Three articles this month, one on an amazing new implant that allows the blind to see, albeit in low resolution, one on a way of treating auto-immune disorders that I’d long suspected would work, and one about which sorts of people think the most like an economist. Let’s start with the eye implant first.
Using technology to let the blind see again has long been one of the staples of science-fiction, perhaps one best exemplified by the character of Geordi LaForge of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember being amazed a few years back when scientists successfully gave a very crude form of sight to some blind people by essentially using feeding the input of cameras to nerve receptors on their chests. But as far as I know, this is the first example of an actual artificial eye implant.
This visual prostheses is the work of Dr. Eberhart Zrenner of the Retinal Implant AG and the Institute for Ophthalmic Research at the University of Tuebingen. It works only on patients with a particular affliction: retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease which results in the malfunctioning of the eye’s light receptors. The device sits underneath the retina, replacing the damaged receptors, but using the eye’s natural visual processing systems. According to the reports, the three blind test subjects were able to perceive shapes and objects within days of receiving the implant.
Of course, this isn’t a general purpose solution for blindness and the sight it can offer is far from as effective as the real thing, but it’s one of the best examples I think of that we’re living in the future right now and that all of the science-fiction technologies we’ve always dreamed about are slowly coming true one by one.
The next article appeared in Scientific American and is about a novel way of treating an inflammatory bowel disease known as ulcerative colitis. This is an auto-immune disease, meaning that it’s caused by a malfunctioning immune system that overreacts in the presence of specific stimuli. As someone who suffers from skin allergy, this is also a subject that I pay particular attention to. The case is novel because the treatment involves not drugs, but live parasitic worms, and was carried out at the patient’s own initiative rather than prescribed by a doctor.
The patient had in fact researched the work of Joel Weinstock of Tufts University who has pioneered research on helminthic therapy, meaning the deliberate infestation of patients with parasitic worms such as whipworm and hookworm to treat their auto-immune disorders. However, research on the subject is difficult as the US Food and Drug Administration is understandably queasy about the prospect of introducing live worms into humans. So the patient apparently obtained a vial of salty liquid containing over 500 live human whipworm eggs from Thailand in 2004 and slurped it down. Three months later, he consumed another 1,000 eggs.
By mid-2005, the man’s symptoms virtually disappeared and he required almost no medication for his colitis. However in 2008, the number of whipworm eggs in his stool started to dwindle and the symptoms started to reappear. So he consumed another 2,000 eggs and the symptoms went away again a few months later.
The theoretical reason for why this is works is based on what is now called the “old friends” hypothesis, which postulates that the human immune system evolved in conjunction with the various parasites and pathogens that it is supposed to deal with. However, the immune system cannot learn to regulate itself if it is not exposed at them, which is the case in growing up under highly sanitary conditions in industrialized countries. This causes the immune system to malfunction and overreact, resulting in auto-immune diseases. The best evidence that this is indeed true is that auto-immune diseases are much less common in undeveloped countries than developed ones, meaning that treatments of this kind, as unpalatable and unconventional as they seem, should have a good future in rich countries.
The last article is a summary that appeared on BPS Research Digest of a paper by Bryan Caplan and colleagues of George Mason University. This paper builds on earlier findings that the more time a person spends in education, the more likely his or her broader economic views match those of typical economists. Caplan argues that these findings failed to disentangle the effects of intelligence on education as it is already known that those are more intelligent and also those who tend to have more education.
They therefore used data from the General Social Survey, a massive US-based poll of national opinions held every two years, and found that intelligence was itself a stronger predictor of agreement than the time spent in education. It’s still important to note that general intelligence is not the most important predictor if you drill down to specific questions in economics, as for example, it appears that party affiliation, gender and ideology are more important in anti-market questions, but intelligence is simply the single strongest one across all categories of questions.