Nobel gossip

[gusl]

I just had a 5-minute chat with Murray Gell-Mann over lunch. (LOLs omitted)

G - did you start this place?
M - yeah, it was mostly me.
...
M - universities can't do what we do. They have departments, grants, etc.
G - I was at CMU the last two years, and they were pretty good about interdisciplinarity.
M - CMU? what?
G - Cárnegie Mellon.
M - ah, Car-nay-gie Mellon.
M - I know Herb Simon. Herb was a good guy.
M - once we were sitting in the Presidential Science Committee(?), and Herb slipped me a note:
M - it said: "Murray, help me destroy the humanities!"
G - he was only half-joking, then?
M - he wasn't joking at all! He hated them.
...
G - I've read Feynman's book: "Surely you're joking"
M - Nonsense! Feynman spent huge amounts of time creating stories about himself, so he could write about them later.
M - One time he decided to never brush his teeth again.
M - He had horrible teeth.
M - We had the same dentist, and the dentist would bring him books and articles, but he never convinced Feynman.
M - He thought there was no proof that brushing your teeth did anything.
M - He told me: "Murray, you're a very conventional person, you're like a salesman... you wash your hands after going to the bathroom before you go to lunch! You only need to wash your hands if you pee on them."
M - in the Faculty Lounge, the men had to wear suits. When it was lunchtime, Feynman would take off his suit and tie, and hang it up in his office...
When he arrived (without a suit&tie), he would go to the cloakroom where they had this "public" suit and tie, for the people who forgot to bring theirs... and the suit was old and scratched, and the tie was bright orange.
G - he sure enjoyed the attention, huh?

UPDATE: this interview with Feynman confirms his skepticism about tooth-brushing.

Comments

[darius.livejournal.com]

Huh. I've become skeptical about toothbrushing too, just lately, on learning of healthy cultures that didn't do it. http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library/price/pricetoc.html

Your chat is hilarious.

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

The thing is we mostly eat a very different diet than in our evolutionary past (e.g. far more sugar and cereal crops) and also live much longer, both of these things are fairly good reasons to do things to maintain health that may not have been strictly necessary before. Further, we all want to lead lives rather than let fate have its way, so if we have some ailment we want to treat it in some way and continue living and looking/feeling good, whereas in the distant past a great many ailments we think of as a nuisance today (in the developed world at least) may have been the end of the line.

That said I totally agree with Feynman's general principle of questioning everything - so much received wisdom is wrong, to a mind numbing extent in my experience.

[darius.livejournal.com]

Agreed that if you get a cavity, you want to do something about it, and that diet changes are important (I've cut down the sugar and tried less successfully to cut out grains). But shorter lives don't seem to explain the better dental health I've read about: the traditional cultures had dramatically lower rates of caries than the westernized ones in these surveys that counted all ages; and one of the biggest contributors to the life-expectancy difference was infant mortality (maybe the biggest). Here's one dataset on lifespan: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespan-of-inuit.html

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

"I've cut down the sugar and tried less successfully to cut out grains"

Ditto. It's not easy is it. And even avoiding obvious sugar such as desserts, sugar in tea/coffee, etc. leaves a lot of hidden sugar added to many foods. I figure this is a large part of the observed poorer dental health, although I am vaguley aware of another hypothesis that links grains with poor health - something to do with immune response I think. Linus Pauling believed sugar was also the primamry factor in the rise of atherosclerosis rates - the digestion of sucrose yields glucose and fructose, that latter of which is converted into acetate in the liver which is a precursor for cholesterol synthesis. A 'traditional' diet would have contained only small amounts of sugars from e.g. berries - just enough for the amount of cholesterol required. It's one of those theories (and there were studies done) that seems to have become strangely ignored.

[darius.livejournal.com]

Interesting -- I think the hypothetical causal chain I've read would be a bit less direct, like fructose/sucrose -> fatty liver -> metabolic syndrome -> lots of bad stuff like heart disease and diabetes. Also processed foods are low in various nutrients, like fat-soluble vitamins essential to maintaining bone and teeth, And mouth pH apparently matters too -- though I haven't read up on that at all. (I'm still starting on this stuff -- mainly going by Gary Taubes's _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ and the blog I linked to.) And, not relevant to teeth AFAIK, but the right kinds of dietary fats make a big difference -- that part I've noticed from experience, even.

On grains: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/lectins and http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/search/label/celiac