Author: Andrew Sullivan

According to an op-ed in the latest issue of Nature, the FDA should rethink its classification of feces as a drug. Christine Gorman elaborates:

Fecal transplants have become increasingly important over the past few years as a way of  basically taking the healthy gut bacteria out of one person and putting them in another person whose own gut bacteria are deficient in some way. … Currently, the FDA has given fecal transplants a kind of waiver from some of the stricter rules that govern the development and testing of medications. But that’s only as long as the treatment is used strictly for C. difficile infections, which cause debilitating gastrointestinal problems and are not otherwise easily curable. Many physicians and patients would like to know if the therapy could be made to work for other bowel problems – such as Crohn’s disease.

But the stricter FDA rules would make it harder to test fecal transplants for no good reason.

Regulating fecal transplants like other tissue products would still keep patients safe, the [Nature] authors argue. And it would undoubtedly keep the cost of treatment lower than would otherwise be possible if some large company with deep pockets had to undertake the sorts of tests that would need to be done to approve fecal transplants as if they were drugs. After all, if there’s something we have a lot of in this world, it’s poop.

Among other things, the researchers worry that people will make themselves sick with DIY transplants:

Websites explaining how to do fecal transplants at home are becoming common, they point out, but patients who pursue this outside of medicine cannot be protected from diseases transferred with the gut contents, or from injuries if the transplant is done badly.

Previous Dish on fecal transplants here and here.

(Graph from Nature)

Banyan has a primer on the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations:

Some analysts fear that the compulsion to get the deal done may result in a lowest-common-denominator agreement, whereby each country’s sacred cows are respected and the potential benefits (estimated at nearly $300 billion a year to global income) squandered in advance.

That risk may have increased following the biggest of the many setbacks TPP has suffered recently: it now seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama will persuade Congress to grant him “fast-track” authority (also called Trade Promotion Authority, or TPA), to negotiate trade agreements before the mid-term elections in November (if ever). Without fast-track, agreements can be unpicked line-by-line by Congress, and other TPP countries will be reluctant to sign up.

James Traub looks at the big picture:

The TPP is the Obama administration’s bid to shape an Asia more in America’s image than China’s — which is precisely why it’s the pivot of the Asia pivot.

The traditional objection to trade pacts — and the default position of all too many Democrats — is that they do more harm than good to American workers. But the public-interest critique of the TPP focuses much more on harms that the United States will allegedly be perpetrating upon citizens elsewhere (even though the political representatives of those citizens will have signed the deal). The fear it reflects is a fear of the globalization of U.S. principles. For groups like Public Citizen, one of the most vocal opponents of the pact, the TPP’s hidden agenda is advancing “corporate policy goals, rights and privileges.” The domestic debate over the TPP is thus very largely a debate over the merits of the American economic model.

Noam Scheiber criticizes the priorities of the administration:

What we do know, based on leaked text of negotiations, is that U.S. officials are hard at work on priorities other than U.S. jobs. Many of them look like the priorities of the financial sector, as well as big energy, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies. For example, [Trade Representative Michael] Froman’s team, like the U.S. trade reps that came before him, is pressing to make it harder for countries to restrict the flow of capital across their borders, regulations that helped insulate the likes of Malaysia and Chile from recent financial crises, but which are unpopular on Wall Street. The U.S. negotiators also favor provisions that would make it easier for companies to challenge a variety of financial, consumer, and environmental regulations in foreign countries, and which could help, say, European banks to chip away at Wall Street reform in this country.

Tom Bartlett reports on a relatively new area of inquiry:

Research on embodied cognition – the idea, basically, that the body strongly influences the mind in multiple ways we’re not aware of (though not everyone agrees with that definition) – is a fairly new field, and in the last few years it has produced a number of head-scratching results. For instance, there’s the 2009 study that seems to show that people holding heavy clipboards are more likely to disagree with weak arguments than people holding light clipboards. Or the study, also published in 2009, that found that people gripping a warm cup of coffee judged others as having a “warm” personality.

Another study indicated that that people who like sweet foods are more likely to volunteer – or as Bartlett puts it, “They were metaphorically sweet people who loved actual sweets”:

That finding hits on one of the underlying ideas of embodied cognition – that is, that the metaphors we toss around are grounded in more concrete, physiological truths. Warm things make you physically and psychologically warmer. Cold things make you feel more alienated. Sweet things make you sweeter, and liking sweet things means you behave more sweetly.

Now there are plenty of people, including some psychologists, who are skeptical about some of those results. I wrote about the critics of John Bargh’s research – he did the coffee-mug experiment – in an article last year. And a study that purported to show that people were more generous after riding an “up” escalator was shot down by Uri Simonsohn, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a dry-witted crusader against suspicious statistics. (The Dutch researcher who did the escalator study, Lawrence Sanna, later resigned.) But that doesn’t mean embodied cognition as a whole is wrong, of course.

A reader writes:

I’m not saying the white boy you posted doesn’t have skills, but the alphabet rapping concept, including progressive acceleration, was done a long time ago by Blackalcious [see above]. I’m more okay with white boys having their place in hip hop if they bring their own perspective and style to the table, like The Streets for example.

Another points to a true original:

A white (as in, albino white), legally blind, Muslim rapper from the Midwest: Brother Ali. He’s been, at times, inspiring to those who are perceived as different (a song called Forrest Whittaker); at times controversial (Uncle Sam, Goddamn); and, always, pretty intelligent and insightful (Dorian, about confronting his physically abusive neighbor, and Travelers, about slavery, African plight, and cultural repercussions for acting so immorally then). He’s not for everyone, but he is very talented.

This freestyle by Brother Ali is pretty amazing: