Science Friday - P-Hacking, Quackery, Growing Greater Grains. Mar 2, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

If you like to read about the psychology around food and eating, you’ve probably come across stories based on research from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, directed by Brian Wansink. In an article published this week by Buzzfeed News, science reporter Stephanie Lee reports on a history of shoddy research practices in the lab, and a chain of emails that indicates a practice of “p-hacking”—a statistical wrangling of data aimed at making a borderline result appear to be statistically significant. Lee discusses her reporting with Ira, and talks about the challenge of reproducibility in scientific research. Having trouble warding off that weight gain? Have you tried taking some tapeworm eggs? Got a troublesome toothache? Consider cocaine. Swollen joints? Slather on some snake oil. In the new book Quackery:A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, authors Lydia Kang and Nate Pederson survey a medicine chest’s worth of quacks through the ages, and employ modern-day scientific evidence to evaluate their efficacy. The grain sorghum might not seem familiar to many in the U.S.—but it’s the fifth most important cereal grown in the world. It’s a common human food ingredient in Africa and parts of Asia, and is often used in the U.S. for animal feed or for ethanol production. Now, researchers report that they’ve identified the pathway in one mutant strain of the grain that allows that variety to produce three times as many seeds per plant as regular sorghum. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A bit later in the hour, medical cures from the olden days like the radioactive jockstrap. And no, don't try that one at home. But first, if you like to read about the psychology around food and eating, you've probably come across stories based on research from the famous Cornell Food and Brand Lab. Over the years, the lab has published many studies that have caught the eye of the media, including Science Friday. from using a magically refilling soup bowl to help study portion sizes,

to work involving the effect of plate size on meals, to investigating how the pricing of meals and wine affect the perceptions of the people consuming them. But the glass may be half empty. In an article published this week by BuzzFeed News, science reporter Stephanie Lee reports on a history of shoddy research practices in the lab and a chain of emails that indicates a practice of pehacking. That's a statistical wrangling of data aimed at making a borderline result appear to be statistically significant.

Stephanie Lee joins us from KQED in San Francisco. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Can we set the scene first? First, what is this lab? What are some of the studies people would have heard of, for example? Right.

So you've probably heard that eating off a science. small plate makes you feel full or faster, or the shape of your wine glass determines how much you pour into it. So those findings come from Brian Wonsink, and he's the head of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, where he's published hundreds of studies over the years about eating behaviors, how and why we eat. He's very well known, and you've probably seen him on the Today Show or Rachel Ray or read in the New York Times. But more than a year ago, independent researchers started taking a closer look at a little bit of a little bit of a day. at his work. Their names are Tim Vander Z, Nick Brown, Jordan Anaya, James Heathers, and they started finding a lot of errors in things that just did not add up. And he's had to retract six papers,

and he's corrected more than a dozen. To be clear, you're not alleging outright fraud here. So I've been reporting on him for a few months, and recently I got eight years of emails between him and colleagues, interviewed a student who used to work in the lab. And what I found was that For years, they slice and dice low-quality data to get findings that could go viral, that could make headlines. And even though they acknowledged among themselves that their data was weak, they aggressively manipulated it to get findings that they wanted or that sounded interesting to an extent beyond sound scientific practice. One expert told me, this is not science. It is storytelling. And in some cases, there's something called an effort at P-hacking.

And we in the media know a little bit about that, but tell us in a little details of what is P-hacking. Sure. So when a scientist has a hypothesis and they set out to test it in an experiment and they get results, how do they show that their results are real? So a tool that's become widely used in scientific research to show significance is called a P-value. And a P-value is basically the probability that what you found was, in fact, rare. So what's become this universal benchmark is to have a P value that's less than or equal to 0.05. There's not really anything magical about the value 0.05, but it has just become this universal guideline in at least psychology and biology research, that if your results match 0.05 or less, then that's considered a statistically significant result. But if you manipulate data through various means in a practice called P hacking, you can get a value that's at 0.05 or less, but it can just actually be a false positive.

The connection may not actually be real. So we see this being an overwhelming theme in these emails out of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, that desire to get results that are interesting and that match that P value, just echoing over and over. in their research. So, for example, they did a study where they put stickers of Elmo from Sesame Street on apples, and they put them next to cookies, and they had kids choose between them at lunch. And what they hoped would happen was that the cartoon stickers would entice kids to pick the healthy fruit over the junk food. So they did this experiment, and they looked at the data, and the P value was actually 0.0.0. which is, you know, not that threshold that they wanted.

And so they said in an email, if you can get the data and I need some tweaking, it would be good to get that one value below .05. They called the .06P value a sticking point. So they had a result that they wanted to show, and they knew it was statistically not significant, but they wanted to tweak the data to get it below that. In another case, they did an experiment with, and all you can eat, pizza buffet in New York, where they charge some diners $4, some diners, $8, then they asked people how they felt about their meals, and then they collected their data and was looking at it afterwards.

And Dr. Wancing gives the data set to a young scientist from Turkey who's visiting and says, hey, we collected this data, why don't you take a look at it. and he tells her to basically run all these different combinations of tests on it, looking at all these different variables, like between the diners and what they said afterwards. And he says, quote, you know, to squeeze some blood out of this rock. And so in this case, it's not really clear if they even had a hypothesis in mind going into it, but they want to mine the data until they find a connection that is statistically significant and interesting. Yeah, we call the lab following your article and they said that they stand by their research.

How normal is this kind of peahacking and sifting and massaging of data in science? Well, so the scientists who helped me review these emails told me that they think this is pretty egregious. You know, one person said, this is P. Hacking on steroids. Another said Dr. Wansing seems to be a consistent and repeated offender of statistics. But one interesting reaction I've heard since my story was published is that, you know, it's a little bit uncomfortable that what they were doing seemed to be quite egregious, but maybe it's just a deeper degree of something that goes on in a lot of science labs already, just perhaps not to this extent. And what role does the media have here? People like Science Friday, other people who cover these sorts of stories? Yeah, I think what's interesting about this story is that, you know, the practices at the Cornell Food and Brand labs seem to go beyond sound scientific practice.

But what they discuss is they're responding to incentives that affect kind of every scientist. So the hard truth for all scientists is that the more you publish and the more interesting your findings are that you publish, the more likely you are to get rewarded in terms of getting tenure or getting funding or getting covered by the media by journalists like us. And these are real pressures that affect everybody in science. You know, how you choose to respond to it is up to you. But I think that this story should look. hopefully lead to some soul searching on the part of everybody involved in the system. So when universities are deciding who to hire and give tenure to,

not just looking at somebody who's produced a lot of really cool work, or funding institutions, you know, same thing there, or journals deciding to only publish the novel findings that will make a splash in the media when deciding what findings to cover, maybe thinking more critically about what the study actually says and has it been shown by anybody else to be true and how much attention and skepticism to give to it. You know, it's a good point because you know what does not get a lot of attention in science research and we cover an awful lot of it is reproducibility in science.

How difficult it is, first, for example, to apply lab work from mouse studies to humans, which hardly ever, you know, maybe 50% of the time can be translated. And then the fact that if other scientists don't want to do an experiment that someone else has done, because it's just not how we do it, we like to do our own stuff, there is a, this isn't to speak to a larger problem of reproducibility in science. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the unfortunate thing is that, like you said, a scientist is trying to reproduce somebody else's experiment is just,

there's not that much glory in it, very little. And it takes a lot of time and effort, and, you know, the reward is just not really clear for that. And so I think that's starting to change a little bit in, at least in psychology and a couple other fields. Over the last few years, some psychologists have taken it upon themselves to try to replicate some of the field's most popular, you know, widespread findings. And one massive effort was done on this in 2015. They tried to reproduce like 100 experiments and they could only do like less than half of the original findings. So that was kind of a wake-up call for the field.

And I think it's starting to spread to other fields too now where we have to create incentives for scientists to do good research the first time around and then for other scientists to reproduce it on their own terms. And especially now since science is under such pressure, you know, to justify itself, it takes it upon itself, you know, in the public eye, to go out and do these things and be more reliable and to be more honest and transparent about it. Yeah, absolutely. I think that people, hopefully, you know, with stories like this, people, consumers, members of the public, you know, they deserve to hear about science that's reliable and test. and done well and, you know, not just hear headlines like chocolate is good for you or whatever, these single one-off studies.

So where do you go from here? You continue to be the watchdog looking at other things? Well, so, you know, Cornell stands by, or the Cornell Food and Brand Lab stands by its work. Cornell University, the employer is investigating the lab and hadn't said much more than that. So I'm continuing to watch what happens, but there is more happening with the story kind of by the day. On Monday, Dr. Wan Singh issued his sixth attraction for a study. A couple days later, I reported that one of his longtime collaborators, Dr. Colin Payne from New Mexico State University, had left the university for reasons unclear.

And then the joy of cooking, a cookbook, tweeted about it. So it's all been very interesting. Well, Stephanie, thank you for your work and continue to keep. Keep doing it. Stephanie Lee from KQED and San Francisco Science Reporter at BuzzFeed News. Thanks for talking with me today. When we come back a look at some of the cures peddled by snake oil salesmen back in the day, like actual oil made from boiling snakes, by some of our modern medical practices might make future generations cringe. What could they be? You've done some of these. We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with this. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Dead rabbits, crocodile dung, shark cartilage, and grapes, and throw in cyanide there.

What do they all have in common? Believe it or not, those are all cancer cures. People have tried over the years, and no, they don't work unless, you know, termination of life is considered a cure, but that's not what we're talking about here. Quack cancer cures are just the beginning of the silly things humans have tried through the millennia to cure what ails them. there were red hot irons to the forehead. Try it for your headache. You got a wart. You can cure it by touching it with a dead person's finger. Or why not bathe in human blood like Egyptian pharaohs did to treat parasitic infections? These fascinating stories, the history of lengths that people will go to for a cure. They're all detailed in the book Quackery, a brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. Dr. Lydia Kang is the co-author of Quackery, along with them. She's also assistant professor of general internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, and she joins us from KVNO today. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Just want to let our listeners know that we have an excerpt of the book and some classic quack medical advertisements for things like snake oil and cocaine toothache. toothache drops. You want to see them? Go to our website, sciencepriday.com slash snake oil. Science Friday.com slash snake oil. Wow. Dr. King, you opened the book with a chapter on mercury, something I understand you've been fascinated with since you were a kid, those little mercury vials, you push them around on the table, the drop? Didn't we all do that?

I have to. I think everybody has done that. People of a certain age do remember when we used to have a broken thermometer on hand, and we played around with those little bits of quicksilver and thought it was okay. But it turns out it's not okay. It turns out it's not okay. For the most part, it's not okay. Luckily for most of us who played with pure elemental mercury in that way, it probably wasn't too harmful for us. But the way that they used to take it in history wasn't the same. Tell us about that. So for a long, long time, mercury was eaten and used in a variety of ways to treat lots of things.

syphilis was one of the classic diseases that it was used to treat. And most people often took it in the form of a mercury salt. So mercurice chloride or mercuric chloride were two of the different salts that were used. But it had a really horrible effect on the body, which is that it caused mercury toxicity. People would have terrible diarrhea and get these awful sores in their mouths and their stomachs. and sometimes it made them mad as a hatter. That's where he came from, right? Mm-hmm.

That phrase. Absolutely. Mercury was used in the felting industry when they were making these big top hats for a long period of time, and a lot of the people who were involved in the creation of these beaver felts got quite sick from poisoning.

Interesting. Our number 844-7248255, if you'd like to talk with Lydia Kang about poison, Poisonings of percolary or other sort of quackery that goes on. Maybe you still do some quackery. Speaking of which, I was horrified by the ancient Greek treatment for headaches, which seems like it would make things like much worse.

Searing your forehead with a red-hot iron to produce boils and blisters, that's a good thing. Yeah, you know, this was one of the chapters in the book that I think a lot of people were sort of shocked at because I feel like in the movies you've seen people getting bloodletting done or maybe having leeches put on. But cottery, which is taking a red-hot iron or gold or something like that and burning it against the skin, was a treatment that was used for lots of different things. And interestingly, it is used in surgery today. It's just wielded in a very different way. It's electrocottery and it's very finely used and it's for very specific types of actions in surgery like cutting or, you know, cauterizing blood vessel ends. But back then, it wasn't just used in that method.

It was if you were looking, you know, really fatigued and tired and lying in bed, somebody might burn an iron up and down your spine to invigorate you. And might get you out of bed. It definitely got you out of bed. And I'm fairly sure that the fear of the iron was maybe one way that people tried to convince themselves that they were actually not as sick as they thought they were. But, yeah, that was one way of doing it. And that's called actual coterie because you're actually putting a burning hot piece of iron or something on you. There was something called potential coterie, which is where they used acids or occasionally ground up insects like Spanish fly, which would cause these blisters and burn people. Amazing. I know that bloodletting was a cure that lasted for millennia, and you write that barbers in London used to put bowls of blood on their windowsills.

And that's actually the way the barber pole gets some of its coloring from? Yeah, yeah, the barber pole, which it's falling out of favor. You don't see them very much on the street anymore. But it has an ancient history, which is that for a long time, people who were these barber surgeons, they were not the, they were the ones who were actually doing the bloodletting. So the doctor might prescribe removing a pint of blood, but it was the barber surgeon who actually did the work. So they would tie tourniquet around. your upper arm and you would squeeze onto this pole to help, you know, get that back flow of blood

and they would cut the artery, excuse me, cut the vein sort of in the crook of your arm, and it would collect in a bowl. So after the barber surgeon was all done, they would take that bowl, put it out on the windowsill or outside, they would take the tourniquet and any kind of bloody rags, and they'd be drying outside and flapping in the wind, so you'd see these sort of white and red, striped pieces of cloth flapping in the wind with the pole and the bowl. And that is where the barber pole, as it is now,

with the red and white stripes and the little bowl that it sits on. You don't see it as much anymore now, but that's where it all comes from. I'm going to allow a few seconds for our queasy listeners to get off the floor. You might get a little dizzy listening to this. We should have warned you ahead of time.

Well, let's go from the frying pan into the fire and talk about corpses and cannibalism. I was fascinating chapter. Speaking of blood, the pharaohs are bathing in human blood, people snorting dried human blood, making jam out of it, eating body, but I could go on, you know. Oh, this was one of my favorite chapters to write because it was so hard to believe, and yet it was so common. It was a thing that everybody thought that, you know, the human body had this sort of magical power in it. And if you could sort of capture that power at the time when someone died, you could impart that health onto yourself.

So there were different ways that it was done, for example, at executions in England in medieval times. You know, there would be a big gathering of people around the gallows. And after the executioner certified that, you know, the convict was dead, people would go up to the gallows and they would rub their pimples and their sores against these hanging dead bodies. and sometimes, you know, they'd even take their little babies or children that had a little sore and rub it against this dead body because this was how you could cure these skin ailments. In fact, I may have a caller. I think they may have a caller. I don't have a caller on that.

Someone was texting us or writing us that and says, when I was little, people told me if I picked a piece of my ward on my hand and put it on someone's coffin, it would go away. You know what? That is a, that idea of being able to do. draw things away from the body was thought about for a long time as well. And I think the first time I read something like that was when I was a kid, I read Tom Sawyer. And Tom had a cure for warts. And it was something about like cutting the wart and putting the wart on something and you bury it.

And it draws the wart away because of this sort of sympathetic blood. So that idea, magical as it is, was used up to pretty recently. So let's talk about something that that is a little more closer to this century, that's radium, which was hugely popular, right? When it was discovered and everybody wanted to get a little bit of the action with it. He had water crocs and tonics. He even had a radioactive jock strap on Good Bullitton. I was reading that?

Sorry, guys. Yes, that actually did exist. You know, the funny thing about radium is, and I think this reflects a lot on things that happened today as well, is that when Mary Curie helped to discover and isolate radium, it was considered this breakthrough, and people were just really entranced with it. Mary Curie called it, my beautiful radium, and she would carry it around in her pocket, and it would glow in the dark.

And it was found that if you put radium close to a tumor, the tumor would shrink a little. So they thought, well, this is fantastic. I mean, it must be able to cure everything. So people went with it far and wide, and they put it into their water because they thought it would, if they drank it, it would invigorate them and make them young again. They thought that it could restore health of all sorts of different, you know, medical problems. And I feel like I see this a lot today where you have a new, you know, a finding, and people take this sort of one bit of evidence and they kind of go wild with it. And before it really has a chance to be investigated, and I feel like the human race has gotten in trouble a lot of times because of this, and radium is kind of a classic example of that.

But radium treatments still exist today, don't they? Yes, it does. Radium was used a little bit more carefully for the treatment of cancers, and it still is used in certain types of cancers, albeit, you know, instead of the way that people were just sort of throwing in into everything, you know, they've studied it a lot better, and they do understand how it can work a little bit more specifically for very specific things. So, for example, radium, I think it's 223,

is used for certain stages of prostate cancer. It is not used across the board for every kind of cancer in every stage because they know now when it can be used and what the limits are. One of the things, you have so many, it's a wonderful book, and it's so richly illustrated, and I always speak to authors about how beautiful their books. Your book is just beautifully colored. The publishers wanted to spend some money on this book.

It's good to see that. We were just so excited with how well Workman did with trying to be, bring this book into reality. They knew that pictures would make it better, and actually Nate and I did a lot of digging. We found a good number of the illustrations ourselves because we knew when we were doing the research, we were

digging up all these great pictures, and we wanted them to be in the book. And you've uncovered some things. I mean, there's so much in here. I have pages and pages of notes of what to ask you, but some of the things you've answered some questions. Let me go to some of the things that you've answered that I think most of us have wondered about.

For example, have to be careful how I say this. Blowing smoke up people's rear ends was tobacco smoke enema, so to speak? Yeah. That was a thing? It was a thing. In the 18th century, there was thought at the time that tobacco smoke could revive victims of drowning.

And so there was an actual group that was dedicated to making sure they had these kits on the side of the Thames River that contained a bellows and a little thing where you could strike up and, you know, get some tobacco smoking. The institution that was in charge of putting these little kits on the river was called the institution for affording immediate relief to persons apparently dead from drowning, which is probably a terrible mnemonic. So I'm not going to say what it is. But that's what they thought.

They said, you know, someone's almost drowned. They pull your pants down, lift your skirt up, and they get that bellows and try to revive you. So my guess is that if you're actually still conscious, it will freak you out into actually trying to run away from the treatment. But that didn't last for very long. You know, people kind of realize after a while this wasn't the best way to revive people from drowning. But it was used for a while, just hard to believe. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from PRI Public Radio International.

And I'm not just blowing smoke, as they say. That's where the phrase came from. Exactly. I think people sort of realize that it was an effort in futility, so that's where the term came from. But what was the most surprising thing that you came up with then? And you talk about so many things in here. Well, cannibalism and corpse medicine was probably one of the things that I found most particularly disturbing to me. And I think partially because it's so culture-bound, we use other parts of the human body in our medical. treatments all the time now and we don't blink an eye about it. You know, getting a kidney transplant or a liver transplant, these are wonderful gifts,

corneal transplants, blood transfusions, skin, you know, there's so many things that we do and we're all okay with it. And yet we will get really, you know, we'll start to feel a little icky at the idea of breast milk banks. So it's interesting where we draw the line, whereas way back then there was not much of a line drawn at all. But wouldn't we think, in a few minutes we have left, I was talking about things that maybe 100 years from now, people will be making fun of. I think, yeah.

I mean, and one of the things that gets mentioned is our mammograms, for example. I mean, it's sort of a crude thing to do, isn't it? Yeah, it kind of, when you think about it, I mean, this is the best thing that we have to try to catch breast cancer early, and it's been rigorously studied. but there is going to come a time, and I don't know when that time is, when we're going to look back and say, you used to take the tissue and squash it between two plates and get these images to try to find cancer,

when nowadays all you have to do is just we can wave a wand or you have a blood test and you know at birth if it's going to have. I mean, there's just so many other ways that we can't even begin to imagine how we are going to be able to save lives and find diseases early or prevent them, and they're going to look back right now at what we're doing, and they're going to laugh at how crude it was. You talk about the King's Touch, actually, healing people, but you don't talk about faith healers in there or people laying on hands as being a – it doesn't come up.

Is it sort of the same thing, or was that outside of what you wanted to go to? You know, it was a little bit outside of what we wanted to go to because there was a certain amount of religious-based medical treatment that we decided not to touch because it's a pretty delicate realm. What we wanted to do was focus on things that happened far enough in the past that most people could pick up the book and say, wow, that's pretty ridiculous. Why would someone do you do something like that? So the King's Touch, which was going on from, you know, basically like the 1,1,1,200s and

onward, and it kind of died out maybe in the 1800s. people can look back on that and say, well, obviously kings don't have divine power. So it's easier to look back at that and with a big skeptical eye. So, yeah. So if the kings touch some coins, then did it transfer to somebody who picked up their coins? Yeah. So, you know, if you, you know, we're part of the British peasantry, and you were at one of these kings touched ceremonies.

Let's say you had this bad case of tuberculosis and you had scrofula, which is like, you know, sort of this big mass of tuberculosis sort of in your neck, you might go and have a king touch it to sort of have it shrink down or maybe go away, and you would receive this special gold coin that would be dubbed an angel in the image of St. Michael or something like that. And this coin had a lot of power in and of itself. People would take the coin and rub the coin on themselves to try to heal things. And so the king's touch could be imparted to these tokens as well. Speaking with that, Dr. Lydia Kang, co-author.

with Nate Peterson of a really great book, Quackery, a brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. Dunn really executed very, very well. We have an excerpt from the book on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash snake oil, science Friday.com slash snake oil. We'll take over a little break now and come back more with Dr. Kang. Kang.

She's going to stay with us. If you have any questions, our number is always here for you. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Quackery, brief history of the worst ways to cure everything. We'll see if we can get a little bit more into the book after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about the book Quackery, brief history of the worst ways to cure everything with co-author and Dr. Lydia Kang. Our number, if you want to talk about quackery, is 844724-8-25. A few tweets coming in. A tweet from Claire says, my 88-year-old, grandmother broke her arm when she was little. Her mom would rub olive oil on her arm and sit her in the sun for an hour or two with the oil, hoping to keep her arm growing, despite her doctor saying it wouldn't.

It did. Was this a big fad? Did you come across that? That one I don't think we came across as much. There were a lot of people who I've met over the course of this last year who would come up to me at book signings and things like that and tell us what their grandparents used to do or their own parents used to do. And so all these other sort of old-timey treatments are coming out through the cracks, some really interesting ones. And we've heard a couple of recurrent ones like blowing smoke in people's ears to cure earaches and use of mercuricrome for all their cuts and bruises. But that's one I haven't heard about the olive oil and the sun trick. We'll have to write that one down. That's your next book, the follow-up. Let's go to

Berkeley and Ed. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I'd like to mention that for thousands of years, ancient Egyptian women practiced birth control, by the way. They really did by using dried crocodile dung before having sex with their men. That's true fact. Yes, I actually studied that in medical school. I actually did an entire paper on the history of contraception, and that's when I first learned about Egyptians using cross. crocodile dung as a contraceptive. I also learned about using wax, cervical caps, as well as all sorts of other contraceptives, which probably had some usage that was very positive that worked and probably

some that didn't. So it's kind of interesting to see that women, since time out of mine, have been trying to control their fertility. So, yeah, more power to them and us. I don't want to get into the details of crocodile dung at the moment. Let's go back to California, Palo Alto, to Mesa. Oh, actually. Hi there. Oh, hi. First I want to say, oh, actually, no lady is from Osterland, so I want to say congratulations, and I'm so excited for you.

And I also have a question about related to contraception, which is actually more about pregnancy, and the idea of women as ovens. the need to keep people, keep the woman and the baby warm. And I was talking with a lot of friends from Asian countries who we all have traditions where you have to wear things to keep the baby warm while you're pregnant and you have to eat warm food and not have cold food. And a friend from Cambodia said even after the baby's born, they try to keep the mother warm and have charcoal under the bed to make sure that, yeah. And sometimes nowadays, babies actually die from overheating.

And in these Asian countries, it seems like it wouldn't be a problem to stay warm. So why do that? I just wondered where that came from. Yeah. That's interesting. I haven't heard of that one either. Most of the work from the book, for the most part, pulls from Western culture. And so we knew that going into looking into more Asian remedies, it was an entire volume, multiple volumes of books unto themselves.

That one I also hadn't heard of. A lot of the women's health stuff that we found out were from these old texts from the Middle Ages that was supposedly written by a woman, but we're not actually 100% sure about that. And there was a lot of animal medicine in that. So haven't seen as much of the warming or the cooling, but I wonder how much of it also stems from some of the cultural beliefs about heat and cold and what they mean and whether or not they're helpful or harmful. You write in your book about tapeworms for weight loss, but aren't tapeworms and tapeworm extract being legitimately investigated today for things like inflammatory bowel disease? Yeah, the tapeworm thing is really fascinating because in the realm of weight loss, the idea was that if you could eat a tapeworm, then the tapeworm can eat your cake for you and you don't absorb it and you don't gain weight. I remember reading Jane Fonda's book when I was a kid, and she'd mentioned how she'd bought tapeworms to do this. And these ads were from the turn of the century where you could buy these tapeworms to lose weight.

So that doesn't make sense. The tapeworm can't really eat its weight and make you lose weight specifically for that. It can make you sick, and you might lose weight for other reasons. That being said, parasites have been looked at more recently in inflammatory bowel disease. So it's kind of interesting when you think about a lot of people suffering these days from inflammatory bowel disease, and you think about how clean we are these days about washing our hands and not wanting to have parasites and infections. There has been this interesting change over time where we're becoming more clean of a civilization in the West, at least in the United States, for example.

But we're also seeing this huge rise in inflammatory bowel diseases and other diseases such as autoimmune diseases. So is there a correlation? And there is some evidence to suggest that having a parasite in you, that if it doesn't hurt you too much, might actually impart some changes to your gut microflora or your immune response that allows you to not have these inflammatory responses that you might see in inflammatory bowel disease. So there are several studies that are out there that are looking into this. And it's really fascinating to me because I think it also talks a lot about what's going on in the gut microflora, which is a huge area of research that is just exploding right now. You know, if you listen to Science Friday, you know the microbiome is one of our favorite topics. I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today.

This has been a – it's a wonderful book. I mean, it loved reading it. There's so many little nooks and crannies in the book. It's well illustrated. The book is Quackery. A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything by Lydia Kang and Nate Peterson. We have an excerpt of the book on our website and some classic quack medical advertisements for snake oil, cocaine, toothache drops. Go to our website, ScienceFriday.com slash snake oil.

ScienceFrily.com slash snake oil. Thank you very much, Dr. Kang for taking time to be with us today. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. For the rest of the hour, delving into a grain, you might not know, much about, talking about sorghum, unless you're a farmer. It's the fifth most important cereal crop in the world. It's a common human food ingredient in Africa, parts of Asia. In the U.S., it's mainly used for animal feed or for ethanol production with millions of acres of the grain

planted in the U.S. every year. But now, writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers report that they've identified the pathway in one mutant strain of the grain, that allows that variety to produce three times as many seeds per plant as regular sorghum. Doreen Ware, one of the authors of the report is a plant molecular biologist with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service and an adjunct associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory that's out there in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Allen. She joins me by Skype.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. I'm really excited to be here today. Well, we're happy to have you. let's talk about this is fascinating. This just jumped out of me because I'm a plant person, you know? And your study worked on the flowers and seeds of this sorghum plant. It's kind of a grass, and for those listeners who haven't looked up close at some sorghum lately.

But tell us what does it look like? So it basically looks a lot like corn, if you've seen a corn field. But if you look at the top of the plant, that's where the flowers are in sorghum. and the top part of the plant has many different flowers on it. Hundreds of flowers will be on the top of this panicle. But normally in nature, when you look at that panicle, only half of the flowers or less than half of the flowers are normally fertile and make seed.

But what we were able to find out about was that one of our colleagues in Texas, a USDA breeder, was introducing novel genetic variation into sorghum using traditional approaches that readers have been using for many, many years. And what he found in his field were a few of these plants now where the flowers, almost all of them were fertile in that top panicle. And this was really, really unusual.

We never ever see all the flowers being fertile. And by increasing the fertility of that plant, we were able to actually increase the number of grains that that would have. And this is really, really critical because as we're thinking about needing to grow more food with the same amount of land

and less resources to feed 10 billion people by 2050, it's going to be really important for us to think how we might approach this. And increasing the number of seeds on a single plant might be one of those approaches. You say might be because you haven't actually grown all those seeds to see if they might make plants and produce food?

Well, actually, we've been able to grow the plants, but it turns out that in order to grow different varieties of sororium in local environments, you might have to introduce the variation that we've identified and tested out. So what we can do is we can make all those flowers fertile, but we might have to do some additional modifications, for instance, to make the seeds a little larger or to have them be, have them have more of the nutrients and things in those individual seeds. I was really excited to hear that the background that you provided on sorgum, because I think most people aren't familiar with it. And if you think about it, sorgum is a major crop in Africa and it grew up in Africa. And one of the really wonderful things about sorgum is over its lifetime,

it's learned these secrets of how to grow well in hot climates and on really poor soils. And that's going to be really, really important for us here in the U.S. And sorghum, it's also emerging as one of those superfoods. I don't know if you know this or if your listeners know this, but it's gluten-free. You can use it to make flour or beer. You can cook it like quinoa or barley. And it has different colors and the darker black and burgundy varieties have beneficial antioxidants, very similar to what you get for when you eat grapes and cranberries. Can you bake, can you make flour out of it, make bread out of it? Yes, you can. In fact, it's actually used to make bread, and it's also used actually for frying as well. It actually turns out that the coating you get

when you use sorghum flowers really gives you more, you retain more of the moisture inside of the meat or the other products than when you, for instance, would use some other flower types. It also turns out that it's a really versatile crop because not only do we eat the grain portion, either us or as an animal feed, but it turns out that the main body of that plant, that, you know, when you see like the corn stalks in the field, all of that actually can be used for renewable energy to make biofuel. Wow. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International.

everything you've ever wanted to know about sorghum. I mean, you know, we don't talk much about this. Doreen-Weir, plant molecular biologist, is my guess. So the mutation in these plants affects a sort of plant reproductive hormone. Is it in other plants, too? I mean, can we spread the love out here to other plants? Yeah, no, actually, that's one of the things that we're really interested in understanding. So it turns out that the change that we saw was actually,

actually in a gene that regulates other genes that make this plant hormone. And you can kind of think about this gene is like a manager. It tells the other genes when to turn on or when to turn off. And it turns out that plants like animals have hormones. And in this case, when we decrease the amount of hormone that's around, it turns out it makes those flowers fertile now. And when we increase the amount of hormone around, it actually decreases the number of flowers.

And we were able to actually test that hypothesis by taking that new variety and we added external hormone to that plant. And we were able to get it now to make less seeds than what it, less grains on the plant or less fertile flowers than what it was making before. So we understand now this mechanism. And it turns out that when you look at plants, especially closely related species, like the grasses we're talking about, like wheat, like rice, barley, and corn, that a lot of times those genes are, they're using the same set of genes.

But what they might be doing is changing it up a little bit. Maybe they'll leave one out, when and where they might turn them on and off might change, and that's what gives us those different flower architectures. It's that slight shifting the nuances that are happening. So what we now understand is this underlying mechanism of how, how the plant may be changing is fertility. And we can see if that also holds true in some of these other grasses. And the approach that we would use is to look to see if those genes exist.

And then to see if they're turned on and off at similar times in the plants. And so those are things that we're moving forward with right now. Why would a plant evolve to waste energy on making flowers that don't produce fruit? or conversely, you know. That's a really interesting question. And I think if we go back to, where did sorghum originate? So sorghum originated in Africa, and it turns out that it basically grew up in very harsh conditions. And as I mentioned earlier, plants will use the same sort of, you would call them gene modules over and over to make the flower structure.

But it turns out that in sub-Sahara Africa, maybe an adaptive response was not to make as many of the seeds. Because by making less seeds, you would be able to put, for instance, more resources into the seeds that you have. And perhaps those seeds may be more competitive in that very harsh environment. That's just a hypothesis. That's not something we know. But you can see how that, for instance, what we would call fitness, that maybe sorghum initially did make, or what the ancestor that may have made all the fertile flowers,

but it turns out that when it made less, those seeds had a higher fitness level, and perhaps the plants overall were more productive that way in the longer term. So there are different strategies, depending upon the adaptive responses. But we're really interested in understanding some of the other secrets that Sorogam have learned along the way

of how to do well with low water usage and very efficient energy conversion, whether this has to do with the wax the deposition on the leaves or how it does photosynthesis. These are some of the things that it's learned to adapt in that climate and if we can

learn more on how it's done that then we could maybe apply it to some of these other grasses that we think of more often like rice and wheat and see if we can actually train them or have them learn a new trick of how to grow better and eating less water. Thank you. We've run out of it.

This is fascinating. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us on that. Dr. Doreen Ware, plant, Mike, molecular biologist at the USDA's Agricultural Research Service and she's out there in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. B.J. Leiderman composed our theme music. And, of course, if you want to, we're here all week on all kinds of social media. So we're going to try to stay dry this weekend. This nor Easter comes our way.

It's pretty cold and wet outside, so we're heading out. Have a great way. Stay warm. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.