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Why inaccuracies in Bill Cooper’s influential conspiracy theory book serve as its strength

Thiago Vahia Malliagros
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Why inaccuracies in Bill Cooper’s influential conspiracy theory book serve as its strength

When it comes to writing about the conspiracy theory landscape in the 1990s, the obvious place to start is with Milton William “Bill” Cooper, and his book Behold a Pale Horse. My used copy of the book consists of 500 pages, with 17 chapters and 7 appendices; to begin with, sources for various claims appear at the end of each chapter, but as the work progresses, the citations cease.

The book is usually credited to Cooper, even though large parts of it were not written by him – in fact, chapters 1, 3, 4, 10, 14, 15, and 17, plus all of the appendices, were written by other people, and at other points Cooper introduces material published elsewhere, to which he merely adds some commentary or conclusion.

The book is thus a mishmash of chapters that do not connect; each of them can be read independently of the other. The objective of some of those chapters is that they would be documents that reinforce the author’s central idea that there is a secret cabal dedicated to the destruction of the United States. In fact, the book contains two of the most notorious pieces of conspiratorial writing – one reproduced in its entirety, the other just in selected pieces: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.

The protocols were published in 1903 in Russia, purporting to recount a plan by the Jews to control the world. The fact that the book was a hoax, and a plagiarism of several works, did not stop it spreading throughout the world over the decades following its publication.

The most interesting part of Cooper’s republishing of the text is in the author’s note he includes by way of introduction:

Author’s Note: This is an exact reprint of the original text. This has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word “Zion” should be “Sion”; any reference to “Jews” should be replaced with the word “Illuminati”; and the word “goyim” should be replaced with the word “cattle.”

Cooper clearly understands that the Protocols are an antisemitic work, yet he is happy to use them because the message they contain supports his narrative. So how does he solve this problem? By claiming that the Illuminati manipulated the work, and by asking the reader to replace any terms that have a Jewish connection with conspiratorial “neutral” terms. Other conspiracy authors, such as Stan Deyo in The Cosmic Conspiracy follow the same approach:

The protocols are real; they do exist; and they have been exercised with alarming precision by some group for more than 100 years. They were truly written by the Illuminati… that same Illuminati whose Hermetic code insists on secrecy… and a ‘low profile’. The Jews and Masons have been made the scapegoat for something they have not done… even though some of both groups have at times aided the cause by their own ignorance.

Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy, page 66

What is the advantage of having the Protocols as a work that is part of your canon, given all the baggage the original text carries? Given that text is a fraudulent and a clearly antisemitic document, you’d think that using or referencing this work would be automatically disqualifying, or at the very least, highly problematic. However, this is precisely one of the chief reasons for including such texts, because of a concept outlined by political scientist Professor Michael Barkun, called “Stigmatized Knowledge”:

In the first place, stigmatization itself is taken to be evidence of truth – for why else would a belief be stigmatized if not to suppress the truth? Hence stigmatization, instead of making a truth claim appear problematic, is seen to give it credibility, by implying that some malign forces conspired to prevent its becoming known.

Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, page 28

So, according to this principle, the problematic aspects of a theory become its strength; society rejects the Protocols not because it is antisemitic or even a proven fraud, but because it is actually telling the truth – the truth that They don’t want you to know. And why does the rest of society scorn and criticise the text? Not because it is an incendiary and deceptive piece of propaganda whose aim when it was written was to stoke racist fears and attack minority groups, but because it is a true account of the mendacious plans of an evil group.

There is also another reason to graft texts like the Protocols into books like Behold a Pale Horse: the construction of a canon. As Jovan Byford points out:

To address the tricky issue of evidence, conspiracy writers tend to interpret the world around them through the work of other conspiracy theorists, past and present, and invoke their authority as a substitute for direct proof.

Byford 2011, page 110

Conspiracy theories are narratives claiming that truth has been hidden and suppressed by society. Authors like Cooper will use whatever material they can to prove themselves correct; the more they use, the better, as it creates the notion of a gigantic canon of material that all confirms what he claims.

The second work grafted into Cooper’s book alongisde the Protocols is Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, which shares a very similar structure to the former work, in that the material purported to be extracts of an evil cabal’s plan to dominate the world. The document demonstrates how to carry out an invisible war against North American society, in order to take control of it. Those responsible would be the Elite (Illuminati), the Council of Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group and (of course) the Rothschilds. In addition to telling the reader why this war is being carried out, it out lines the reasons, methods and theoretical aspects of the war – as if the text had been for internal use by the evil cabal, but had been leaked to the general public.

Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars sometimes stumbles and goes beyond what could plausily be accepted to be an “official” document. However, the important thing is the language, and what the text says: that the American government is slowly attacking its population with various techniques in order to pressure and weaken them. In a book like Behold a Pale Horse, this is enough for both the reader and the author to accept, as it confirms what they want to be true, regardless of the structure or logical errors in the texts. Any issues that are too obvious to ignore are easy to deal with: as Cooper stated earlier, they’re just evidence that the text has been tampered with to hide the truth, so the apparent mistakes actually merely prove the text to be true.

This is merely a brief introduction to Bill Cooper’s material in his book; I intend to go into more depth on on the book and its author in future articles.

The Rothschild family, and the modern conspiracy theory industry

Mike Rothschild
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The Rothschild family, and the modern conspiracy theory industry

In my new book, Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, I make a simple hypothesis to do what all conspiracy theories do: apply an easy explanation to a complicated issue. And that simple hypothesis is that almost all conspiracy theories are rooted in antisemitism, and almost all antisemitism is rooted in conspiracy theories.

Essentially, whenever you have a cabal of global puppet-masters sitting in a dark room smoking cigars around an oak table deciding who lives and who dies, someone must foot the bill. And that someone, more often than not, is labeled as Jewish. Yes, the conspiracy theorists making the claims often couch their abhorrent ideas in euphemisms and front groups, some of which are actually real and not all that interesting: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Club of the Isles, “foreign bankers,” “European financiers,” and so forth.

But an examination of the corpus of conspiracy theory works almost comes back to the idea that whoever those groups are and whatever their individual focus, many of their members are wealthy Jews who have worked tirelessly for generations to keep their money, make more money, and use that money to leverage unlimited power. And if these powerful Jews themselves have a leader, a “king of kings,” if you will, chances are they’re going to be the Rothschilds, the German-Jewish banking family (to whom I’m not related) that started in the walled Jewish ghetto of Frankfurt only to send its tentacles first into the financial capitols of Europe, then the world.

Antisemitism is an ideology that’s easy to exploit and lucrative to monetise any time there’s a major political upheaval, health crisis, economic disaster, military setback, or degradation of “traditional” social mores – which is to say, all the time. Some of this stereotyping is benign enough: jokes about how cheap Jews are, books extolling “Jewish business wisdom,” and the like. But Rothschild conspiracy theories have been used as fodder for pogroms, riots, blood libel panics, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, and played a critical role in ginning up the hate and bloodlust that made the Holocaust possible.

And they still are. The antisemitism powered by Rothschild conspiracy theories has seen a considerable upswing during and after the years of Trump and Brexit and Orban, with neo-Nazis and antisemites emboldened enough to pass out antisemitic fliers at Broadway shows, harass people on the street, hang anti-Jewish signs on overpasses, vandalise Jewish property, and in some cases, commit overt acts of violence. Celebrities and conservative influencers now openly speak to huge online audiences of how much they love Hitler, and of Jews being a lesser race, disloyal, and controlling banking and entertainment – all accusations consistently levelled at the Rothschild family, but often couched in the past in equivocations like “we don’t hate all Jews, just these Jews.”

The impact of these theories is hard to quantify for the Rothschilds themselves and will remain so – none responded on the record to my requests for an interview for the book. But for the Jewish people, the harm is obvious. Modern Jews are still battling the myths that started in a game of telephone almost 200 years ago. With western antisemitism and acts of violence against Jews and Jewish centres of worship and commerce at a high not seen in decades, it’s vitally important to understand how these theories feed into each other and build upon themselves.

To understand Kanye West ranting on Alex Jones’ show about how great Hitler was requires understanding how Jones himself has spoken many times of the influence that John Birch Society speechwriter Gary Allen’s 1971 book None Dare Call It Conspiracy had on him. Allen’s book, which sold millions of copies by attacking Jewish “insiders” like the Rothschilds, was inspired in part by Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a best-selling conspiracy book funded by the antisemitic and openly pro-fascist poet Ezra Pound. And Pound was inspired by that deathless work of anti-Jewish paranoia, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which took root in the anti-Jewish scapegoating of the post-World War I era.

All these, and so many more, lead us to the place where we are now. And Jewish Space Lasers is a study of that dark and winding path. It is not a biography of the Rothschilds, but of an idea: that Jews control everything, and the Rothschilds are the “Kings of the Jews.” Behind this notion lies a tangled web of absurdities that are equal parts bizarre and deeply sad. And it’s not all conspiracy theories, either. When popular culture has needed a rich family, particularly a Jewish one, to satirise or caricature, writers and artists pick the Rothschilds as a stand in simply because they’re the best known of the bunch.

And yet there are truths found in even the most pernicious myths, some bit of historically accurate arcana that prevents it from being dismissed altogether. The Rothschilds were immensely powerful, with an almost superhuman ability to use that wealth to keep the peace between empires. They certainly didn’t “fund both sides of every war” as alleged by countless internet memes. But houses often found themselves on opposite sides of conflict, such as when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, and while the Rothschilds weren’t selling rifles to both countries, they did have investments and holdings in both countries, forcing hard decisions to be made. Of course, the Rothschilds in no way “funded the Nazi war machine,” as conspiracy cranks like David Icke have claimed for decades. But the Rothschilds did see their Vienna and Paris branches looted by the Nazis, with the head of the Austrian branch held hostage by the Gestapo, only being rescued through the payment of what is likely the largest ransom ever paid out.

All of these facts are easy enough to manipulate into myths, and equally easy to monetise as conspiracy theories. Jewish Space Lasers is my attempt to determine why the false and debunked myths about this family continue to spread, even long after their power and wealth have been eclipsed by others. Why does anyone actually believe any of this, particularly given how thin its supporting evidence is? And what, if anything, can be done to put them to bed for good? After all, isn’t 200 years enough?

Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories by Mike Rothschild is out now, published by Melville House

The strange tale of Bridey Murphy and Virginia Tighe

Sean Slater
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The strange tale of Bridey Murphy and Virginia Tighe

On December 20th, 1798 in a small cottage called The Meadows, near the city of Cork in Ireland, Bridget Kathleen Murphy came into the world. The daughter of Duncan and Kathleen Murphy and younger sister of Blaine Duncan Murphy, she was raised to appreciate the culture of 19th Century Ireland. She was sent to a day school to learn to be a ‘lady’. Her barrister father taught her about the poetry of Keats and the tales of Irish mythology. The family spoke English rather than Gaelic, but used various dialect words, and as she grew up, her mother told her of the local custom of kissing the Blarney Stone at the nearby Blarney Castle.

In 1818 at St Theresa’s Catholic church, Belfast, she married Sean Brian MacCarthy, who, like her father, was a barrister. At their wedding, guests followed the tradition of putting coins into her dress pockets as she danced. Brian (he was known by his middle name) studied, and later took up a role teaching, at Queen’s University in Belfast. Alongside that he wrote articles for the Belfast News-Letter.

The couple remained childless and lived an unassuming, but happy, life in 19th century Belfast. She shopped in various stores, such as Carrigan’s grocery, and bought her clothing at Cadenns House drapers. She saw the advent of gas-lighting to the city, describing the long thin lampposts, topped with beautiful bright lights, dispelling the city’s dark corners.

Sadly, Bridey broke her hip falling downstairs, and she died at the age of 66. Her gravestone was marked ‘Bridget Kathleen M MacCarthy, 1798-1864’ (the ‘M’ standing for Murphy).

Her’s was an ordinary life that would otherwise have remained anonymous, but she remarkably become famous in 1950’s America. Her story was the subject of countless articles, books, hit records and even a major motion picture. Cocktails were created in her name, and revellers would host “Bridey Murphy” themed parties.

In addition, her story would popularise a whole new pseudoscience.

All this despite no real evidence she ever existed.

Virginia Tighe, who was given the pseudonym "Ruth Simmons" (image in public domain)
Virginia Tighe, who was given the pseudonym “Ruth Simmons”

In order to tell the whole story, we need to meet Colorado businessman, Morey Bernstein. As well as running several businesses, he was a keen amateur hypnotist who would use his skills at social gatherings as a party trick, and to help friends overcome some minor ailments. In 1952, at a dinner party at the home of Virginia Tighe in Pueblo, Colorado, Bernstein offered to hypnotise Virginia to discover the cause of her allergies. He regressed her back to her childhood, hoping to determine if there was a long-hidden trigger to her issues, but at some point – to the astonishment of Bernstein and the other party guests – Virginia started speaking in a distinct ‘Irish’ accent, and instead of being an 8-year-old American, claimed to be 8-year-old Bridey, living in Cork in the early 1800’s.

Over the next few weeks and over several sessions, Bernstein tape-recorded his subject’s responses as he pushed her for more information about what he assumed was a past-life. When he had originally studied hypnosis, Bernstein was excited by the work of The Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce. Cayce was the progenitor of so much new-age quackery that he deserves an article here all to himself. He was a fantasist who claimed to have access to angels, dream worlds, and past-lives; he claimed to be able to project his spirit across the universe, that he could see both the past and future, and that he could heal anyone via his powers even if not in the same room. All by putting himself, or his subjects, into a trance-like state.

By Morey Bernstein - Pictures from the LP The Search for Bridey Murphy. Experiment No. 1 Research Recordings No. 101. Released with the book The Search for Bridey Murphy. Doubleday, 1956., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57719095 Photo shows a woman laying on a sofa surrounded by people watching on.
Hypnotist Morey Bernstein with Virginia Tighe

Bernstein assumed that Tighe was able to access this world – and from there, to her previous life – because she was clearly in a trance-like state, and was revealing details that only someone who had lived that life could possibly know.

Virginia Tighe – at the time 29 years old – was born Virginia Mae Reese in Chicago and had never visited Ireland, nor had her family any connections to the country. Her parents were 2nd generation Scandinavian immigrants. For Bernstein, her ability to speak in an authentic Irish accent, and recount facts only someone native to Ireland would know, plus her uncanny ability to recall such intimate and precise details of a life once lived, was proof that she wasn’t lying. 

The story subsequently appeared in the Denver Post in 1954, and Bernstein soon released a book: The Search for Bridey Murphy, in 1956. Tighe had asked to remain anonymous, so he changed her name to Ruth Mills Simmons to protect her identity.

An excerpt from the recordings,
in which Bernstein talks to Bridey
Murphy, via Virginia Tighe

The book caused a nationwide sensation, and the recordings made between them were released on LP records. Soon songs on reincarnation topped the charts, countless comedy routines, magazine articles and similar claims of past lives filled the US media.

As the New York Times put it:

Within months of the book’s publication in January 1956, it created a cultural brush fire, elevating hypnotism into something of a national mania and laying the groundwork for a later surge in interest in reincarnation and channeling.

The rights to the book had already been sold to Hollywood, so the film was released the same year.

Unfortunately, in his rush to release the book, Bernstein had failed to do much fact-checking of Virginia/Bridey’s claims. He had verified that the Belfast News-letter existed, as did Queen’s University. There was a St Teresa’s church in the Belfast phone book, and an English author had confirmed some of the dialect words used by Tighe were indeed Irish idioms, but because prior to 1864, no good records existed, an Irish law firm tasked with searching for any official birth, death or marriage records had stated they were unable to verify any of these details. Despite this the book was published.

Only then were others able to investigate properly, and it became clear that many of the facts did not add up. St Teresa’s didn’t exist until 1911. Catholics in Ireland would not have been allowed to become barristers until Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Her claim to learning about the luck brought by kissing the Blarney Stone as a child was strange, because it only became a popular myth after appearing in a poem in the 1840’s. Strangely, Tighe never mentioned the Great Famine, an event that would have dominated the life of anyone living in Ireland in the 1840’s.

It was soon discovered that Tighe was adopted and her birth parents – with whom she had lived until the age of 3 – were part Irish. A neighbour of her childhood home in Chicago was one Bridey Murphy Corkell, born in Ireland in 1892. In the 1930 census, Corkell’s sister Margaret Murphy was actually living with the Tighes, when Virginia would have been in her teens.

Most scholars now put Virginia Tighe’s story down to Cryptomnesia. This is where a subject may relay, what they believe to be something new, but is in reality a forgotten or long-dormant memory. There’s no accusation that Tighe was lying or making up stories to deceive, and it is not doubted she was in a trance-like state, but Bernstein’s rush to publish without any due diligence led to fleeting fame and a prominence for a pseudoscience that was taken all too seriously, when in reality it was nothing more than an interesting parlour game.

Listening to the recordings it is clear that much of the information is drawn from Tighe at Bernstein’s promptings. In her hypnotic state, she no doubt used faint memories passed onto her from the Irish immigrants she had known in her childhood, weaved with common tropes well known about Irish culture – such as the Blarney stone – to build an imagined life. There is no real evidence that past-life regression under hypnosis has any basis in fact. Despite this it is still offered as a ‘treatment’ by some maybe less than impeccably reputable therapists.

A new study suggests vegan diets are healthier for cats and dogs – but is it really true?

Robyn Lowe
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A new study suggests vegan diets are healthier for cats and dogs – but is it really true?

Back in April 2022, a study made the headlines, after a peer-reviewed analysis of around 2,500 pets found that vegan dogs visit the vet less often and require fewer medications. This week, we have another, with the Guardian stating ‘Cats may get health benefits from vegan diet, study suggests’ and ‘Owners who fed their pet a plant-based diet reported fewer visits to the vet and less medication use’

It certainly sounds amazing – a diet that is healthier for cats and dogs, while also saving the environment, and resulting in fewer vet visits and less medication. However, journalism like this must be taken with extreme caution, as it is so difficult for owners to be able to break down wordy and complex literature to understand the bias and limitations behind them. These studies make it look as if vegan cat and dogs’ foods are the way forward, when in actual fact they should only be undertaken with some serious considerations.

Healthy pets

At the heart of every owner’s decision – especially with the surprisingly emotive topic of diet – is the want to provide the very best for our pets. Many of these decisions can also be based on or swayed by our own bias and beliefs too. This is even highlighted in the study:

Our results affirmed the importance of pet health to guardians. Among 2,596 respondents, health and nutrition was the factor considered most important in purchasing decisions.

Incredibly, when looking at the new cat data, the article written in praise of vegan cat food states:

The study, published in the journal Plos One, surveyed 1,369 cat owners, about 9% of whom reported feeding their cat a vegan diet. When asked about 22 specific health disorders, 42% of owners whose cat ate a meat-based diet reported at least one disorder, compared with 37% of owners of cats on vegan diets.

While this may look positive, although overall the vegan cats scored better on all health indicators – which is expected when you do survey-based client-reported outcomes – it is crucial to note that these differences were not statistically significant.

We are increasingly aware of the global climate crisis and environmental concerns, and as such interest in veganism has grown, with the belief that it may be better for our health, better for animal health and welfare and better for the environment. Naturally, these ideas will also filter into our decision making for our pets, and thus we have also seen a growth in interest in vegan diets for dogs. This is also acknowledged in the study:

Vegan diets are among a range of alternative diets being formulated to address increasing concerns of consumers about traditional pet foods, such as their ecological ‘pawprint’, perceived lack of ‘naturalness’, health concerns, or impacts on ‘food’ animals used to formulate such diets

Dogs are omnivores, and as such can technically live on a vegan diet – and there are many that do. However, we are in the infancy of knowledge about these diets and their effect on health and longevity in dogs – and as such, this kind of bold claims in the media could have far reaching and potentially quite damaging effects if the evidence isn’t presented in an open and transparent way.

Cats, on the other hand, are obligate carnivores, and therefore need specific amino acids to survive. Cats lack the ability to synthesise (make) a number of important nutrients, due to a complete deletion or severe limitation of the enzyme or pathway that makes each nutrient. Important examples include taurine, arginine, and Vitamin A, but there are others.

Conflict of interest

First thing to note is the conflicts of interest – the researcher that devised and led both peer-reviewed studies, Andrew Knight, follows a vegan diet himself, and the study that was funded by the charity ProVeg – a charity whose aim is to raise awareness of the importance of plant-based food for people, animals, and the planet through their campaigns. The study notes ‘This research and its publication open access was funded by food awareness organisation ProVeg International’.

This transparency and the investigation is worthy of praise, as we all have a responsibility to ensure the health of people, animals and our planet – but starting from this ideological position does inevitably introduce a risk of bias towards a plant-based diet in results, and we should bear that risk in mind when we are assessing the results.

Downfalls of a survey

The sample size for the study was good, with 2,639 dogs and 1,369 cats and their owners (termed ‘guardians’ in the study) included, but this study is a self-reported survey, rather than an observational study or randomised controlled trial. Surveys have the potential for issues that may result in the inability to draw robust conclusions from data received and analysed, and this study was no different, with a number of potential downfalls.

Respondent Profile

Of the 2,610 human respondents who provided their sex in the dog study, 92% (2,412) identified as female. Similarly, in the cat study of the 1,399 human respondents who provided their sex, 91% (1,269) identified as female, and only 9% (124) as male. This is heavily skewed, and may indicate that respondents aren’t wholly representative of the general pet owning population.

Many of the respondents also had an existing interest in vegetarianism or veganism, with vegan (22%, 586), reducetarian (omnivore reducing animal product consumption) (21%, 567), and vegetarian (10%, 266) making up 53 % of respondents in the dogs study. In the cat study the diet choice of the humans respondents were as follows; omnivorous (35%, 500), vegan (26%, 372), reducetarian (omnivore reducing animal product consumption) (22%, 318), vegetarian (10%, 146) and pescatarian (consuming fish but no other meats) (5%, 72). This is significantly higher than the estimated 7% of the UK population who are currently vegan, and could have affected results due to potential bias.

Sample Issues

In the study, there was a much larger sample size for conventional diet compared to vegan, which could introduce some uncertainty in the results. For the 2,536 dogs in the first study, dog guardians reported their dogs were on one of three main diets: conventional meat (1,370–54%), raw meat (830–33%), and a vegan Diet (336–13%). In the cat study, 91% reported a meat-based diet, with 9% reporting a vegan diet.

When looking for robust data to support a conclusion, ideally there should be no significant difference between the groups being compared – so a larger sample size of vegan-diet animals would be less prone to outlier results, and will hence provide more accurate results.

Age range

In the cat group, it is noteworthy that at 6.24 years, the average age of cats in their sample fed vegan diets was nearly two years less than that of those fed meat-based diets, at 8.14 years, and that difference was significant. This is important, because younger cats may have decreased risks of certain health disorders, meaning the cats in the vegan group may have naturally reported less age-related health issues, simply because they are younger, not because they are vegan.

The dogs and cats weren’t on an exclusive diet

Another limitation to the study was that these diets were usually not fed exclusively – as might occur within a controlled study in a research institute. Of the 2,536 dogs in the three main diet groups, 76% received a variety of treats at least once daily, and 37% were also regularly offered dietary supplements. In the cat study the author noted ‘The researchers could not rule out the cat’s obtaining meat through other means’.

Outdoor V indoor

When assessing the impact of diet, it is also important to control for other significant variables in the compared populations, that might otherwise impact on the results. Yet, as the Guardian noted:

The researchers could not rule out the cats obtaining meat through other means, but said that this was unlikely to influence the findings. “Most of the cats on vegan diets were indoor cats,” said Knight. “They weren’t going outdoors and hunting. It could’ve been for the other ones that there was some supplemental hunting going on.”

This is certainly relevant, because while the researchers feel they could rule out vegan cats sneaking unseen meat into their diet, the meat-based cats were more likely to be outdoor cats – which means they might be more likely to need veterinary visits from the injuries and trauma that’s often associated with their outdoor lifestyle. Indoor cats are far less likely to get into fights, or to encounter traffic, or to pick up parasites and some diseases, which could account for why they’re less likely to need that visit to the vet.

Certain ideologies mean you are less likely to visit a vet – at all!

We know that certain ideologies around human health can make people less likely to visit a doctor or less likely to access conventional medicine and experience poorer patient outcomes – and this can be seen in their animals too.

This theory is noted by the researchers who discuss it in regard to health checks. The study suggested that routine health checks are normally conducted annually, whereas multiple veterinary visits within a single year may sometimes indicate a health problem. The study was interested in those dogs who saw veterinarians more than once in the previous year.

In their survey, they found that a larger number of dogs fed on a raw meat diet did not see a veterinarian at all in the last year, compared to the other two dietary groups, and there were more raw-fed dogs who had not seen a vet at all, than in the other groups. But not visiting a vet does not always equate to the animals being healthier – it might just mean they were not getting any professional care. Guardians feeding raw meat diets also had lower neutering rates – it might just be that such guardians are less likely to seek, or to comply with, veterinary advice and routine preventative healthcare advice.

 The researchers even acknowledge this:

there is reason to believe that guardians of dogs fed raw meat are less likely to visit veterinarians, for reasons not directly related to the health of their animals. It is known that those who feed a raw meat diet are less likely to seek advice from their veterinarian, and more inclined to gather information from other sources, such as online resources which vary greatly in their reliability. The perceived opposition of most veterinarians to the feeding philosophy and choices of guardians feeding raw meat diets, may make these people less trusting of veterinary advice, and less likely to visit veterinarians, in general. This is likely to have altered this apparent general health indicator, for reasons unrelated to the health of these dogs.

The researchers fail to note that this phenomenon may also be seen in the vegan group, who also had a higher percentage than conventional meat group for not seeing a vet at all, and could also be down to similar ideologies seen in the raw feeding group.

For example, in the vegan group there was an increased risks of internal parasites in dogs – the vegan lifestyle adhered to by such guardians commonly involves a commitment to minimising harm to living creatures, and it is possible some vegan guardians consider internal parasites to be living creatures deserving of consideration, reducing their use of anthelmintics (de-wormers). Or it may just be that the owners following a vegan diet might also have an aversion to pharmaceutical products, leaving their pets at risk of parasites. The ideological choices of owners can filter down and have serious implications for the health of their pets.

Personal Bias of Respondents

Personal bias can also sway results when obtaining survey results. We already know that when surveys are distributed, we can often experience a bias where people interested in that particular topic are more likely to respond, as they are passionate about the subject. This means that personal bias of respondents can lead to their over-representation within results, in what is known as ‘selection bias’.

Pet diet is actually a very emotive topic and can be a source of much angst – as such those with a particular passion or interest in their pet’s nutrition may have been more likely to respond to this survey.

To have personal biases is to be human – we all hold our own subjective world views, and are influenced and shaped by our experiences, beliefs, values, education, family, friends, peers and others – but if we want to make robust scientific conclusions, we need to find ways to eliminate as much of the effects of that bias on the results as possible.

Unconscious Bias

Another source of potential bias when relying on respondent’s answers, is unconscious bias. This could occur if a guardian using a conventional or unconventional pet diet expected a better health outcome as a result, and if this expectation exerted an unconscious effect on their answers about pet health indicators.

The caregiver placebo effect is also an unconscious issue that is seen in owners – essentially, as the owners have faith in a treatment, they are self-motivated to perceive a notable benefit in their pets, even if the animal is not actually clinically any better. This effect can be strong – it can be as prevalent as 39.7% in owners – and it works in combination with a number of other factors.

When guardians were asked for their own assessments of their dogs’ health status there was a shift of roughly 5% in all groups toward considering dogs to be healthier than veterinarians were expected to rate them – this suggests that owners are not objective at assessing their dog’s health status. It is conceivable that vegans, or even the respondents following other dietary groups, such as omnivores, might have had greater subconscious expectations of good health, when animals were fed diets similar to their own, and inadvertently adjusted their assessments and their answers accordingly.

Diet change to ‘therapeutic diets’

In the survey, if a dog had to move onto a ‘therapeutic’ diet, then the dog guardians were asked to respond about the diet they were previously on. Again, raw-fed dogs were less likely to do this, perhaps for some of the reasons outlined above. However, there were significant differences in likelihood of subsequent progression onto a therapeutic diet – dogs initially fed vegan diets had more than three times the risk of this outcome (needing to be changed to a therapeutic diet), compared to those initially fed raw meat.

In the feline study, cats fed a vegan diet had, on average, 56.5% lower odds of progressing onto a therapeutic diet. This was not a statistically significant finding, but it also may have been affected by guardians feeding vegan diets being reluctant to progress their cats onto therapeutic diets, if those therapeutic diets were not also vegan.

Encouraging but more data is needed

The results of this study are encouraging for the potential of a new and complete dietary choice for owners that also allows them to maintain their belief system while having the joy of pet ownership.

However, despite a lot of ongoing research in the field of vegan dog and cat diets – and these papers add to the body of evidence supporting its benefits – there is currently a lack of robust data mapping the long-term health consequences of feeding a vegan diet to a large number of dogs over many years. As such, evidence such as the Dilated Cardiomyopathy in diets using grain-free recipes and pea and legume proteins could shed more light into the potential inadequacies of such protein sources. In cats, nutritional deficiencies in vegan foods could result in secondary nutritional hyperparathyroidism, thrombocytopenia, impairment of platelet aggregation, DCM development and more.

Previous data found that laboratory analyses of the four main commercial vegan cat and dog foods showed that none of them met all of the nutritional recommendations of FEDIAF and AAFCO (2019) for the species for which they were intended, prompting the BVA to respond:

While on paper a vegan diet for cats may include supplements or alternatives to animal-based protein, for example, there is no guarantee that these would be bioavailable to the cat or that they wouldn’t interfere with the action of other nutrients. That is why robust, peer-reviewed research is needed to ensure that non-animal protein sources can meet the pet’s dietary requirements.

Despite what you might read in the media and on social media, you should never rush into a vegan diet for your cat or dog, and if it is something you are considering, be sure to seek the input of a veterinary nutritionist, who can help guide you appropriately to ensure the health and welfare of your pet.

Headlines about “talking” fungi raise the question: Do we really discover languages?

Georgy Kurakin
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Headlines about “talking” fungi raise the question: Do we really discover languages?

Humanity has for a long time been fascinated by the question: “Is there language out there?” It is one of the most intriguing questions, along with “Is there life out there?”.

Learning the animal languages is an eternal dream of mankind, reflected in beloved fairy tales and fiction — C.S. Lewis’s Narnia is inhabited by speaking animals, and Harry Potter speaks parseltongue, the serpent language. However, most animals prove to have no complicated communicative system that could resemble human language. Our searches for language in animals have been limited to simple signals, only some of which may be assigned with a kind of meanings (as the screams for “eagle”, “leopard”, and “snake” in vervet monkeys).

Various fungal bodies with electrodes inserted
Andrew Adamatzky, a computer scientist, inserted electrodes into fungal bodies to record electrical activity of the hyphae. It was found to be very similar to the activity of human nerves, but can we describe this as language? Image credit: Andrew Adamatzky/Royal Society Open Science/CC-BY 4.0

But recently, two similar results on very dissimilar organisms were published. Both species have been mathematically proven to communicate with shorter signal sequences (“words”) that can be combined into longer sequences (“sentences”). The most intriguing thing is that these signals have different physical nature: if in the case of chimpanzees, they are good old-fashioned vocalisations, whereas fungi build “words” and “sentences” from the electrical bursts of cell membrane potential. These bursts are highly similar to action potentials in human neurons which are the basis of electrical signalling in the nervous system. 

While press-releases and “popular science” outlets reported on the findings with eye-catching headlines, could it actually be true that we have revealed language in chimpanzees (and in fungi)? I think that at least, we cannot say for sure.

A similar finding springs to mind immediately: the “language” of dolphins. Their communication is excessively characterised and very complicated. It is often regarded as a language in science fiction: the “dolphin language” is a central element of the plot in The Dolphins of Pern by Anne McCaffrey and in Dolphin Island by Arthur C. Clarke. In Visitor from the Future by Kir Bulychev, studying ‘dolphin language’ is even a vacation task for school children. This reflects the enduring interest in dolphin communication since the 1960’s.

However, for such a long time nobody could prove exactly that this communication system is a language. Some mathematical attempts to do it face a lot of criticism from the scientific community. For more than a half hundred years of extensive research we have known that bottlenose dolphins use personal signatures similar to human names — but this is the only deciphered part of their “conversations”. This is rather insufficient — for example, individually specific calls have recently been reported in elephants, but one will need a very luxuriant imagination to suspect them of having a language. This is the reason why today’s zoologists keep avoiding the term “language” regarding dolphins and speak about their “communication system” instead.

A bottlenose dolphin rising out of the sea
This bottlenose dolphin is likely to have their own name, but does it know any other words and phrases as we know them? Image credit: NASA

This problem of distinguishing between communication systems (a more common entity) and language (a specific kind of communication system) is crucial also in the case of the “fungi language” and “chimpanzee language”. The main challenge is the absence of a definitive set of criteria which can be checked mathematically. Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, PhD in Linguistics, Researcher in DH CLOUD Community, comments:

In both articles, the word “language” is used in the sense of “system of signs”. Semiotic scientists of the 1970s actually liked to describe “languages” of bees, dolphins etc. from this perspective. Within the same meaning, one can discuss  programming languages and even air traffic control language which is the set of clear univocal signals, too. To what extent these “languages” exhibit properties of a natural language — for example, ambivalence, redundancy, generativity, different language functions beyond the information transmission function — it is highly questionable. Many philosophical articles have been written about these properties of human language, and one cannot just up and find Top 10 properties of the human language anywhere.

The most known attempt to enumerate properties of human language was made by American linguist Charles F. Hockett. He listed multiple “design features of language”. Seven most principal features mentioned in modern textbooks are: (1) mode of communication, (2) discreteness, (3) interchangeability, (4) cultural transmission, (5) arbitrariness, (6) displacement, and (7) productivity. Now, a half century after Hockett’s works, some researchers do not agree with him, but cannot offer any definitive set instead. As a result, we don’t have any criteria to check computationally.

This leads to a situation where, in a best case scenario, authors check the statistical characteristics of a studied communicative system against the set of criteria they prefer or even postulate themselves (as in the case of “chimpanzee language”). There is no prize for guessing that this way can “discover” language anywhere, but the linguistic relevance of such discovery is highly questionable. Maybe this is the reason why “language” vanished from the peer-reviewed article title while present in bioRxiv preprint — authors tried to make emphasis on communication, not language. The same can’t be said for some media outlets.

In the worst-case scenario, no list of “design features” is used. In the paper on “fungal language”, the statistics of fungal communication are compared only to the statistics of the English (and sometimes Russian) language. Using English as a single reference has already led Noam Chomsky to his “Universal Grammar” which fails to explain features of Pirahã language and even ancient languages like Akkadian or Sumerian (for more details read the book Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher). This kind of reference does not allow us to draw any conclusions about languages “in general”.

Does this mean that the efforts of computer scientist Andrew Adamatsky (author of the paper on “fungal language” known for his impressive previous experiments with problem-solving slime moulds) and the research group of “chimpanzee language” are futile? I don’t think so. Adamatsky’s paper provides invaluable insights into the action potential of fungi. We knew that this kind of electrical signalling occurs not only in neurons but also in nerveless animals, and even plants. Now we have a detailed description of electrical signalling in fungi. They are really like us — not in terms of language, but in terms of action potentials.

The research on chimpanzee communication seems even more promising to some linguists. Svetlana Burlak, linguist, professor of Russian Academy of Sciences, studies the origin of language problem for a long time and has summarised her studies in the book “Origin of language: Facts, research, hypotheses”. She is convinced that chimpanzees and other apes do possess some evolutionary prerequisites for acquiring language, such as the ability to use gestures for communication, and these prerequisites were the basis on which human language developed. She explains:

This was to be expected that chimpanzees’ communication would reveal properties similar to those of human language. That sounds great that they were found. Now, we have one more building block in the understanding that human language didn’t come from thin air but was created from something that was already present.

Thus, the both articles provide valuable evolutionary insights, and the only problem is a dubious status of describing their findings as “languages”. This problem arises only from the absence of strict testable definitions of language. Astrobiologists searching for life on other planets know that one of the most difficult questions is “What is life?”. Maybe searching for “language out there” will raise a similar question: “What is language?”.

What’s the better exercise for our health: lifting weights or doing cardio?

Clio Bellenis
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What’s the better exercise for our health: lifting weights or doing cardio?

I am a weightlifter in a sport also known as Olympic weightlifting: I throw weights over my head for fun. I did do a 10km road race once, hoping that if I committed and trained seriously I’d find the elusive ‘runner’s high’, and get into running. I hated every minute of it. So there’s my bias: hate running, love weights. And to cut straight to the conclusion, that’s essentially the bottom line when it comes to exercise: whatever you enjoy, whatever will motivate you to be active, that’s what’s best for you. But there is some science that is worth knowing about.

First, let’s talk about types of energy generation. Aerobic exercise is exercise that you can continue for minutes to hours. It burns oxygen directly. Anaerobic exercise is more strenuous exercise, in shorter bursts, like cycling uphill. There isn’t enough oxygen available, so cellular respiration continues without it, storing up lactate – which is why your legs get so sore when cycling uphill. A brief respite will allow the oxygen-dependent metabolism of lactate, so that the dreadful burning goes away. There is a third form of cellular respiration, which generates a super-high energy burst lasting seconds, and doesn’t create lactate, but it does need a 3-5 minute recovery time before it’s available again, which is why exercise like weightlifting involves a lot of sitting down.

While different forms of exercise use these 3 systems to various degrees, exercise is usually categorised as primarily cardio-vascular or primarily strength-focused. Cardio gets your heart and lungs working harder, which increases their efficiency. There are different ways of addressing getting stronger, depending on what your goals are.

The UK government guideline for exercise recommends 150 minutes of moderate intensity, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity every week, spread over 4-5 days, and to do strength training twice a week. For the over 65s, balance and flexibility work is recommended in addition (although these are key functional skills for everyone).

Examples of moderate activity include brisk walking, doubles tennis, dancing, or cycling. Vigorous activity includes running, swimming, speed or hill cycling, football, squash, skipping or martial arts. The aim of these recommended exercise levels is to make us physically fitter and stronger, but does it do any more than helping us catch that bus, or allowing us to help someone move their fridge?

Anyone who has done a couch to 5k, aerobic cardio, knows that starting to exercise is hard, but with gradual increments what was hard becomes easier. We are able to push ourselves further and further. Research has focused on the health outcomes of aerobic exercise, and found the benefits to be many and varied. They include reduced blood pressure, better insulin sensitivity and better cholesterol control, all of which contribute to lowering the risk of metabolic disease, so lowering the risk of heart attacks, strokes and type 2 diabetes. In addition, cognitive and mental health benefits have been found.

HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is a form of vigorous exercise reputed to be highly beneficial in only a short time, and is particularly useful if time is lacking, as it’s full-on exercise which only lasts seconds, with only seconds of rest in between. HIIT is a cardio exercise, but often incorporates strength elements. Because of the rapid boost HIIT can give to cardio-respiratory fitness it has even been suggested that some training before major surgery can reduce the recovery time.

Strength

Another brief diversion, this time into the different goals of different types of strength training. Bodybuilding (for the older readers, think Arnie Schwarzenegger in his heyday) is an aesthetic discipline, with the aim of building a ‘perfect’, symmetrical physique. Powerlifting builds absolute strength, and at maximal effort this will be very slow. Competitive powerlifting involves deadlifts, squats and bench-presses – often the same lifts people do when weight training in the gym. Weightlifting is, perhaps confusingly given the nomenclature, about generating maximal power (as in force*acceleration). The aim is to raise the barbell as fast possible and catch it in the air. They are high energy, ballistic lifts, and can also be cardio-intensive. The focus is on the clean and jerk, and the snatch (even to lifters, complementing their nice snatch never gets tired!).

Yoga also has a strength focus and crucially also improves flexibility or suppleness – the third arm of the functional fitness triad along with stamina and strength.

At its most basic however, strength training can simply be standing up and sitting down, picking something up from the floor and putting it down again, or moving two soup cans overhead. Body-weight exercises, such as variations of pull-ups and press-ups, can also be done at home.

Balance

Strength and balance are closely linked – strength improves balance. Being stronger, and more in control of your body, is functionally useful: picking up children, carrying shopping, putting something away overhead, that sort of thing. But on top of those benefits, stronger muscles protect joints; moving weight strengthens bones, reducing the risk of osteoporosis; and more muscle bulk leads to a higher metabolism, which many people like because it allows them to eat a little more. There is also robust evidence that it also benefits cognitive function and  mental health. Grip strength is even suggested as an easily measurable biomarker that is linked to numerous health outcomes.

The frail elderly are a special case, and are at risk of falls, illnesses and cognitive decline. They are both less strong and less physically active. Intervention studies have been found to be beneficial. At this level of fitness, it is impossible to disentangle cardio from strength work, as without some focus on both, neither is possible.

Ideally one would want to combine strength training and cardio. There is good evidence that including strength training is beneficial to other sports and helps to avoid injuries. Running or cycling similarly improves stamina generally. Sports needing more explosive strength lean towards the Olympic lifts for help. But what does this tell us for someone who simply wants to improve their physical and mental health?

Reaching the government guidelines might be optimal, but they aren’t possible for everyone. Even 10 minutes walking a day is beneficial, so starting small and achievable is the way to go, and that may be enough for many people. It can be easy to give up if the guidelines seem unreachable because of time constraints or disability, so knowing that just 10 minutes is worth it can be empowering. This is behind the concept of exercise snacking, that just a few minutes at a time has been shown to be beneficial. The best exercise for anyone is the one they feel motivated to continue: If you like training with others, join a class or train with a buddy; if running clears your mind, then run; if throwing weights around gives you a buzz, then do that.

It’s always best to take tips from others when starting out, to avoid injury. If you get bitten by the bug, it’s a good idea to balance your cycling with weights, or your weights with yoga. If it never becomes a joy, then find what’s most tolerable – the benefits may grow on you and make it worthwhile. There are so many different ways to exercise and so much to gain that there is something for almost everyone.

I called Scottish Water to solve my supply issue – I never expected them to bring dowsing rods

Brian Eggo
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I called Scottish Water to solve my supply issue – I never expected them to bring dowsing rods

My masculinity isn’t as toxic as it used to be. The LD50 has increased with age and proximity to wisdom, but one of the remnants of the former me is a desperate need to at least pretend I know what assorted tradespersons are referring to when they talk to me.

“Where’s your Toby?” asked the kitchen fitter. “I don’t know” was my partially honest reply. I’m pretty sure that he wasn’t enquiring as to the whereabouts of the nearest carvery, so the fact that I didn’t know what a Toby was meant that I couldn’t possibly know its location. Awkwardness avoided. Partially. Some discreet Googling told me that

A toby is the water shut-off valve, generally located at the boundary of your property, that sits between the council water main and your private water pipe.

Cue an aimless and ultimately fruitless meander around the front and back of my house to try to locate it.

Toby or not Toby

Considering the age of my plumbing, the kitchen fitter had recommended a new stopcock (insert your own punchline). This meant I was tasked with contacting Scottish Water to see if they could shed some light on the location of my elusive valve.

A phone call to Scottish Water only confirmed that due to the age of my house (similar to me, approximately 50 years) they didn’t have accurate records of where the Toby might be located, and they’d have to send out an operative to try to locate it.

The first engineer to arrive spent a good forty minutes looking around the front and back of the house, and along the street. In terms of technology there was a classic metal detector, but also what appeared to be an electromagnetic detector. Sadly, they were unable to hit the mark, and as he was leaving, I joked “Maybe bring your dowsing rods with you next time”. Strangely, instead of a laugh he informed me that he didn’t have his with him today. I kept my poker face on because it’s not wise to antagonise the people who will determine whether the installation of a kitchen you’ve already paid for will actually happen or not. He marks a couple of points on the path outside that may have potential and heads off with the promise that the digging team should be out within the next week.

Rod Steward

For the blissfully unaware, dowsing is an old, and highly discredited method of attempting to find water, oil, and other valuables using sticks, metal rods, and other such inert ‘devices’. They are generally understood to be ‘working’ as a result of the ideomotor effect, similar to Oiuja Boards. Amongst the most notorious use of such devices was for ‘bomb detectors’, as was covered by Meirion Jones at QED in 2016.

Blue boards surrounding a hole in the paving
Dig number one just outside my garden
Blue boards surrounding a hole in the paving as a man with hi vis clothing and a hard hat looks on.
Dig number two down at my next-door neighbour’s place

Divining Intervention

Two fruitless digs later and we’re still at square one, with nothing found. Another phone call to Scottish Water and they send out engineer number two. He’s polite, eloquent, and clearly energised by the conundrum he’s been met with. He talks at length about the historical lack of detailed data about pipe location, the shortcuts that have been taken to serve multiple houses with single valves, but he at least knows the location of the main pipe that serves the street (put a pin in that), so he’s confident he’s closing in on the target.

The divine Trevor Sloughter from Glasgow Skeptics dowses for credulous members of the public
The divine Trevor Sloughter from Glasgow Skeptics dowses for credulous members of the public

The confidence wanes somewhat after a half hour of fruitless searching. I wade back in with my dowsing rods joke just in case engineer number one was an anomaly. Sadly not. Engineer number two heads back to his van and returns with his dowsing rods. They look very familiar to me, because I’ve got my own set which we at Glasgow Skeptics use to demonstrate to the public how they don’t work (under controlled conditions).

Engineer number two then proceeds to demonstrate the dowsing rods to me. He’s not quite sure how they work, but they “definitely do”. To prove his case, he shows me the rods clearly moving and crossing over as he walks up to directly above the main pipe serving my neighbourhood (ok, this is where you take the pin out). My poker face slipped somewhat at this point, but my teeth remained firmly clamped on my tongue.

Pipe Dreams

It’s hard to put into words the highs and lows that came to pass in the next three unsuccessful visits. A Toby was found in a garden a few doors down (using good old human eyeballs), but it only fed the first four houses on the street (mine is house number six). Another Toby was found a few doors up (also leveraging the power of vision), but it had been blocked by some concrete poured for a fence post. A dig team was dispatched the following week to put a new valve in close by, after which we found it fed houses eight to twelve on the street, leaving me and my next-door neighbour high and far from dry.

A newly fitted valve
The last resort: My very own Toby valve!

The final roll of the technological dice from engineer number two was to have me run my taps at full pressure and use sound detection equipment to try and find out the path of water from the main pipe towards my garden. This unfortunately failed, which meant that a desperate last resort had to be taken: a dig team had to lift slabs in my garden just outside the kitchen window, then dig by hand to get to the pipe running to my house. The excavator could not be used, so it took a significant manual effort working through some particularly unpleasant soil to get to the pipe. Once that was located, they fitted a valve.

It’s worthwhile pointing out that the (real) technology that the engineers had at their disposal failed to do the trick, but it was for valid reasons: pipes can be made of differing materials, they can be too deep for detection, soil types have an effect, and of course it’s pretty common for enthusiastic councils or homeowners to cover over valves. All along the way the dowsing rods that “definitely work” proved to be useless.

Repetitive Drain Injury

This is not the first time that Scottish Water, and other water companies across the UK have been taken to task for their continued use of pseudoscientific methods. Back in 2017, Science Communicator Dr Sally Le Page contacted a number of companies to enquire as to their use of dowsing rods. The result was disappointing to say the least. Scottish Water confirmed by Twitter that dowsing rods were used, but later poured some cold water on that confirmation, presumably after being doused with understandably negative publicity.

I messaged engineer number two after all the work was done to thank him for everything he had done, but also revealed my connection to the skeptical community and offered to put his dowsing skills to a controlled test. I received no response.

I therefore decided to reach out to Scottish Water’s media team, and got the following statement:

Scottish Water does not support or encourage the use of dowsing and provides its employees with equipment and training to ensure they use methods for finding underground assets and leaks which are scientifically tried and tested. These include ground microphones, correlators and metal detectors and other devices to pinpoint the exact location of underground assets and leaks. Scottish Water does not budget for or spend money on any form of divination or dowsing tools and training.

Very occasionally, an operative may use rods if they feel it would help locate a leak. But this is not an officially-sanctioned method and it is down to individuals.

Water Re:tension

I thanked Scottish Water for their response, and for the hard work and dedication of the team to resolve my problem. Everybody I dealt with was polite, professional, and understanding of my problem. Even though it wasn’t an emergency they were aware I was on a timeline. They used state of the art equipment, leveraged all of their experience and expertise, and moved metaphorical mountains of soil with multiple digs. With a logical process of elimination and investigation they did the best they could with an incredibly difficult situation. I just wish they didn’t muddy the Scottish water by giving any kind of credence to such a clearly nonsensical practice.

A cancer treatment derived from ancient Chinese calligraphy ink?

Michael Marshall
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A cancer treatment derived from ancient Chinese calligraphy ink?

When it comes to reading about cancer cures in the media it is usually good advice to be pretty skeptical. Sometimes the story lends well to skepticism – like the claim, covered across the media a while ago, that scientists had found a cure for cancer in ancient Chinese calligraphy ink. It’s a story that has everything – hints of ancient wisdom, miracle cures hidden right under our noses, it even has lasers. It is a romantic idea that the cure for cancer might lie in an ink that is produced from plants and has been handed down between generations as a way to share writing and art. The proposed treatment is billed as non-invasive and specific only for cancer cells – could this really be science?

I was particularly suspicious when I saw that the representation of the story on Natural News, a prominent proponent of pseudoscience, looked a lot like the story on Science Alert which is typically more of a reliable source on science stories. So I did some digging into the data for this finding.

The paper that was covered in the media is titled “New Application of Old Material: Chinese Traditional Ink for Photothermal Therapy of Metastatic Lymph Nodes” and was published in the journal ACS Omega in August 2017. The researchers were based in Shanghai distributed across various institutes at different hospitals or universities. They had been working on a relatively new cancer therapy called Photo-thermal Therapy (PTT).

Photo-thermal therapy (PTT)

In cancer treatment, PTT is the use of specific types of nanoparticles to generate cell damaging heat specifically at the tumour sites. Scientists take a material that can be stimulated with light – typically infra-red – causing the generation of heat and subsequent tumour cell death. The problem is that many of these nanoparticles are toxic or expensive so in order to make the treatment as efficient and effective as possible, we need to find just the right material.

Hu-Kaiwen (Hu-ink) is an ink that has been used by calligraphers in China for hundreds of years. It’s derived from plants, is mostly made up of carbon and it is black in colour which the materials used for PTT tend to be. So scientists got to wondering if it might be useful for PTT.

Firstly the authors of this study looked at the stability of the ink. They diluted it in different things including water and saline and made sure it was stable when stored over time. They looked at the structure of the ink and noticed that it typically forms small aggregates of 20-50nm in diameter – nanoparticles. They confirmed that the core component of the ink was carbon and they stimulated different concentrations of the diluted ink with infra-red lasers and tested the temperature. They found that Hu-ink was more efficient at converting light into heat than most other PTT materials reaching temperatures of 55°C after five minutes irradiation.

Hu-ink for PTT in cancer cells grown in the lab

In research we use cell models of cancer which we refer to as cancer cell lines. These are cells that have originally been taken from patients with different types of cancer but are grown and stored artificially in the lab. We use them so we can test things out on cells that behave like cancer but aren’t in a human body before we move on to doing tests in living organisms. The researchers in this study used some cancer cells originally derived from colon (SW-620) and colorectal (HCT-116) cancer. First they treated the cells with just the Hu-ink and the cells tolerated it really well proving that the ink solution itself wasn’t toxic. Then they treated the cells with the ink and combined it with irradiation with the infra-red laser.

Image described in the text.
HCT-116 cells treated with Hu-ink and infra-red compared to HCT-116 cells treated with infra-red only. Image modified from the paper.

The image above is part of a figure taken from the paper itself. There are three images of HCT-116 colorectal cancer cells. In the top image, the cells were treated with only the laser for five minutes. They were not given any Hu-ink. In the middle image the cells were treated both with the Hu-ink at a medium dose for two hours and the laser for five minutes. In the bottom image the cells received a high dose of the Hu-ink for two hours and the laser for five minutes. The red cells are cells stained with a marker of cell death. The green cells are living cells. You can also see that the dead cells are much smaller than the living cells. In the top image where cells did not receive any ink – all of the cells are alive. In the bottom image where the cells had a high dose of ink – all of the cells are dead. In the middle image with a lower dose of the ink, there are some living cells and some dead cells. In other words – when you treat cancer cells with both Hu-ink and infra-red, the cancer cells die.

Hu-ink for PTT in mice

The researchers wanted to be sure that this technique was safe in living organisms and that it was able to kill cancer cells in living organisms. So they took mice with cancer of the lymph nodes and injected Hu-ink into the tumour which they then irradiated with infra-red. After an allocated treatment time, they removed the tumours from the mice and measured them.

Image described in the text
Lymph node tumours taken from mice treated with Hu-ink and infra-red versus control treatments. Image modified from the paper.

For this experiment they had three control conditions – NS (the tumours were injected with saline), NS plus laser (the tumours were injected with saline and treated with a laser) and Hu-ink (the cells were injected with Hu-ink). They had one test condition – the Hu-ink plus laser. The test condition is the only one that the authors predicted would have an effect on tumour size. And that’s exactly what they saw. Lymph node tumours treated with Hu-ink and infra-red were significantly smaller than the control conditions. They also saw that the surrounding tissue wasn’t damaged suggesting that the treatment is safe.

Study conclusion

This study is a proof-of-principle study. The authors have shown that this ink can be used in PTT therapy with a positive effect and in a safe way in mice and in the lab. It is a very small scale study and it is a single study. It needs replicating before we can be confident in the result and it needs to be studied on a larger scale and have many more safety tests before we could begin to think about using it in patients.

But it is a really promising study. It takes a treatment we already use and aims to make that treatment safer and cheaper and more available to patients. It is a non-invasive treatment and it can be used in ways that reduces tissue damage to healthy tissue while targeting cancer cells for cell death. It’s a great example of some really clever science, using materials that have been available for many years and applying them to modern techniques.

It might seem far-fetched to say ancient ink can help us treat cancer, but really it’s just cool science!

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