it does have the direct authority of the forty interviews Isaacson carried out wherein Jobs evidently spoke freely.

Isaacson witness to Steve Job’s surrender to docs

But his chosen biographer is more of a transcriber and reporter than deep thinker, it seems. As his Aspen Institute role indicates Walter Isaacson is a paid up member of the professional publishing elite as much as a mere author (he is also an ex-head of CNN and ex-managing editor of Time), and he has an amiable crowd pleasing mentality who has surely done a workmanlike job of knitting together all he finds out from not only from Jobs but exgirlfriends, employees, and rivals, but how deeply informative and insightful is his job going to be?.

He doesn’t seem to be the type who might have evoked a deep and sympathetic discussion with Jobs of any unconventional notions in medicine he might have tried. Instead Isaacson seems likely to have been an extension of all the family friends and colleagues who are now revealed to have put great pressure on Jobs to go the conventional route back to health as fast as possible, despite the familiarity he must have worked up in forty interviews listening to Jobs reminisce up till nearly his end.

We say that as a preamble to one key fact which has emerged which is that Isaacson is reporting in his book that Jobs avoided surgery at first for nine months in favor of treating his ailments with some kind of nutritional approaches and later said he regretted the delay in performing surgery to excise his pancreative cancer.

Sixty Minutes features Jobs on tape

This emerged tonight in the interview Isaacson gave Sixty Minutes tonight (Sun Oct 23) to promote what is surely going to be a blockbuster best seller. It follows the Times review of his book on Friday, headed as Making the iBio for Apple’s Genius, by Janet Maslin, who told us that Isaacson suggests that the cancer might have been better treated by earlier surgery:

“Of course the book also tracks Mr. Jobs’s long and combative rivalry with Bill Gates. The section devoted to Mr. Jobs’s illness, which suggests that his cancer might have been more treatable had he not resisted early surgery, describes the relative tenderness of their last meeting.”

That’s apparently what Isaacson concluded from what Jobs told him.

Now in the 60 Minutes interview voiceover Steve Kroft states that “the cancer which eventually killed him was discovered accidentally when he was checked in 2004 for kidney stones. The CAT scan showed a shadow in his pancreas which turned out to be malignant. ”

Isaacson says “they did the biopsy and it was very emotional but that turned out to be good actually they said it was a slow growing cancer one of the 5% of pancreatic cancers that can be cured. But he didn’t do it straight away. He tried to treat it with diet and he goes to a spiritualist. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn’t get an operation.”

“Why didn’t he get an operation straightway?” asks Steve Kroft.

“I asked him that and he told me “I didn’t want my body to be opened.” And soon everybody was telling him to quit trying to treat it with all these roots and vegetables and just get operated on. But he does it nine months later,” replies Isaacson with a slight grimace at the unfortunate mistake Jobs made.

“Too late?” asks Steve Kroft.

“Well I assume it’s too late because by the time it was operated on it had spread to the tissues around the pancreas.”

Was Jobs a fool for avoiding surgery?

“How could such a smart man do such a stupid thing?” asks Steve Kroft.

The answer, for Isaacson, is that Jobs believed too much in “magical thinking”:

“You know I think he kind of felt that if you ignore something if you don’t want something to exist you can have magical thinking. And it had worked for him in the past. He regretted some of the decisions he made and certainly he felt that he should have been operated on sooner.”

Clearly Isaacson has not the first clue that mainstream research is now continually justifying trying phytochemicals on cancers of all kinds including pancreatic, rather than going the conventional route, especially in pancreatic cancer, which is 95% fatal in nine months or less.

The voice over commentary by Steve Kroft goes on to say “Jobs continued to have cancer treatments even though he was telling everyone he had been cured. And that is what people believed until 2008.”

“All of a sudden” says Isaacson “people are gasping because he looks so frail and has lost so much weight. Suddenly people are realizing that he is very sick again. He denies it publicly. He puts out things that there is a hormonal imbalance which has a tiny kernel of truth to it because his liver was secreting the wrong hormones but it wasn’t just a hormonal imbalance it was that the cancer had gone to his liver. He was trying to deny it to himself and he was denying it to the public and this was a (business) problem of course.”

Steve Kroft goes on to note that Jobs finally took a leave of absence and in March of 2009 received a secret liver transplant in Memphis that wasn’t publicly acknowledged until three months later. “The doctors that did the operation could tell the cancer had spread.”

Isaacson says the last two and a half years were “a painful, brutal struggle and he would talk often to me about the pain.”

Given that his liver was a transplant after the first one was ruined by years of chemotherapy, and his immune system was switched off by immune suppressing drugs after that transplant, and that his pancreas was damaged, so his whole digestive system could hardly handle protein, it is painful to contemplate what Jobs must have gone through.

Steve Kroft ended this topic of discussion with these final lines before moving on: “Jobs survived nearly eight years with his cancer and in his final meeting with Isaacson in mid August still held out hope that there might be one new drug that could save him.”

Times’ earlier hints

That’s the last of the 60 Minutes material on Jobs’ illness and its treatment. A couple more points may be gleaned from the Steve Lohr Times piece on Friday based on their advance look at the book, however.

This is Jobs Tried Exotic Treatments to Combat Cancer, Book Says The subhead is “Steve Jobs’s early decision to put off surgery and rely on less conventional treatments angered and upset his family”.

Steve Lohr’s report centers on the news that Jobs’ attempt to use alternative nutritional treatment for his supposedly safer and slower moving version of the normal quickly fatal pancreatic cancer ran into heavy disapproval from his friends and colleagues, who mounted a continual barrage of advice to stop that nonsense (spelled “nonscience”) and undertake standard surgery and chemo sooner rather than later.

Both sides were presumably under-informed of the latest mainstream research on phytochemicals, even though Jobs is said to have researched the conventional techniques of intervention very intensively once he took them up, about nine months after his diagnosis, when he opted for surgery.

In the mind of mainstream medical science congregationist Timesman Steve the choice was evidently one between “exotic diets” and “cutting-edge treatments”, which betrays a fairly universal bias in medical reporting against alternatives in medicine and surgery, one very misleading to readers.

In his last years, Steven P. Jobs veered from exotic diets to cutting-edge treatments as he fought the cancer that ultimately took his life, according to a new biography to be published on Monday.

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled….

He paid $100,000 for instance to have not only his genes sequenced but the genes of his cancer.

Although the broad outlines of Mr. Jobs’s struggle with pancreatic cancer are known, the new biography, by Walter Isaacson, offers new insight and details. Friends, family members and physicians spoke to Mr. Isaacson openly about Mr. Jobs’s illness and his shifting strategy for managing it. According to Mr. Isaacson, Mr. Jobs was one of 20 people in the world to have all the genes of his cancer tumor and his normal DNA sequenced. The price tag at the time: $100,000.

DNA sequencing to combat cancer to help target drugs? In this and other ways the piece suggests that misinformation and misunderstanding were rife in the thinking of Jobs and his advisers. Apparently none of them had ever heard of PubMed, let alone used it:

In October 2003, Mr. Jobs got the news about his cancer, which was detected by a CT scan. One of his first calls, according to the book, was to Larry Brilliant, a physician and epidemiologist, who would later become the head of Google’s philanthropic arm. The men went way back, having first met at an ashram in India.

“Do you still believe in God?” Mr. Jobs asked.

Mr. Brilliant spoke for a while about religion and different paths to belief, and then asked Mr. Jobs what was wrong. “I have cancer,” Mr. Jobs replied.

Mr. Jobs put off surgery for nine months, a fact first reported in 2008 in Fortune magazine.

The power of underinformed pressure

The pressure on Jobs from family and friends was unrelenting, it is clear. As usual, all those with unresearched faith in conventional medical treatment who had themselves fallen into its hands were utterly convinced of the futility of evading its clutches:

Friends and family, including his sister, Mona Simpson, urged Mr. Jobs to have surgery and chemotherapy, Mr. Isaacson writes. But Mr. Jobs delayed the medical treatment. His friend and mentor, Andrew Grove, the former head of Intel, who had overcome prostate cancer, told Mr. Jobs that diets and acupuncture were not a cure for his cancer. “I told him he was crazy,” he said.

Art Levinson, a member of Apple’s board and chairman of Genentech, recalled that he pleaded with Mr. Jobs and was frustrated that he could not persuade him to have surgery.

His wife, Laurene Powell, recalled those days, after the cancer diagnosis. “The big thing was that he really was not ready to open his body,” she said. “It’s hard to push someone to do that.” She did try, however, Mr. Isaacson writes. “The body exists to serve the spirit,” she argued.

When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science, he became an expert — studying, guiding and deciding on each treatment. Mr. Isaacson said Mr. Jobs made the final decision on each new treatment regimen.

The DNA sequencing that Mr. Jobs ultimately went through was done by a collaboration of teams at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and the Broad Institute of MIT. The sequencing, Mr. Isaacson writes, allowed doctors to tailor drugs and target them to the defective molecular pathways.

A doctor told Mr. Jobs that the pioneering treatments of the kind he was undergoing would soon make most types of cancer a manageable chronic disease. Later, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson that he was either going to be one of the first “to outrun a cancer like this” or be among the last “to die from it.”

That is all we learn from the Times so far. Notice the implied definition of alternative treatment as nonscience that Steve Lohr slips in:

“When he did take the path of surgery and science, Mr. Jobs did so with passion and curiosity, sparing no expense, pushing the frontiers of new treatments. According to Mr. Isaacson, once Mr. Jobs decided on the surgery and medical science…..”

Was Jobs ever told of recent pancreatic cancer research?

So did Jobs ever learn of the simple edible and non toxic antidotes which the latest mainstream research points to?

All we know is that a knowledgeable colleague forwarded a piece on the topic, a column on mainstream studies of the potential of phytochemicals in medicine and in particular pancreatic cancer, to a family member who happened to be a photograph gallery owner who knew Jobs through selling him hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Ansel Adams and other prints, but never heard of any response to that overture. The column was forwarded in email and not marked up in red pencil which would have been ideal, so whether Jobs actually noticed the section referring to his specific ailment is unknown, since it was buried at the end of the piece.

More info needed for further analysis

Unfortunately therefore the discussion so far has to rest on speculation, but we are obtaining a copy of the book to see what more can be gleaned from Isaacson about how Jobs handled his treatment, secretive though he may have been.

In that further discussion we can review the prime specimen of establishment rationalization posted by a junior member of the Harvard Faculty on Quora, which blames alternative medicine as responsible for Jobs not getting ideal treatment.

However, the Quora piece is rife with what look to us to be logical inconsistencies so we look forward to deconstructing it and then summarizing what the universally neglected mounting current lab research on cells and mice has to offer on the topic of whether it could have saved Jobs from surgery, chemo and eventual death.

Let’s hope that he wasn’t despatched early by medical myopia

Supersalesman and tech market seer Steve Jobs is, sadly and predictably, dead from pancreatic cancer, as long expected. Kept alive for seven years by the barbaric techniques of modern medicine when faced with a particularly difficult form of cancer – surgery, poison and eventually a liver transplant – he finally died under the assault. Let’s hope that the alternative that is increasingly pointed to by recent decades of stunningly promising research into how phytochemicals – plant chemicals – aid the body in fighting off cancer was not neglected by his doubtless expensive medical consultants.

Did Jobs benefit from phytochemicals?

One might expect it probably was, of course. Awakening the medical profession to what may be the most important modern trend in medicine – how a range of chemicals extracted from food have proven especially over the last five years to be strongly effective against human cancer cells in the lab and in mice – is proving an uphill battle, even though a flood of research has appeared in mainstream peer reviewed journals in the last ten years.

Perhaps, however, it wasn’t . Perhaps Steve Jobs was helped by his own core character as instinctive heretic, if not also by good advice from his wife and other people who can be wiser than the professionals. We understand that Jobs was interested in alternative medicine, and did take advantage of what some Chinese herbalists had to offer. This may have helped keep him alive far beyond the three to six months his doctors originally forecast that he had left of life when he was diagnosed. Luckily, it was a rare kind of pancreatic cancer which forms about five per cent of the cases of this terrible killer, one which responds to surgery. Surviving seven years is evidence that he benefited from good treatment, though, as well as luck.

The great heretic, flipping the world of personal tech into art

It’s not surprising if Jobs was one of the few to take a look at what alternative medicine might have to offer him when he fell sick. After all, Jobs spent his life trying to move beyond the norm, forcing the merely talented to craft the ideal consumer tool from the geek idea of computers as digital engineering incarnated. He made ugly and unreliable products user friendly, beautiful to look at and reliably useful in ways which seem beyond the engineering and technical talent to concieve, for some reason. Even the marketing arm of computer companies seemed to think of this aspect only after Jobs led the way, and only Sony and eventually HP seemed able to compete in looks, though, saddled as they are with Bill Gates’ atrocious mishmash of an operating system, never caught up to Jobs in the realm of reliable and easy use.

Why was this range of virtues mysteriously beyond the leaders of other technology companies and their marketing people before Jobs showed the way, and even after he did so? The source of this odd design blindness to what now seems so obvious remains a bit of a mystery, but it must reside somewhere in the blocked mental arteries of of the group mind. Jobs thought for himself, on behalf of the average user. People who think in group terms cannot think independently very well, it seems.

So it wasn’t surprising to hear Jobs at the 2005 Commencement at Stanford where he gave the address saying the following:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Jobs was not a genius in mind but in action

What kind of genius did this man have who changed the personal world of, ultimately, billions of people? The questions which Jobs asked were not after all rocket science. We remember ourselves asking them in print and on the Web as early as the mid nineties. Why shouldn’t computers be easy to use? Why shouldn’t they be reliable and easy to tinker with? Why shouldn’t their cases be colorful, chic and even simply beautiful in the manner desired, consciously or not, by all sane people, and most especially by women?

These are not difficult questions to pose and Steve Jobs was not a genius for asking them. What was unique was his strength of purpose in bringing them about. Like all pioneers and visionaries who try to move the mass of conventional me-too thought in any arena, he faced a great edifice of inertia born of lazy thinking, self-interest and the frequent assumption in a complex field that if consumers didn’t know better or demand better then there wasn’t any point in exerting oneself in one’s job to take the initiative and create something more attractive and usable. The problem is not only complacency but that most of us are sheep frightened by and antagonistic to change, which is a threat to established comfort.

Jobs knew how to put himself in the place of the buyer and work out what that buyer might grow fond of without that buyer telling him or even knowing what it was that he would learn to like, once he experienced it. Jobs spurned focus groups for that reason. He liked to say that “it is not the job of the consumer to tell us what he wants. He doesn’t know until he sees it.”

Or as Jobs explained to Fortune, as quoted by James Stewart in his fine Times piece today, How Jobs Put Passion Into Products:

Mr. Jobs made no secret of his focus on design; in a Jan. 24, 2000, interview, Fortune magazine asked if it was an “obsession” and whether it was “an inborn instinct or what?”

“We don’t have good language to talk about this kind of thing,” Mr. Jobs replied. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. … That is the furthest thing from veneer. It was at the core of the product the day we started. This is what customers pay us for — to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

Jobs the supreme heretic

The trait that you believe you know exactly what the world needs and wants is of course is shared by many crackpot inventors who are sure they know what the world needs, even if they show no sign of wanting it when offered, so it was truly Jobs genius to be correct in his forecasts, especially, for instance, we think, in dreaming up a product such as the iPad when Microsoft’s clunky tablet computers had failed so dismally six or seven years earlier. Jobs must surely have recognised the future of the iPad notion once he encountered the touch screen, which makes all the difference. But why didn’t others? Incidentally, the capacitive touch screen was invented at CERN in 1976, and that home of the LHC also boasts that it was where Tim Berners Lee invented the Web – on a NeXT screen!

In fact there is a video that Apple produced in 1987 that shows that even then Jobs was mapping out a path to the iPhone, the iPad, and Siri, the voice activated personal assistant which is making a hit on the latest iPhone 4. It is quite remarkable to see how early Jobs envisaged what he brought about later.

The originator who could lead

Steve Jobs was a man who not only followed his own star, but brought the world along with him into a new era where the resources of the Web could be as portable as an iPhone. To us he is the epitome of the maverick, the heretic, the originator who comes up with something new because he has freed himself of the chains of group think.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

What was truly marvelous though was the fact that he could combine all the roles needed – not only the independent minded visionary, but the team player who could lead a talented group to win the marketing world series without losing sight of his personal dream.

Here is the whole of that speech which he gave at the Commencement at Stanford in 2005:

((Click the Show tab; if you want to print out, it will print out the post including whatever Shows, but not if it is Hidden again by clicking the Hide tab at the end))

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.
Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html