Tag: research

Google has funded EcoHealth’s virus research for at least 14 years

The 2018 paper, titled ‘Serologic and behavioural risk survey of workers with wildlife contact in China’, reported on a study conducted in Guangdong Province, China, which aimed to identify risky populations, occupations and behaviours that contribute to the transmission of zoonotic pathogens with pandemic potential.

It was authored by researchers from Yale University, Metabiota, EcoHealth Alliance, the Guangdong Provincial Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Washington Centre for One Health Research – one of them being Peter Daszak.

But, as Natural News wrote, check out the conflict of interest statement: “Metabiota Inc. is a commercial company that received funding from Google/Skoll.”

The Skoll Foundation was created in 1999 by Jeffrey Skoll, who made his fortune as eBay’s first full-time hire and president.

It turns out that Google.org, the charity arm of Google, has been funding studies carried out by EcoHealth Alliance researchers, including Peter Daszak, for at least 14 years.  A 2010 study on bat flaviviruses lists both Daszak and EcoHealth vice president Jonathan Epstein as authors – and like the 2018 study mentioned above, this 2010 study thanks Google for funding it.

Yet another paper on henipavirus spillover that was published in 2014 shows the same authors and funding from Google, demonstrating a lengthy relationship between these entities.

Natalie Winters – who first wrote about Google funding research conducted by Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance in 2021 – posted a Twitter thread about it earlier this month to remind us.  Her thread also lists another paper published in 2015, tying Google to Daszak and EcoHealth.

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Researchers Ask Federal Court To Block DEA From Banning Two Psychedelics Under ‘Unconstitutional’ Administrative Process

Researchers are asking a federal court to block the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) from proceeding in its attempt to ban two psychedelics, arguing that the agency’s administrative approach to the proposed scheduling is unconstitutional.

Panacea Plant Sciences (PPS) filed a complaint and request for injunctive relief against DEA in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington last week.

The legal challenge focuses on the agency’s recent scheduling of an administrative hearing to receive expert input on its controversial plans to classify 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC) as Schedule I drugs under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The filing doesn’t speak to the merits of the scheduling proposal—an issue that psychedelics researchers have previously addressed in public comment. Rather, PPS is contesting the administrative hearing process that’s preceding final rulemaking, arguing that DEA’s reliance on administrative law judges (ALJs) to settle such arbitration is unconstitutional based on U.S. Supreme Court precedent.

PPS said that because the Supreme Court has held that ALJs are considered “inferior officers,” current statutory removal protections unconstitutionally insulate them from executive control under Article II of the Constitution. That means DEA should not be permitted to subject researchers to an administrative hearing concerning the psychedelic scheduling proposal, the filing says.

“The hearing and scheduling poses a significant threat to the company,” it says. “PPS conducts research and development on medical technologies which include the use of DOI or DOC for development and as products themselves. Currently, DOI and DOC are not controlled.”

“Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) and its implementing regulations, PPS will be required to turn over to law enforcement or destroy our stock of DOI and DOC which means the rule-making acts as an effective taking of property,” the document says.

“As a result, when PPS received the hearing notice from DEA, it was faced with a stark choice: either default and lose automatically or defend itself against the DEA’s attempts to schedule DOI and DOC and its use of an ALJ-overseen adjudication,” it continues. “PPS is thus compelled to participate in the DEA’s adjudicatory proceedings.”

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‘Arbiter of Truth’ & ‘Disinformation Guru’ Tells Public ‘Don’t do Your Own Research’

During a recent discussion, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and Executive Director of the Pitt Disinformation Lab Beth Schwanke spoke about beguiling the public into believing establishment sources.

The discussion specifically regarded what they deem as misinformation and disinformation on elections and how Americans should not have a mind of their own.

The Pitt Disinformation Lab executive lambasted self-led investigations, instead saying Pennsylvanians should just blindly eat up what the ‘trusted sources’ claim to be true. She also discussed January 6th and the 2020 election as a failure of control over the minds of citizens.

“One thing everyone can do to make sure they are seeing accurate information is to use trusted sources. So in elections that means using the Department of State, that means using your county elections office, it means using media organizations that follow, that adhere, to professional journalism standards like … your local NPR affiliate,” Schwanke said. “And it doesn’t mean you know, ‘doing your own research’ and just asking questions and sharing, you know, posts from – I don’t know, in my case, it’s Uncle Joe, right? It means being thoughtful about where your sources are coming from.”

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How generative AI will ruin science and academic research

I often come back to Neil Postman’s 1985 classic Amusing Ourselves to Death. It’s a penetrating analysis on the cognitive effects of media technology. His focus is mainly on how the format and mode of communication influences the character of content and how that content then trains us, but to a lesser extent also how the discourse and the “atmosphere” of the information exchange affects these issues.

This is almost forty years ago, and the disruptive medium under scrutiny is television. The entire approach seems almost quaint, the 80s in relation to the current period being a comparative golden age of critical thinking, complex exposition and conscious, creative citizens.

Still, the issues Postman emphasizes were already significant way back then. You can summarize his criticism with television’s format having complex, detrimental effects on the content and character of public discourse, as well as on the cognitive abilities of human beings, especially in terms of understanding complex issues and parse arguments and evidence with many layers and branching implications.

The basic issue on Postman’s view is that written exposition and complex oral tradition alike foster and prepare the human mind for the rigors of critical thinking and rational reflection. And to the contrary, that the entertainment media and discourses as exemplified by television in particular, geared towards short-term gratification and the communication of sensational experiences, have rather the opposite effect.

His examples are really glaring, even back then:

Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears. This point is nowhere made more clear to me than in conferences with my younger students about their writing. “Look here,” I say. “In this paragraph you have said one thing. And in that you have said the opposite. Which is it to be?” They are polite, and wish to please, but they are as baffled by the question as I am by the response. “I know,” they will say, “but that is there and this is here.” The difference between us is that I assume “there” and “here,” “now” and “then,” one paragraph and the next to be connected, to be continuous, to be part of the same coherent world of thought. That is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe I’m “coming from,” as they say. But they are coming from a different universe of discourse altogether: the “Now … this” world of television. The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist. My point is that we are by now so thoroughly adjusted to the “Now … this” world of news—a world of fragments, where events stand alone, stripped of any connection to the past, or to the future, or to other events—that all assumptions of coherence have vanished. And so, perforce, has contradiction. In the context of no context, so to speak, it simply disappears. And in its absence, what possible interest could there be in a list of what the President says now and what he said then? It is merely a rehash of old news, and there is nothing interesting or entertaining in that.

– Postman, ibid.

This is not an unfamiliar situation for most of us. I even had a similar experience this morning in an attempted discussion with someone who incredibly enough stated four (!) different, mutually incompatible things within the framework of a couple of short paragraphs, and he of course still kept insisting I was wrong. His stated position contained the following propositions:

  1. Beliefs are absurd
  2. Beliefs ought to be held only due to acceptable evidence
  3. You can hold beliefs for whatever reasons you like
  4. Beliefs are by definition anchored in emotion and not acceptable evidence

All of these statements are literally incompatible with every single other one.

It’s like a convoluted version of the Liar’s Paradox. If I agree with him, I’m necessarily wrong, and if I disagree, I’m wrong too. But in contrast to the old thought experiment, where my error lies in the direct affirmation of a statement’s opposite, here there’s literally no way to make sense of how I would be wrong if I either agree with or reject his position, since it’s internally incoherent in a complex and not only binary sense.

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FLASHBACK: Air Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones

Facebook isn’t the only organization conducting research into how attitudes are affected by social media. The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them. While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research—including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program—has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.

One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. “A less investigated problem is once you’ve identified the network, how do you manipulate it toward an end,” said Warren Dixon, a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering and director of the University of Florida’s Nonlinear Controls and Robotics research group. Dixon was the principal investigator on an Air Force Research Laboratory-funded project, which published its findings in February in a paper entitled “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity.”

The research demonstrates that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots can be applied to social networks in order to control human behavior. If properly calibrated, the mathematical models developed by Dixon and his fellow researchers could be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors—perhaps in concert with some of the social media “effects” cyber-weaponry developed by the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ.

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New Mexico Senate Committee Unanimously Approves Psilocybin Therapy And Research Resolution

A New Mexico Senate committee has unanimously approved a bipartisan resolution requesting that state officials research the therapeutic potential of psilocybin and explore the creation of a regulatory framework to provide access to the psychedelic.

The Senate Health and Public Affairs Committee voted 7-0 to pass the resolution from Senate Minority Whip Craig Brandt (R) and Sen. Jeff Steinborn (D) on Saturday.

As “memorial” legislation, the bicameral proposal wouldn’t be binding. Rather, it would represent a formal request for the state Department of Health to “study the efficacy of using psilocybin mushrooms for therapeutic treatments and the establishment of a program for psilocybin mushrooms to be used for therapeutic medical treatments.”

The whereas section of the resolution cites various studies supporting the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin for conditions such as major depression and substance misuse, while pointing out that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has designated the psychedelic as a “breakthrough therapy.”

To that end, the measure states that the health department should look into “necessary statutory or regulatory framework for developing” a state-level psilocybin program.

“This can help people very potentially, and so what we’re trying to do in a bipartisan way is ask the Department of Health to recognize that we want them to get going to start looking at this,” Steinborn said during Saturday’s committee hearing.

The measure “really seeks to expand therapeutic options for New Mexicans,” he said.

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Indiana House Panel Approves Psilocybin Research Bill That Already Passed Full Senate

An Indiana House committee has approved a Republican-led bill that would fund clinical research trials into psilocybin that has already cleared the full Senate.

After adopting one amendment, the House Public Health Committee advanced the legislation in a 12-1 vote on Tuesday.

“This is not fringe science at this point, so my original intent was to elevate this potential,” Sen. Ed Charbonneau (R), the bill’s sponsor, told panel members ahead of the vote. “It creates hope for people that currently are in hopeless situations.”

“I think it’s important that we get clear right up front that this bill does not make anything legal that’s illegals today,” he said, highlighting the research-focused nature of the legislation.

Rep. Brad Barrett (R), who chairs the committee, said he was initially “incredibly skeptical” of psilocybin’s therapeutic potential but was moved by testimony he heard during an interim study session on the issue that lawmakers convened last year and “left there with the same kind of feeling” that Charbonneau expressed about the psychedelic’s ability to help people.

Last week, the Senate passed the psychedelics measure in a 47-1 vote. That followed the proposal being passed unanimously by the Senate Appropriations Committee and the Health and Provider Services Committee.

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PERCEPTION OF TIME CAN DRAMATICALLY ALTER THIS CRUCIAL BIOLOGICAL PROCESS, NEW STUDY REVEALS

New research from Harvard University shows that a person’s perception of time can directly affect how fast wounds heal.

Previous studies have hinted at a link between the mind and body, particularly in relation to stress and lifestyle. However, this study is the first to show a direct connection between the perception of time and the seemingly autonomous process of healing, opening up the possibility of incorporating time perception into the treatment of injury.

HEALING AND HUMAN PERCEPTION OF TIME

Published in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the study conducted by Harvard psychologists Peter Aungle and Ellen Langer aimed to determine if the rate of healing was independent of the psychology of the patient or if their perceptions could accelerate or decelerate the healing process.

“Based on the theory of mind–body unity—which posits simultaneous and bidirectional influences of mind on body and body on mind—we hypothesized that wounds would heal faster or slower when perceived time was manipulated to be experienced as longer or shorter respectively,” the researches behind the finding write.

As noted, previous work had found connections between recovery from injury and stress levels, with higher levels of stress potentially interrupting a healthy recovery from injury, but those connections were thought to be primarily physiological in nature.

The researchers also note that previous work studying psychological influences on chronic pain, emotion, and physiological health, and even placebo effects, particularly those involving administration of inert medications, “have led to meaningful improvements in treatments for a broad range of illnesses and injuries.”

Still, this latest study is the first to look at the mindset of the individual, specifically their perception of the passage of time, in relation to recovery rates.

“We hypothesized that experimentally induced wounds would heal faster when more perceived time had passed and heal slower when less perceived time had passed,” the researchers explain, “despite no differences in actual elapsed time.”

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DEA Calls For Even More THC, Psilocybin And DMT To Be Produced For Research In 2024

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is now calling for the production of even more THC, psilocybin and DMT for research purposes than it initially proposed for 2024—raising its quotas for those drugs while maintaining already high production goals for marijuana and other psychedelics.

In a notice set to be published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, DEA said it received comments from registered manufacturers requesting increases to previously proposed 2024 quotas for the Schedule I substances in order to “meet medical and scientific needs,” and it agreed to do so in the new final order.

Accordingly, the agency nearly doubled the quotas for delta-9 THC and all other tetrahydrocannabinol, increasing them to 1,523,040 grams and 1,166,130 grams, respectively.

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DEA Renews Push To Ban Two Psychedelics After Abandoning Effort Last Year, Prompting Researchers To Fight Back Again

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is taking another shot at banning two psychedelics after abandoning its original scheduling proposal last year, teeing up another fight with researchers and advocates who say the compounds hold therapeutic potential.

In a notice published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, DEA again proposed placing 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) and 2,5-dimethoxy-4-chloroamphetamine (DOC) in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA).

The agency said that its scientific and medical basis for proposing the ban “remains the same” as it was last year, so it’s making an identical argument that the phenethylamine hallucinogens hold high abuse potential with no known medical value. What’s changed in the new notice appears to be related to the administrative process of requesting a hearing challenging the facts or laws governing the scheduling action.

When it withdrew its earlier notice, DEA mentioned that it would be “publishing a new proposed rule using an amended procedure.”

DEA doesn’t explain why the amended procedure was necessary, but it is the case that scientists rallied last year to request a hearing on its DOI and DOC scheduling proposal. The psychedelic research company Panacea Plant Sciences had also filed a motion contesting the policy change, which could’ve resulted in an administrative judge scheduling a hearing.

Unlike the previous notice, this latest filing says that the “decision whether a hearing will be needed to address such matters of fact and law in the rulemaking will be made by the Administrator.” There are suspicions that DEA is effectively complicating the process for outside parties to challenge the proposal.

In any case, Panacea Plant Sciences is again sounding the alarm. Founder and CEO David Heldreth told Marijuana Moment on Friday that the “response to our rallying cry to fight the DEA’s illogical rule making has been amazing.”

“The psychedelic community from lawyers and researchers to community activists and even individual people have really come together in opposition to the DEA prohibition mindset,” he said. “Panacea have had contact with at least 10 groups that want to be involved or support the legal fight against the DEA attempt to criminalize DOI and DOC. These compounds are intrinsically important to researchers and the scientific study of the mind and body.”

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