Ray Peat on science

"About 40 years ago, someone noticed that the commercial cholesterol used for research was contaminated by oxidation, and that pure cholesterol didn’t produce the same toxic effects."

- September 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The dominant reductionist philosophy of science denies that generalization is an objective process, and has strenuously attacked the idea that intention or purpose guides biological, biochemical and genetic changes."

- September 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Defining the organism and the environment in accord with its ideology of mechanistic reductionism, official science has radically misrepresented the nature of organismic adaptation."

- September 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Following Brewers research, I saw that extra sodium should help in other situations involving circulatory inefficiency. Premenstrual edema, insomnia, and even high blood pressure often respond very well"

- Nutrition For Women

"infertility in mice is also associated with an increased ratio of estrogen to progesterone. My research showed that the probable mechanism by which estrogen excess causes infertility is through limiting the availability of oxygen."

- Nutrition For Women

"This anti-oxygen effect of estrogen suggests a convergence of reproductive aging research with Warburgs theory that damaged respiration is the primary defect in cancer, and also with Selyes observation that estrogens effect resembles the first, shock phase of the stress reaction."

- Nutrition For Women

"The adrenal hormones and mineral metabolism are disturbed in stress, whether the cause is a disorganized style of life, or the injury of surgery. The diet should include about 90 grams of protein (in frequent feedings), eggs as a source of sulfur (needed to synthesize joint lubricants, for example), and should keep the ratio of magnesium to calcium high (as with vegetables, bran, fruit), and the phosphate intake low (this would include using green leaves in place of some meat, as well as using cheese). Vitamins C, E, and pantothenic acid are needed in especially large amount in stress. Vitamins A and B2 are also essential for production of the anti-stress hormones. Inositol is known to protect biological materials from many kinds of damage, and might have this effect in arthritis, but I dont know of any research in this particular application."

- Nutrition For Women

"The Shutes have done extensive research on the use of vitamin E in heart disease, and found that pharmacological doses of 400 mg/day or more are beneficial. They have also recommended it for preventing thrombosis elsewhere in the vascular system."

- Nutrition For Women

"During LSD research, it was noticed that people with chronic headaches, asthma, or psoriasis sometimes recovered completely during treatment with frequent doses of LSD. Another alkaloid derived from ergot, bromocriptine, is now being used to suppress lactation (such as is caused by prolactin-secreting pituitary tumor which develops after using oral contraceptives) and is used experimentally to treat Parkinsons disease. Both LSD and bromocriptine shift the ratio of two brain chemicals, DOPA and serotonin, towards DOPA dominance. Among the effects of this is an inhibition of prolactin secretion. Prolactin excess is involved in breast cancer and in other cell proliferation, probably including the rapid cell division in psoriasis."

- Nutrition For Women

"The holistic view of the organism and its adaptive potentials, advocated by Hippocrates and Aristotle, was rejected by the new science of the last few centuries. Recovering that view, and using it creatively, has become urgent, if we want to understand the processes of development, including aging and the degenerative diseases"

- November 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Almost as soon as purified estrogen was available for research in the 1930s its ability to produce inflammation, cancer, miscarriages, and convulsions was recognized,"

- November 2016 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"It’s true that the pathophysiological reasoning based on knowledge of the basic sciences has very often been wrong, but the solution is to improve the quality of the basic science education, rather than abandoning active reason in favor of passively following guidelines established by the corporations with their interest in the most profitable treatments."

- May 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The basic assumption of medical reductionism is that the parts of a system can be understood and defined, and that those definitions can be trusted as a basis for pathophysiological reasoning. To the extent that the interests of the drug industry have guided research, publication, and education, the facts, the basic sciences, have to be reconsidered."

- May 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Beginning right after the second world war, government, corporations, and foundations began taking an increased interest in science. As funding for research grew, control of science moved from the researchers themselves to the funding institutions."

- May 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Financed by the Pentagon, Chomsky’s linguistics research was seen as a way to improve military Command and Control, with computers programmed to use language with great precision."

- May 2017 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"McClintock’s recognition of stress-induced genetic adaptability was completely unacceptable to the dogmatic genetic determinism that was firmly in control of the research establishment, so she became almost invisible for 30 years, until the genetic engineering industry revived her work,"

- March 2021 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"I don’t think it’s possible to think about Gilbert Ling’s work (which began in the 1940s) without evaluating the way that the science industry has been working during this period, at least in the US and England. Science has its rules, but they don’t apply when the ruling ideology or paradigm is challenged."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The situation in our science culture resembles the Jim Carrey movie, The Truman Show, except that very few of the participants understand that it’s a constructed illusion."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"For many years, the science culture of the US has at times denounced holism, intentionality, consciousness, epigenetics, self-organization and self-regulation, along with vitalism, as unscientific and superstitious. In the 1960s, Gilbert Ling’s idea of a living state had overtones of holism and selfregulation, but one of the most offensive things about it was that it proposed to explain all biological processes in terms of known laws of physics and principles of physical chemistry."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"While biologists claimed to be defending mechanistic materialist science against vitalism, in fact they were rarely able to think in the physical chemical ways that were the essence of Ling’s work. His criticism of the membrane sodium pump made it clear that the pump was just the ghost in the machine that was needed to animate the conventional theory of the living cell."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"In 1960, the painter David Alfaro Siqueiros said that the Rockefellers and the US Government had created ghost art, abstract expressionism, to destroy society’s consciousness. Much of contemporary science has been a ghost science, a mental impediment imposed on society, limiting our ability to perceive the nature of our problems and possibilities."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"As recently as the 1950s urea was recognized as the most effective treatment for brain swelling, but the science based membrane theory reasoned that the removal of water from cells was always governed by osmosis, and since urea could remove water from cells, it must be osmotically active. As an osmolyte, it was added to distilled water for intravenous use, and the red blood cells behaved as they would in distilled water, dissolving. The report that urea causes hemolysis led to general discontinuation of its use for treating brain injury."

- March 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The receptor doctrine is part of an ideological attitude toward life, an attitude that would like things to be clearly definable and uncomplicated. The fact that hormones and neurotransmitters can crucially interact with things that aren’t their receptors has usually been disregarded, if not denied. The professionalization of science in the last 150 years has created a culture in which authoritative assertions can be accepted for decades without any supportive evidence at all."

- July 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The style of writing in science journals is explicitly intended to depersonalize language, to give the impression of objectivity. That is a propaganda technique, that contributes nothing to scientific objectivity."

- July 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Around 1980, a friend showed me an article in JAMA that warned about the dangers of vitamin E, with many citations of research publications. Most of the articles that the author said showed the harmful effects of vitamin E were actually reporting biological changes that the researchers considered to be beneficial."

- July 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Refinements of Ehrlich’s idea of specific neutralizing antibodies dominated immunological research, and were recognized by several Nobel Prizes, from 1960 to 1996. Public thinking about the theory of vaccination hasn’t moved beyond those ideas."

- January 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Up until the beginning of this century, inflammation had usually been thought of as a simply constructive part of the local healing process, but it was starting to be recognized to have a universal role in pathology. Tissue injury was no longer seen as a merely local event. Research was being forced toward a reconsideration of Metchnikoff’s holistic, developmental view of immunity. Bystander effects, the emission by any injured cell of substances that induce a similar injury in other cells, even in remote parts of the body (Koturbash, 2007; Kovalchuk, 2016), and the persistent epigenetic changes they involve, are part of innate immunity. This system is activated by adjuvants, as well as the adaptive immune system that produces antibodies."

- January 2020 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The major science journals avoid publishing things that aren’t compatible with the current belief system, so the facts that support the principles taught in the universities are undeniably cherry picked, first by editors, and then by professors."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Mainstream science, the official science that is massively financed by government and industry, has been elaborating an ideology based on a metaphysical view of matter, as something known a priori. A different, experience-based science, which isn’t committed to a particular doctrine about the nature of matter, has barely managed to survive into the present century in the work of a few scattered individuals."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Ehrlich believed* that physical chemistry didn’t apply to biology, and his attitude, encouraged by the drug industry, has persisted in official science up to the present. Physics and chemistry had become State Sciences by the end of the 18th century, and with Ehrlich, biology became a Commercial Science."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Responsiveness or sensitivity is a property of the living substance that needs to be explored without preconceptions, along with the other properties such as polarity and intentionality that guided the best research of the past."

- January 2019 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"The understanding of time is where there is the most radical difference between mainstream philosophy of science and the antireductionist dissenters."

- January 2018 - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"n 1968 or 69, I had been reading the previous 50 years of research on celi physiology, and i saw that for 20 years, Gilbert Ling had been almost alone in offering a view of the cell that was physically possible."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 4

"I have seen articles in major science journals that draw important conclusions from the nonexistent positive charge supposed to be on the outside of cells, and those things have got past the editors and referees because those ideas are so current 1n our scientific culture. Less blatant, but equally false, ideas are even more prevalent. The use of various microelectrode techniques has produced an abundance of information on cellular electrical responses, but with the exception of the work of Gilbert Ling and a few others, the meaning of the data is obscured by a huge culture of phantasy theories."

- 1998 - Ray Peat's Newsletter - 2

"Psychologists have noticed that naming an object according to a certain function often limits the way people will be able to use it. This happens in science. If we know one function of a substance, and name it for that function, we will find it harder to think of its other possible roles."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Estrogen increases the brain’s susceptibility to epileptic seizures, and recent research shows that it (and cortisol) promote the effects of the excitotoxins, which are increasingly implicated in degenerative brain diseases."

- 1995 - August.September - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"the Interaction of iron with vitamin C (and other reductants) and unsaturated fats, to produce lipid peroxidation, has been the dominant Issue in research on the toxic effects of iron."

- 1994 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Intravenous injection of ATP cures shock, restoring normal circulation and tissue function, but again, the idea of membranes and their pumps has kept mainline science on its relatively sterile track."

- 1994 - April - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Two research projects showed that very large supplements of salt reliably normalized the high blood pressure in women with toxemia of pregnancy."

- 1992 - June - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"For several years, I have been interested in the biological effects of ammonia, and compounds that are metabolically close to it. There is clear evidence of ammonia’s antiviral effect, which stimulated extensive research by drug companies seeking patentable antiviral amines. Most simple substances have regulatory functions in themselves, besides participating in other systems. Besides viral immunity, I think ammonia is involved in regeneration and nerve modulation. Urea, inosine, GABA, the polyamines, and betaine derivatives (e.g., gamma-butyrobetaine) are closely related to ammonia metabolism, and combinations of them will probably have many useful biological effects."

- 1991 - July - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Human (and ecological) health obviously should have the benefits of holistic science, but the actual situation is that biology and medicine have become very product-oriented, and holistic considerations are increasingly left to a variety of fringe occupations. Many of these alternative approaches are concerned with the idea of energy as the key to health, but in general they lack simple and effective methods for optimizing biological energy, and often use counter-productive methods."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Physical science provides a much richer picture of the qualities and potential of the material world than geneticists recognize. Even many physicists don’t recognize the richness implied by the body of experimental results in their field."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Many other types of research in adsorption fields and long-range order make it clear that the interactions of atoms and molecules in cells neednt be governed by either direct contact or by random motion. When cell components are rearranged, they return to their normal position in relation to other components, revealing a great capacity for self-assembly or self-ordering."

- 1990 - October - Ray Peat's Newsletter

"Research showing the toxic effects of unsaturated oils goes back more than 60 years. A 1985 article published in my newsletter cites some of the key references. These substances inhibit many enzymes (e.g., in digestion, in immunity, in clot removal, in thyroid function), they disrupt mitochondrial energy production, and they interfere with communication between cells. We hear very little about these toxic effects, and there is not much money available for more research in these areas."

- 1989 - February.March - Ray Peat's Newsletter