Thinkering: A New Model for Biotechnology

There's a Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) taking shape.

I suspect William Baines and Seth Roberts would agree.

It may still be in the start-up stages, but it's building momentum as we speak.

I envision, perceive, and actively participate in (thankfully and luckily) an intriguing and innovative Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) that is coalescing on the periphery in the Blogosphere.

I suspect Nassim Taleb would agree.

From m=1 my-thologizing thought-experiments to n=1 tinkering self-experiments, Patient of One clinical trials provide a new model and modus operandi for biotechnology in the Information Age: t h i n k e r i n g.

Thinking + Tinkering = Thinkering

It's an artistic, practical, and real-world bricolage of searching and acting--a meritage for taking Theory to Practice--and it's unveiling and uncovering wisdom in the clinical practice of leading lives where we thrive.

Carlos Rizo--mi amigo de Innovation Cell--and I started tinkering with thinkering awhile back, behind the scenes, and since then, some of our concepts, ideas, and hypotheses have come to fruition interestingly, bubbling up in various forms, such as my presentation on Nutritional Bricolage at BIL:PIL a few weeks ago.

So the initial inertia is not insurmountable and the ongoing momentum is building: we just need to ensure that we capture it and channel this positive energy effectively so that we blaze these new frontiers and pathbreaking trails in a manner that allows everyone to benefit from our trial-and-error collectivities.

Remember: We can learn by grace or by hard knocks--let's choose grace.

The Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE), as a highly-diversified, graceful community of self-experimenting deductivists connected through the power of the Web, acts as a self-funded biotechnology 'company': various bloggers are cataloguing--as Sextus Empiricus and members of the Empiric School of Medicine did--their self-experimentation hypotheses, observations, results, and conclusions and then sharing them openly and honestly with the world.

With falsification and the history of science, the history of medicine in mind, we must not forget the Black Swan reality that PubMed is an Anthology of Mythologies. Research studies, of all shapes and sizes, suffer from various biases, statistical limits, errors, and misinterpretations, but they do serve as good narratives--abstracts are like short-stories--for fueling thought-experiments that could potentially motivate self-experiments. The statistics of individuals--n=1--trumps the scant observation of many because all that really matters is what works, what doesn't work, and what else is possible in our own specific cases. Different ancestral lineages and genetic backgrounds, biochemical individuality (*see Roger Williams, hat tip to Dave Lull), aesthetic preferences, cultural nuances, religious traditions, sensory perceptions, etc. all point to the far-reaching implications of individuality that we must respect, at some point, and then operationalize by systemically exposing ourselves to the envelope of serendipity. In this context, it takes m=1 my-thologizing to surmount inertia--to serve as venture capital--and then it takes Barbell-framed n=1 self-experimenting to gather, maintain, and build momentum throughout a Patient of One clinical trial. It's the physics of thinkering, Richard Feynman style, of course.

So what does this thinkering process look like in practice?

Well, I conduct--as Einstein did--thought-experiments as I interact with the various textures of this world in my local ecology, and these active reflections--like a stream of consciousness--often go something like this: A cell membrane--what I call the epigenetic Cell MemBRAIN--is composed of a phosphoLIPID bilayer, and cholesterol is embedded in this bilayer as an integral structural component that contributes mightily to membrane fluidity and many other things. In fact, without phospholipids, life would not be possible as we experience it today because phospholipids permit the formation of a micelle, an entity which separates the contents of the inside of a cell from the outside of the cell, allowing a cell to control its internal environment through mechanisms like selective permeability, despite fluctuations and changes in the external ecology. Cholesterol and (good) lipids don't seem harmful to me in that context; on the contrary, they seem quite critical and functional. What else do I know about cell composition in relation to lipids? Well, nerve cells, like the ones in my brain that intake, process, and signal vital information throughout my body, are composed primarily of lipids. That's interesting: our brains are mainly made of lipids. And what do neurons do? They conduct electrical signals. How do those electrical signals move? They jump between Nodes of Ranvier along the neuron's axon, speeding the conduction of electricity immensely, thanks to electrically-insulating myelin sheaths. Myelin sheaths are almost entirely (~80%) made of lipids, and many neurodegenerative diseases like Multiple Sclerosis are linked to degradation of the myelin sheath--that means the erosion of lipid structures in nerve cells. Myelin repair (*see the Myelin Repair Foundation, thanks to the awesome Justine Lam who wore Vibrams to BIL:PIL and worked on the Ron Paul campaign) is a ripe area of research right now, but what causes the breakdown of myelin sheaths in the first place? Could it be diets deficient in saturated animal and omega-3 lipids? That seems plausible given that we have ostracized lipids in modern day (to our own peril, that is) in favor of inflammation-causing 'complex' carbohydrates. What else do I know about lipids? Well, I know that they lubricate surfaces; they facilitate fluid flow through a vessel. Coronary arteries are vessels with fluid (blood) flowing through them. If I were an engineer or physicist studying fluid dynamics in these vessels, I suspect I might conclude that the right soluble lipids would support blood flow through arteries and veins, thus preventing strokes and heart disease. That could be important to cardiology--another specialty of medical mythology. And, finally, I remember studying the formation, absorption, and transportation of vitamins and hormones, only to learn that lipids (and cholesterol) play central roles in orchestrating the use of these molecules in our physiologies. Where are the lipids in Gatorade? All those vitamins sans lipids does not make sense to me. Lean protein never made sense to me. That seems hard on the kidneys, which led to the "Atkins folly". Maybe we should design multivitamins and other supplements based upon the liver contents of healthy, active, wild animals that we evolved to consume? Animal livers could have served as our ancestral 'multivitamins' for many years. Well, that's enough for now, I must pull my head out of the clouds.

It's time to test hyperlipidity directly, on myself, just to see what happens. That makes sense to me. Let's see if I can falsify the conjectures generated by my thought-experiments.

So, I conduct these types of thought-experiments 'randomly'. In fact, this is how I built my novel model for the intricate interaction between antibiotics and intestinal-tract microflora: Clostridium difficile is a weed inside your digestive tract. Research studies, physiological concepts, and other scientific principles served as data points and reference frames for my thinking about 'good' and 'bad' bacteria, which compelled me to tinker through nutritional bricolage with good bacteria in my diet via fermented foods as a proactive, preventive approach to embracing a probiotic culture in modern medicine in hopes of averting the antibiotic-resistance slide that current healthcare practices drive. Later, I re-edited this model when I learned that many bad bacteria survive on sugars (fructose, in particular), and I responded by entering Fructose Detox to explore further how best to optimize my gastrointestinal health. I also added high-lipid FAGE, raw cheese, kombucha, apple cider vinegar, and other good bacteria items into my energy intake patterns, and I submitted my hypothesis to a running, practical and grounded real-world empirical test. The best parts: this test is cheap--I didn't have to write a grant or convince an organization for funding--is embedded naturally within my life experiences--I eat food and consume beverages already, regardless--and is enjoyable to conduct--I get to try new foods as a bricoleur / connoisseur. It also captures and benefits from the placebo effect--I serve as an active agent in determining my own health state: agency is a beautiful thing.

So I have thinkered my way through each day for awhile now, continuing to read, research, reflect, write, and re-edit/re-design my tentative, working 'story system' on the fly, only to recently realize, after traversing this fractal 'm=1/n=1' philosophy path iteratively, spontaneously, and organically for quite some time, that the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) is a real, active, and rapidly evolving and growing Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO), uniting Nassim Taleb's vision of an epistemocracy forming in the Blogosphere with William Bains' vision of n=1 clinical trials in biotechnology via Seth Roberts-inspired self-experimentation.

Just take a look (click) around the Web; we have all the leadership pieces in place (Note: This is only a partial list of the exemplary self-experimenters in this expanding health space):

We have our MDs, our PhDs, and our CDs (Doctorate of Curiosity): William Davis, Michael Eades, Kurt Harris, Doug McGuff, Dr. T, Dr. B G, Art Ayers, Loren Cordain, Stephan Guyenet, Aaron Blaisdell, Art DeVany, Seth Roberts, Mark Sisson, Richard Nikoley, Keith Norris, Matt Metzgar, KetoWarrior, Don Matesz, Jimmy Moore, Tom Naughton, Jeff Erno, Robb Wolf, Bryce, Skyler Tanner, Peter, Brian Geremia, Marc, Zach, etc.

And then there's me; just sitting here, trying to make sense of this online conversation melody.

It's all in the spirit of ancestral mimicry.

I see an AFE.

I see a new approach to biotechnology.

But maybe that's just me.

To good health,

Brent