What they said
I recently circulated ‘Rethinking food and diabetes’ to those organisations around the world, with responsibility for managing diabetes in their various countries.
This is my reponse to what they said.
This describes a simple and inexpensive way that people can breed, in organic waste, the beneficial microbes which power our control system which regulates our bodies, then grow plants which they eat fresh to feed their gut-brain.
As eight million people a year have a limb amputated from diabetes this has major social benefit.
Those that bothered to reply said that this has not gone through the rigorous scientific evaluation and suggested I should set up a global trial to prove the technology actually works.
This would cost millions of dollars and there is simply not the money in showing people how to recycle their organic waste to breed these beneficial microbes and grow a few plants on their back patio.
So that will just not happen.
So I wrote a second article, ‘Innovations and managing ignorance’ giving case histories of how innovative technology achieves widespread adoption in the real world.
The punch line was that there was no need for them to endorse the technology, all they had to do was make diabetes sufferers aware that this option existed and let them decide.
We know that this technology is effective in some cases. But they are right, we have no idea whether 5% or 95% of amputations could be avoided – but even 5% of 8 million is 400,000 – that is a lot of legs not amputated.
But the issue of how we manage innovation could be critical to the survival of our species, if we continue to develop technologies on the basis of profits rather than public benefit we could wreck what keeps us alive.
I am not just a lead innovator, I am one of those woke, left of centre greenies who put the community benefit ahead of profits, and proud to argue the case.
Read on and join me.
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Innovation and managing ignorance
Rethinking food and diabetes
I recently wrote an article rethinking food and diabetes that described a simple and inexpensive technology which could dramatically reduce the eight million amputations that occur every year.
You may think that this would be met with great enthusiasm by both diabetics themselves, those professionals responsible for managing diabetes, and the Governments who spend trillions of dollars in their health care budgets on diabetes.
The lead balloon
That is not what happened, it can only be described as a lead balloon – but why?
As our society depends on innovation to solve many of the problems modern civilised society faces, this is a question that needs answering.
There is a basic misconception about the process of innovation with the model of some scientist working away in the lab, coming up with some discovery which is then commercialised and adopted for the benefit of the community.
I am a successful innovator, I was recognised by the Institute of Engineers as one of the countries leading innovators and I can tell you that is just not the way innovations normally occur.
The nature of innovation
Suck is and see
Take something as simple as a bicycle. Was the bike invented because some enterprising applied mathematician studied the theory of gyroscopic couples and the self-centering action of the offset in the forks and so invented the bicycle.
It is not at all instinctive that a two wheel bicycle could be made a stable means of transport, but it was discovered by people tinkering around with no understanding whatever of gyroscopic couples – that came later when it was found that the bicycle was something that was really practical
Was steam power, still the dominant source of power, developed because Carnot developed the theory of thermodynamics, and the Carnot cycle which explains how steam power actually works, which led to the development of the steam engine?
No – a few Englishmen like James Watt were playing around with steam power which was proving incredibly effective. The French government, worried, as ever, that those pesky English were getting ahead, paid the University of Paris, where Sadi Carnot was a professor to study thermodynamic theory.
Look at most of the innovations that we take for granted and they started off by some cantankerous person defying conventional thinking, showing that something both worked and was useful.
Then, after it had been shown to work and be useful, the two key tests was the scientific method applied to develop the underlying science which typically led to major improvements.
From the lab
Of course, there are many innovations that do originate in the lab, WiFi, the semi-conductor, and penicillin all came from fundamental research but were accidental discoveries that were applied in totally different fields.
Swapping fields is a feature of innovations and does involve risk.
Innovation involves risk
There is no better example than Barry Marshal and his work on H Pylori where he put his life at risk to solve a serious illness.
Good on you Barry – nice to know we have not all been turned into dumb donkeys.
The dreaded Silos
The dreaded Silos are one of the great obstacles to innovation – may be essential for fundamental research but deadly for the process of applied science and innovation.
Take my participation in Diabetes. I was a pioneer in computation fluid flow and was regarded as an expert in that specialise field which has nothing to do with diabetes.
But when I made a career change to study Ecology, an area where I have had a lifelong interest but no formal qualifications.
By chance, my background in fluid flow turned out to be highly valuable in my development of the Wicking bed which enabled plants to be grown with minimal water.
Still, nothing to do with diabetes.
But it is well known that wet conditions benefit the development of infectious diseases. Just read the story of building the Panama Canal where a major problem was that the workers died at such a high rate from infections in the hot and wet conditions.
Still, nothing to do with diabetes.
The power of serendipity
But it turned out that the technology of growing plants in moist (rather than wet) conditions, favours the growth of beneficial microbes rather than harmful pathogens.
This is highly relevant in the battle against diabetes.
Our built-in intelligent control system
My innovation to reduce the number of people having their legs chopped off is based on a simple observation that the body has an inbuilt intelligence that regulates what and how much we eat and where and how much fat we store.
This is not a hypothesis – this is an observation of what happens in the real world.
This is a very simple observation. If I go out into my garden and work away and sweat, as happens in Queensland, I develop a craving for something salty. This is just a fact.
But what is going on here? I sweat and lose salts from my body. Somehow my body senses this. I don’t know the mechanism that tells my body that it is lacking in salts but there is no doubt that it does.
Our intelligent control system learns
But, and here comes the punch line, my body, or rather my intelligent control system has learned over time that if I eat certain foods or drinks I replace these salts.
Now just slow down and think about this, what we see playing out in the real world is a natural example of what we see in artificial intelligence. My intelligent control system has learned, by observation and deduction, that certain foods satisfy my body.
It then sends out signals so I have this craving to eat (or drink) specific foods.
We see this demonstrated over and over again, starve people, like the Dutch in the war, and when food becomes available they put on large amounts of fat.
We see this in people who try and lose weight by inappropriate diets.
There is no question that our bodies come equipped with a natural intelligent control system that regulates our bodies.
This is just beyond argument even though we have no idea how it works.
We have no idea how it works
But the problem is we have no idea how it works. In my younger days, I used to write sophisticated software, solving partial differential equations and writing self-learning software. I could be described in Australian slang as a gun coder.
But, and here is the crunch, I, and no one else, have any idea how this intelligent code works. It is just too sophisticated. Maybe in a few decades some bright researcher will uncover the mystery but, for now, we simply have no idea.
Act or wait?
So we have two options, we can just wait for a few decades until this mystery is solved.
But just do a bit of simple maths – at eight million amputations per year for a couple of decades that is 160,000,000 possibly unnecessary amputations.
Pure and applied science
Or we can recall one of my favourite quotations.
Science is the art of managing truth, engineering is the art of managing ignorance.
An engineer’s job is to apply science.
Every time an engineer designs and builds something there is a risk it will not work, airplanes fall out of the sky (remember the Comet), cars crash, and bridges and buildings fall down.
It is a question of managing risk. Engineers talk of safety factors, that is the one time engineers showed any expertise in public relations because they are not safety factors at all – they are ignorance factors because we do not have a complete understanding of what we do so we allow for that ignorance.
Reducing amputations
So let’s get back to my solution for reducing the number of amputation from diabetes.
The diabetes epidemic is man made. For all human existence, we have eaten gut-brain food. Then we changed our food system and the epidemic arrived.
A seven years old would say then let’s go back to eating gut-brain food.
Perhaps the simple logic of a seven year old is why it is so difficult to get this idea accepted.
Just grow gut-brain food
My solution is simple, grow plants in living soil full of beneficial microbes and nutrients, and eat the plants while they are still fresh so they feed the gut-brain which forms our intelligent control system.
What are the benefits, risks, and negatives?
Well, the first we know for sure by observation – we will use a lot more toilet paper because eating fresh greens will open up our bowels. We can manage that by buying toilet rolls in large packs – not a big deal.
There is a risk that soil may be left stagnant for long periods of time which are the conditions which favour the growth of harmful microbes.
In the Gbiota system, we have a drainage system so the soil is drained regularly. About as easy to manage as putting on a seat belt.
Plants need to be picked and eaten fresh so it does mean growing at home which is marginally more work than throwing a bunch of aging veggies into a supermarket trolley. But they are cheaper so that is not a big deal.
So what are the benefits? A substantially reduced risk of having your foot chopped off and generally better management of your health.
Risk-adverse
The general view of the medical profession is that this is not a tried and proven method that has gone through the normal scientific verification process.
This is true but is looking at the problem from the point of view of proven science.
But the science will never become tested until a significant number of people try it and see if it works (which is easy – all diabetics measure their blood sugar levels and anyway the real test is does it stop food cravings which the person knows).
Just one
I, acting alone, will never make any impact on the number of amputations. I am just one person. What I have to do is convince one, yes just one, diabetic professional that the benefits far out way any risks.
They have the professional recognition to make things happen, but where is this single person? I cannot find him or her.
Have we all become so overwhelmed by the power of the digital revolution with its collection of data which it uses to manipulate our thoughts?
Have they won and turned the human species into dumb donkeys?
What I am asking for
So what am I asking from the medical profession?
Well, I am not asking for them to endorse this as an approach that has been subject to the normal rigorous testing – I am saying that they should be informing patients that there is this approach they can read about for free on my web gbiota.com and they should be the ones that decide whether the benefits out way the risks.
It is their foot that could be chopped off so they should decide – is it moral not to make this information to their patients?
This is also probably the only way of getting a large scale trial that will provide the scientific evidence to satisfy the requirements for scientific rigour.