Paused at 0:00.
On the Back of a Tiger, Episode 1, Deep Dive. [Music] Hello. Hi Ray, it's Brad and Jeremy. Hi. How are you? Very good. Yeah, so we were just wondering if you could generally describe the association induction hypothesis in the most basic way and why it's so important. Association refers to the relation between two charged particles, two electric negative and positive particles, when you dissolve sodium chloride in water, they dissociate more completely the more highly diluted they are. So when they're concentrated, they tend to get pushed into association more often.
And the idea of the association in the cell is that you have proteins very close to each other with lots of charges, predominantly negative charges. And so they're held in a relatively stable relationship to each other, although everything is liquid. And being concentrated negative charges, it's the opposite of a diluted solution, and so you automatically have a high degree of association between charged particles, oppositely charged. So just the fact that you have a substance with an intrinsically high negative charge means that you're going to pull positively charged particles out of the surrounding environment.
And it works just as well for clay or water softening gel or hair. Lots of conventional biologists have simply preferred to be ignorant about the physics of solid substances such as clay, water softeners, and hair. But if you thoroughly wash a substance such as hair and then dip it into serum or a solution containing both sodium and potassium ions, for example, the hair will selectively take up potassium ions out of the solution, relatively excluding sodium ions. And that's something that the mainstream biologists for several decades have simply not wanted to look at.
They say that there's a semi-permeable barrier doing that, letting in one kind of ion, preferably the potassium which has a lower surface of water, attached to water molecules. And that whole idea of a semi-permeable barrier membrane has been discredited for now about 80 years, thoroughly and repeatedly, but they just won't give it up. They insist that there are little motors at the surface accounting for the unequal distribution. Long ago, Gilbert Lane showed that if you block the energy systems of a cell, it's still just like hair being completely dead will selectively associate potassium.
Lane demonstrated that in the state where the cell is predominantly associated with potassium, using isotopes, he showed that sodium is constantly entering the cell but being excluded. It goes in, but it goes out even faster. So it's analogous to the solubility of something. A.S. Troshin, about the time Lane was working on history, was working on the idea of different solubilities governing the properties of cells. And he showed that, for example, he could demonstrate that cells are not osmometers, which if there's a semi-permeable membrane, they have to behave as an osmometer, like an egg membrane.
It's a very thick substance compared to the idea of a cell membrane, but you do a dialysis membrane, for example, made from an intestine. It's not at all analogous to the hypothetical cell membrane. And Troshin demonstrated that urea, for example, will change the water content of a cell, but it is free to enter the cell. So it isn't pulling water out as an osmotic effect, but it enters the cell freely and simply changes the properties of the protein system so that less water is bound by the cell proteins.
So for the follow-up, or one follow-up, is why does any of this matter? Why does it matter that the membrane pumps and channels theory may be incorrect and that Gilbert's theory or something like it may be more correct? How does that sort of impact? Well, the induction part of the hypothesis is that everything that sticks to the protein affects the electrical properties of the protein, and that applies literally to everything, other ions, hormones, metabolites, and so on. Carbon dioxide is an acid which affects the acidity of the protein, and so affects its potassium/sodium affinity.
Once you see that the system as a cooperative organized system is acting as a different phase, the whole substance of a cell is a coordinated cooperative phase system, and everything you do to that phase is going to change its properties. The basic assumption of the foolish membrane hypothesis is that cells are controlled by that semi-permeable or pumping property of the surface membrane because the ions are equally randomly distributed on either side of the membrane, so you need something to account for why they are non-randomly distributed. Atrocin saw it as a simple matter of solubility,
but the association induction shows that specifically the ions are governed by the electrical properties of the proteins which are influenced by everything. Basically, all of the mistaken medical treatments are the result of bad reasoning from the doctrine of a random solution on the inside of the cell. Randomness is essential to the working of the equations that are used to explain cell potential and ionic distribution. One of my professors, for example, Sidney Bernhardt, spent his whole career and a few years after I left graduate school, he pretty much finished what he had been working on,
showing that even the glycolytic mechanism of converting glucose to pyruvic acid or lactic acid, he showed that just by careful measurement of the substrate and the proteins, he showed that the assumption of randomness, which is the basis for all of the standard enzyme substrate interactions, they are all based on statistical randomness. He showed that there is no possible room for application of those equations because the substrate is about at the same concentration as the enzyme, basically one substrate molecule per one enzyme. So the substrate has to be essentially handled directly from one protein to another
rather than randomly diffusing. So all of the equations, assuming random diffusion, are irrelevant to biochemistry. That part seems really important, sort of culturally. Could you talk to us a little bit more about what it means, basically, to build everything on top of the wrong assumptions? Yeah, everything. When I talk to cardiologists or pulmonologists or any of the specialties, they build important therapeutic approaches on that assumption of standard explanation of how enzymes work, how hormones act on cells and so on. If you follow their reasoning, you can connect the membrane theory
and the randomness theory to specific mistakes they make in their treatment. For example, most thyroid doctors think of thyroid hormone as increasing excitability rather than decreasing excitability of cells. And carbon dioxide metabolism in cells is usually 180 degrees misinterpreted because they think of the equations of bicarbonate rather than the intrinsically acidic modifying effects of the carbon dioxide itself acting on the cell structure. Could we do a thought experiment as if, let's say, we're now living in a world where doctors and scientists, biochemists, have decided to accept the AIH,
or at least that as a starting point? How would you see that changing how medicine or research is done? They would start realizing that right at the center of cell structure and function, the energy process consisting of the production of carbon dioxide from fuel and oxygen, that is the essential acidifying process that governs the structure of the cell, the potassium favoring properties of the cytoplasm, and therefore the structure of the cytoplasm and the readiness to work and be stimulated. So it leads to, for example, seeing interpreting mania as a deficiency of cellular energy.
Epilepsy is a deficiency of cellular energy. When things are overactive, it's because they don't have the energizing structural effects of oxidative metabolism all the way to carbon dioxide. So muscle cramps, hardening of the heart muscle, losing contractive force, nerve symptoms, a great variety of nerve symptoms, kidney malfunction, every system you look at, the approach to treating it comes down to optimizing the energy which regulates the pH ion selectivity and fuel selectivity. Do you think that it would also, continuing this thought experiment,
how would it trickle down scientists sort of using or considering the AIH as the hypothesis to pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical industry drugs? Would those be different and how research is done on them be different in treating some chronic diseases? The drug research industry is so far unrelated to reality that many other things could abolish essentially our whole drug industry because it's corrupt and based on nothing but selling substitute products for basically old herbal and biological drugs that were available 100 years ago could substitute for our multi-billion or trillion dollar drug industry.
Do you think considering the AIH or taking it seriously could affect some chronic diseases, people suffering with them like Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease? Yeah, exactly the same as epilepsy, heart disease, kidney disease, lung disease and so on. Gilbert Ling, one of his articles or books several years ago was "Cancer won't be solved along the present line of thinking." If you don't know Gilbert Ling's work thoroughly, it's hard to understand the idiocy behind contemporary last 80 years of biological and medical thinking. It's a type of insanity that is reinforced by the culture,
the fact that it can make vast profits. And then another smaller important piece to me seems that you get a different understanding of how life works that at the smallest level all you really need is the association of water and proteins? And fuel, oxygen and sugar are the equivalent. And Sidney Fox's demonstration that hot amino acids put on a hot rock will spontaneously polymerize into protein-like molecules. Randomness doesn't occur anywhere in the origin of life. The whole assumption of randomness associated with the Darwinian approach.
Sidney Fox showed that a random mixture of amino acids polymerizes spontaneously into protein-like elongated molecules. But if you put water on that hot protoprotein substance, it produces very symmetrical cell-like particles about the size of a big bacterium spontaneously forming these spheres, microspheres. And these spontaneously formed proteins have enzyme-like functions. And he showed that precursors of the nucleic acids could be polymerized by these spontaneously formed amino acids. It's just a chemical, physical way of showing that the assumption of randomness is basically a crazy religious doctrine that was built in 200 years ago
in the conventional science thinking for religious reasons such as the Big Bang. They had a creation theory and so they fitted their physics to it. Thermodynamic thinking likewise was fitted to associate the idea that God created a universe and that it has been running down ever since, tending toward entropy with no basis other than religious assumptions. The alternative, it isn't necessarily an anti-Christian idea, but it's associated with Hinduism, is that the universe is alive and maybe growing and that randomness in the universe tends to be decreasing rather than increasing, if anything.
Let's talk in terms of metaphors or analogy. I liked how you said the pumps and channels is like there being motors or engines on the surface of the cell or another something that Pollock had said, pumps and channels, it's sort of like doggy doors that only let in certain size dogs. What would be an analogy? And they have to have an attendant to push the wrong dogs out. Right. What would be an analogy for the AIH in that sense then? Say you have a thermostat and food growing inside the house.
If you have the right kind of temperature and food, the right dog will come in, a dog that can't digest beans, for example, might be excluded if you're only growing beans in the house. It's a matter of affinity, not selectivity in the sense of a doggy door. Yeah, I like that. And then sort of going from there, and this might be a hard task, but in just like a couple sentences, could you say how the AIH differs from the pumps and channels theory?
If you look at nature, hair, clay, anything that is a selective iron preferring substance, you simply see that that's a natural property of nature. For example, soil prefers to associate with potassium, and the sodium washes out and gets into the ocean. So if you wonder why soil contains potassium and the ocean is full of sodium, you have to start thinking why is a cell full of potassium and the serum full of sodium? It's simply a physical preference, the structure and electrical properties of the solid matter.
The solidity being anchored in space governs the tendency to associate more fully. Dilution changes the tendency to associate and dissociate things. Given a solid matrix of potassium throughout the world, soil tends to prefer to associate with potassium. How did you first hear of the AIH? What were you doing research-wise or scientifically? I had just enrolled in graduate school, and I was taking my first course in nerve biology. As the lectures went on, by about the fourth week, I decided that the professor giving the standard line was a crackpot.
He would refer us to papers in the 50s, 40s, and 30s. Each time he referred us to a paper that he said was the origin of the thinking that he was expounding on, I would look through the journal and see what people were saying at the same time. I realized that most of the other articles sounded better than the ones he was referring to us. As weeks went by, I read more and more about the history. Looking at the articles he would refer to, I would read the whole rest of the journal.
I started seeing Gilbert Lange's work around 1950 and on. I realized that he was solving all of the problems that were evident in what was being taught in 1968. So I wrote to him and outlined the problems that he had obviously solved. I said, "How is this? These people are going on about this membrane regulation." His answer was, "You just don't understand science. Science is about money and prestige and power. It has nothing to do with understanding reality accurately."
Would you say that without adjusting our understanding of the basic model that we'll kind of be at a standstill? Yes. They'll never get any further. Just more and more drugs and techniques. But never any progress against preventing and curing heart disease, kidney disease, lung disease, brain disease, and so on. Why does it seem like Gilbert has been the only one who has offered this complete alternate model of the cell? It seems like he's just this lone voice in the wilderness. And now that he's passed on, will this all be forgotten?
Oh, no. All along there have been people who were just less diligent and energetic in doing the work. Trotian, his basic book on sorption, is something everyone should read. It will revolutionize your thinking as much as Gilbert Ling's. It just happens that Ling covered all of the essential arguments that the membrane people have offered their bad solutions to and does it in a very elegant way. Besides that one letter that you wrote to him and that you got a reply from, did you two ever chat or exchange more letters or chat on the phone?
Yeah, I wrote to him a couple of times and talked to him once at a meeting in New York. I noticed he, I think it was in the 90s, I asked him a question about carbon dioxide. And he said, "I have untraded your letters," as if it had been a regular thing, but he kept a good file of who had written to him, obviously. Is there a chance that Gilbert's wrong and the AIH is wrong or some parts of it?
Well, in the 1970s I wrote him and asked him if he didn't think that Michael Polanyi's adsorption isotherm would be more appropriate for explaining cells than the sort of elaborate London Langmuir theory I think he was using. And he said, "No, this one works all right." But if I was starting out where he started, I would have used Polanyi's isotherm because it gives an image of a long-range potential that he takes a lot of math to arrive at where Polanyi's isotherm would give you a sketchy approach to it right from the start.
Yeah, one thing that we have noticed in this journey is that, I don't know if it's the way that Gilbert breaks things down or if it's just that the hypothesis is so complicated, but it seems like he hasn't done a great job of communicating it to people, especially lay people. The membrane theory is so easy for lay people to understand. I don't think it is easy for anyone to understand. There are only a few membranes that will make it work that resemble in any way the hypothetical membrane.
The phospholipid bilayer membrane, all kinds of facts contradict it so intuitively it's impossible to have any substance to it and conceive it. The way it stains indicates that it can't possibly be what the hypothesis says it is. Nothing supports it except their assertion that it's there doing something. Do you feel though that, was it a sort of failure on Gilbert's part of communicating or writing about his theory that, you know, so many people just sort of couldn't get through it or understand it?
No, I didn't think it was at all hard to see what he was doing. I didn't have any background in school biology at all when I started, but since I didn't have that background, it was immediately obvious that the whole membrane pump thing was phony and impossible to believe. It's only this sort of religious background of assumptions, it's all built on assumptions that are dogmatically proclaimed. The random selection of genes, for example, in Darwinism, totally counter-empirical. It's all a religious set of assumptions.
One thing I wanted to ask was, because I know that you keep up with a lot of different spheres of research that are going on and new studies that are coming out, have you noticed that any AIH-like theories or experiments have been going on that are getting some more mainstream traction or anything you've seen that you're sort of hopeful about? A guy in Germany at Ulm University, Andre Sommer, S-O-M-M-E-R, is doing the organized water in cells approach.
At MIT in physics, Jeremy England is taking the approach that order builds itself spontaneously given the flow of energy. That approach is basically denying this 200 year long assumption that matter is an inert, randomly moving something. The idea that order is intrinsic to matter is a big assumption that has to be changed. The idea that an atom is identical at all points of time and everywhere in every context is a purely platonic, idealist doctrine with no evidence whatsoever. It is saying that the elements of matter are nothing but a mathematical, changeless thing until they change.
This change is only described by a randomness describing statistical approach. Even Leibniz would have a better grasp of reality in seeing that everything depends on its relationship to other things. Every atom is slightly different depending on where and when it is. The inductive effect says that every atom is sensitive to its surroundings. Once you have the membrane assumption that things move randomly inside of cells, even Leibniz's recognition would tear down the whole approach. Do you have any hope whatsoever that something like the AIH or the AIH will eventually one day be taken seriously?
Yes, if the next election for example could theoretically overthrow the whole drug medical establishment and establish by legislation the insistence on being empirical and rational in everything done in research. Who do you think would do that? Theoretically, Bernie Sanders could look at all of this criminal waste of resources on phony medical approaches, phony military approaches. There would be roughly $20 trillion a year left to do something intelligent. Right, that would be amazing. Well thank you so much Ray. Yeah, we really appreciate your time.