There can be damage or defects in the mitochondria that inhibit it's ability to respond to hormones, for example per-oxidation of cardiolipin. Cells don't always die when they have a mitochondrial defect.

Sure, but what's the prevalence of this kind of problems? Sugar and/or glucose can cause problems in a significant chunk of population, maybe even the majority. Are you saying all these people have damaged mitochondria?

Perhaps sugar and glucose only cause problems in those who can't metabolize it effectively

What do you mean by "metabolize effectively"? People who have problems with metabolizing glucose are usually known as "dead" and things like insulin resistance are a problem with signalling, not a problem with cells' aerobic metabolism.

I used to think high glucose intake caused metabolic syndrome but I can't reconcile that with the existence of large groups of people (Kitavans, fruitarianism, etc.) that have very high carb diets and don't develop metabolic syndrome.

The metabolic syndrome is clearly multi-factor, there is no single cause we can point to. I am not sure PUFAs (or fructose) are the magic ingredient either, and it looks quite likely that the amount of physical exercise plays a fairly major role in all this -- but the whole thing is pretty messy at the moment. Sorting out all the causal connections leading to the metabolic syndrome is probably Nobel material :-/

suggested consuming foods high in glucose the other day when I was complaining about being tired, and that actually seemed to work pretty well.

If you're getting hypoglycemic, sugar will certainly help and sugar highs are real. However I don't think this is a good idea long-term as there is considerable amount of evidence that eating a lot of refined carbs tends to lead to a variety of unpleasant diseases, most prominently the metabolic syndrome.

I was going to comment upon the comment you made in another post about Gilbert Ling. I'd never heard of them or their ideas and had to go looking the other night. As a result I now know why I never did.

I am extremely tired right now and in the middle of preparing for my thesis committee meeting, so I cannot give this the attention it deserves right now. Come back in a day or three and I will either expand this reply or make another one.

For now:

*From what I've seen, Ling's ideas seem to originally be based upon a few equivocal experiments from the sixties and seventies that have since been contradicted by just about all cellular electrophysiology, enzymology, and membrane biology known.

*All the odd results they point to about ion balance requiring too much energy to be accounted for via active-transport ion pumps in the membrane have been solved to my satisfaction by more recent work, especially in neurons, and all their talk about cells with compromised membranes maintaining ion balance seem like they can be explained by work on calcium-triggered membrane vesicle fusion from the nineties.

*This proposed role for ATP in unwinding proteins is experimentally unsupported by any good sources I can find, I fail to understand why it would be better for this purpose than just phosphate laying around the cell, and I use ATP nearly literally nearly every day to drive enzymes via hydrolysis. The ability of enzymes and channel proteins to couple its hydrolysis to all kinds of processes is not and never has been in doubt.

*Ion gradients established via membrane pumps are well-established as an energy source (or sink) in biology from the classic rotary ATPase that pumps protons across the bacterial membrane while breaking down ATP (with the proton gradient then driving flagellar motion in bacteria as it leaks back in through another rotary setup attached to the fiber and various transport systems), to the role of calcium as a signaling molecule that is sequestered out of the cytosol by active ion-specific pumps that can be poisoned, to the existence of channel proteins in our blood that form part of our innate immune system which exert their killing effect on bacteria by forming large nonspecific channels in their membranes that allow ions to leak across their gradient.

*Most of their writing that I did see in my hour of poking around contains incredulity about the very idea of powered channels being able to do what we know, experimentally, they do, along with some very elementary misunderstandings of molecular biology and evolution.

*The evidence for ordered water more extensive than hydration shells around proteins is not very good, and there is actually very interesting and productive research going on into protein hydration - I interviewed with and almost worked for a guy at Indiana University starting a project comparing the hydration shells around bacterial and eukaryotic proteins and finding that bacterial proteins had nice orderly hydration shells you can see in crystal structures while eukaryotic proteins are 'sticky' to other protein molecules because they are unable to hold onto water molecules well in the face of themal noise. You pointed to the work of Gerald Pollack supporting the idea of extensive ordered water and while this is a guy doing interesting materials science about the interaction of water and solutes with surfaces he is prone to making wild pronouncements on extremely small amounts of evidence and others have raised other possible explanations for his data that have been insufficiently followed up on.

There is a place for controversy in biology. At the university I am working at right now, I nearly worked with a guy who is busily basically trying to prove that the model of protein translocation across the ER membrane is wrong and far more complicated than the usual address-tag plus protein-channel for growing peptides setup in the textbooks. He even thinks that parts of it were crystallized in the public opinion of scientists before sufficient work had gone into proving it. But at a glance shoving out literally most of what is known pretty well about the way cellular metabolism and membranes work... color me sceptical to say the least.

I don't see how

maintaining the low entropy living state in a non-firing neuron requires little energy. This implies that the brain may already be very efficient, where nearly all energy is used to function, grow, and adapt.

leads to the assertion that intelligence is cell-energy limited and that increasing brain metabolism (on timescales shorter than evolutionary) will lead to increased IQ. In particular, I don't know of evidence that starving people become stupid.

Also, a hot water heater is a giant tank of drinkable water, and is always full. It can be drained from a spigot at the bottom.

I would be concerned that the atypical water flow might stir up sediment (high concentrations of assorted contaminants that are in low concentrations in the incoming water). Am I right?

Great post.

For food, I think dehydrated potatoes are a particularly effective emergency food. They're more complete nutritionally than grains and will keep you performing longer in a tough situation.

I also like to store enough fuel to safely get to a friend or family members house in another town, if necessary. My vehicle is diesel, so storing the fuel is somewhat safer than storing gasoline.

Books can be helpful as well- especially easy to read field references for emergency medicine and survival techniques. In my opinion a good book on first aid is more important than an actual first aid kit.

Also, a hot water heater is a giant tank of drinkable water, and is always full. It can be drained from a spigot at the bottom.

If I could change anything, it would be seeking out problem-oriented instead of method-oriented mentors. Scientists and engineers can often be divided into two categories: those who are experts at a given method and look for problems to apply it to, and those who are experts at a given problem and look for tools to attack it with. Both can be productive strategies. I have a problem-oriented perspective, but most of my mentors have been method-oriented and don't understand my unwavering focus on specific seemingly intractable problems.

I definitely get what you mean and I've been blessed with a problem-oriented mentor. However, I don't really have a strategy to seek out some similar mentors and worry that in engineering it's a lot more likely to find method-oriented persons. I'm wondering if you have any advice on this.

(My supposition: Non-applied mathematicians are dominantly problem oriented, but for problems that usually don't matter. Programmers and applied mathematicians (like Operational Research guys) will probably experience a more even distribution between the two modes, however I would guess that it would lean towards problem-oriented as the underlying ontology of phenomena are necessarily modeled from scratch (in physics and chem most of our ontology is mapped, but not so in social problems except maybe with economics).)

Lately I've been less motivated to engage because of the intractability of the problems that grabbed my attention in the first place (intelligence amplification/cognition), even though it would be the more satisfying field from a curiosity standpoint (I like science and BME is highly integrated between all scientific disciplines).

What kind of paradigm shifts do you think will occur for biology in the future? Where are the current controversies for biology right now?

Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I'd love to hear more. I need some time to formulate good questions though. If you're willing to share your email address with me, you can email me at jsinick@gmail.com

Some verifiably false ideas about basic biology remain commonly accepted in the field, and will need to be reinvestigated for progress to continue.

I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this.

As for the grad student debt issue, most major research universities in the USA pay students in doctoral programs. It is very much possible to obtain a PhD in the life sciences or bioengineering with zero debt, if you have good spending habits while in school.

At a major research university in a cheap medium-sized town (at least compared to where I grew up) I am saving 25% of my income - though once one of my fellowships wears off that will probably drop to 10% or less unless I change my spending habits.