The Edogawa NICHE Prize for the year 2020 has been awarded to Dr. John Craig Venter for his contribution to research and development pertaining to the Human genome. This honor reflects Dr. Venters lifetime accomplishments in the power of the genomics and specifically in the identification of the human genome which has radically transformed healthcare according to Prof. Gary Levy, chair, Edogawa NICHE awards committee (www.edogawanicheprize.org).

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Dr. John Craig Venter, recipient of the 2020 Edogawa NICHE Prize, for his contribution to research and development pertaining to the Human genome. (Photo: Business Wire)

Edogawa NICHE Prize was Instituted in 2018, by the Jinseisha trust, and the Nichi-In Centre for Regenerative Medicine (NCRM), which honours scientists or clinicians whose contributions lead to the development of prevention, diagnosis or treatment of any disease, through an inter-disciplinary approach. Alumni of the Fujio Cup Quiz, a part of NCRM NICHE, (www.ncrmniche.org), have priority for nomination, a unique feature of this prize. Previous awardees include Prof James Till, University of Toronto, Canada for discovery of stem cells (2018) and Dr. Steven Rosenberg, National Institutes of Health, USA for his groundbreaking work on T-lymphocyte immunotherapy (2019).

Dr. Venter was born in Salt Lake City Utah on October 14, 1946. He started his college education at the College of San Mateo, CA and later studied Biochemistry in University of California, San Diego under biochemist Nathan O. Kaplan. After obtaining a PhD in Physiology and Pharmacology from UCSD, he became a Professor at the State University of New York and joined the National Institute of Health in 1984. He has founded Celera Genomics, The Institute of Genomic Research (TIGR), J.Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) and co-founded Human Longevity Inc and Synthetic Genomics.

His path breaking sequencing of the first human genome with the Human Genome Project further progressed to transfecting a cell with a synthetic chromosome, a feat that has opened up opportunities to develop novel solutions not only in healthcare, but also in environmental issues and energy domain.

The awarding of the Edogawa NICHE prize to Dr Venter is the most recent in a string of honors including United States Medal of Science (2008), Gardner Foundation International Award (2002), Paul Erlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize (2001) and the King Faisal International Award of Science (2001). He was listed on Time Magazines list of the most influential people in the world.

The award ceremony date will be announced later.

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While health and longevity are matters of social justice and fairness, they are also cornerstones of economic productivity

This weeks news that the UK has officially entered a recession will have left many people deeply concerned. Chancellor Rishi Sunaks Dickensian announcement that hard times are here will have felt a particularly poorly chosen phrase to the millions for whom hard times have never gone away since the last recession in 2008-9.

Massive cuts to local authority budgets and a fall in health spending as a proportion of GDP in the last decade have been associated with poorer population health and increased child poverty. It has been estimated that the austerity measures introduced in the UK following the 2008 crash might have resulted in up to 150,000 excess deaths (excluding those relating to the covid-19 pandemic).

The 2008 crash prompted renewed political attention to the impact of poverty on health. The World Health Organizations Commission on the Social Determinants of Health was published in 2008, and Michael Marmots landmark review, Fair Society Healthy Lives two years later. Both laid bare the brutality of health and wealth inequalities both globally and in the UK. Today, such inequalities result in a massive 16-year disparity in the average life expectancy between Africa and Europe and, even more starkly, a 30-year difference in healthy life expectancythe number of years lived in good healthbetween the highest country (Singapore) and the lowest (Central African Republic). A similar picture is seen between different areas of the UK: the difference in healthy life expectancy between the highest and lowest areas is currently at 21.5 years for women and 15.8 years for men.

The pandemic has forced us to watch the impact of neoliberal economic policy on health as if on fast-forward. Deaths and morbidity from covid-19 have been on a steep socioeconomic gradient, and black and minority ethnic people have been particularly badly affected. An underfunded, marketised and fragmented NHS has only been able to cope with increased demand by cancelling almost all elective surgery and sidelining cancer care. Alfred Saad-Filho at Kings College London has argued that economic policies accelerated by post-2008 governments have directly resulted in the UKs unenviable pole position for highest covid-19 mortality rate in Europe.

Both the WHO Commission and the Marmot review set out a course to reduce health inequalities, a plan which they argued had economic as well as social benefits. While health and longevity are matters of social justice and fairness, they are also cornerstones of economic productivity.

However, a decade of austerity in the UK has shown governments since 2008 took a dim view of the recommendations from WHO and Marmot. In the 10 years on follow-up to the Marmot review, the team at the Institute of Health Equity has drawn a stark picture of the UK governments economic policy choices. Gains in life expectancy began stalling in 2011, and in some areas of England both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy have started falling.

But while the deleterious effect of a decades worth of austerity on public services and public health were predictable (and indeed predicted), they were not inevitable. Economist Jonathan Portes has shown that claims made during pandemic that there is a trade-off between health and negative economic growth are based on a false premise, arguing that it was not the recession that resulted in the terrible outcomes unearthed in Marmots follow-up review, but rather the political choice to disinvest in the welfare state. In their 2013 book The Body Economic, Stuckler and Basu argue:

Conventional wisdom holds that recessions are inevitably bad for human health. Thus, we ought to expect a rise in depression, suicide, alcoholism, infectious disease outbreaks, and many other health problems. But this is false. Recessions pose both threats and opportunities for public health, and sometimes can even improve health outcomes.

Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights made a similar point after a visit to the UK in 2018: the driving force [behind increasing levels of poverty] has not been economic but rather a commitment to achieving radical social re-engineering.

The tenacity of those who have fought in the anti-austerity movement over the last decade has meant that the argument against austerity as a response to a recessionwhich many Conservatives, including George Osborne, would like to rerun after the current downturnnow has high levels of public support. A 2018 UK poll found that a 66% majority thought austerity had gone too far and the British Social Attitudes survey in the same year found 60% were in favour of raising taxes, compared to only 31% when the same question was asked in 2010.

Marmots 10 years on report concluded that health is getting worse for people living in more deprived districts and regions, health inequalities are increasing and, for the population as a whole, health is declining. The report was published in February of this year, just before the devastating impact of covid-19 on the UK became apparent. The challenge is now even harder, the stakes higher, and the fight even more important.

JosephFreeris anNIHR Academic Clinical Fellow,Institute of Population Health Sciences, Queen Mary University London. He worked at The BMJ as the editorial registrar and Clinical Fellow, Faculty of Medical Leadership and Management, 2016-17.

Competing interests: None declared.

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The recession should remind us that health and wealth are political choices - The BMJ - The BMJ

In the late 1960s, the US saw regular, choking smog descend over New York City and Los Angeles, 100,000 barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, and, perhaps most famously, fires burning on the surface of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio. These grim images sparked the modern environmental movement, the first Earth Day, and a decade of extraordinary environmental lawmaking and rulemaking (much of it under a Republican president, Richard Nixon).

From the 70s through the beginning of the 21st century, the fight against fossil fuels was a fight about pollution, especially air pollution.

In the ensuing decades, the focus has shifted to global warming, and fossil fuels have largely been reframed as a climate problem. And that makes sense, given the enormous implications of climate change for long-term human well-being.

But theres an irony involved: The air pollution case against fossil fuels is still the best case!

In fact, even as attention has shifted to climate change, the air pollution case has grown stronger and stronger, as the science on air pollution has advanced by leaps and bounds. Researchers are now much more able to pinpoint air pollutions direct and indirect effects, and the news has been uniformly bad.

The evidence is now clear enough that it can be stated unequivocally: It would be worth freeing ourselves from fossil fuels even if global warming didnt exist. Especially now that clean energy has gotten so cheap, the air quality benefits alone are enough to pay for the energy transition.

This conclusion has been reaffirmed by the latest air quality research, presented at a recent hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform by Drew Shindell, Nicholas professor of earth science at Duke University (and a lead author on both recent IPCC reports).

Shindells testimony reveals that the effects of air pollution are roughly twice as bad as previously estimated. That is a bombshell in a sane world, it would be front-page news across the country.

The air quality scientific community has hypothesized this for at least a decade, but research advances have let us quantify and confirm this notion, over and over, says Rebecca Saari, an air quality expert who teaches in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Waterloo. The air quality co-benefits are generally so valuable that they exceed the cost of climate action, often many times over.

Lets take a closer look at the evidence for this extraordinary claim, and then well consider its political implications.

Recently, I wrote about an ambitious and detailed new plan to substantially decarbonize the US economy by 2035 (primarily through electrification) and said that it would bring transformative social and health benefits.

Shindell and his team at Duke have attempted to quantify those benefits, drawing on the latest science. They began with the climate model used by NASAs Goddard Institute and upgraded it to represent air pollution at relatively high resolution, Shindell testified, making this model suitable for simultaneously studying the impact of climate and air quality.

Using this all-in-one model, Shindells team mapped out a pathway from 2020 to 2070 that reduced US greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the worlds pledge to stay below 2C and attempted to quantify the air quality and climate benefits.

(Note: Though the model and the techniques have been peer-reviewed, Shindells crunching of the latest numbers is currently going through peer review. He includes extensive documentation of his methodology in an appendix to his testimony.)

The numbers are eye-popping. Shindell testified: Over the next 50 years, keeping to the 2C pathway would prevent roughly 4.5 million premature deaths, about 3.5 million hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and approximately 300 million lost workdays in the US.

All that prevented death, illness, and lost productivity adds up to a lot of savings:

The avoided deaths are valued at more than $37 trillion. The avoided health care spending due to reduced hospitalizations and emergency room visits exceeds $37 billion, and the increased labor productivity is valued at more than $75 billion. On average, this amounts to over $700 billion per year in benefits to the US from improved health and labor alone, far more than the cost of the energy transition.

Importantly, many of the benefits can be accessed in the near term. Right now, air pollution leads to almost 250,000 premature deaths a year in the US. Within a decade, aggressive decarbonization could reduce that toll by 40 percent; over 20 years, it could save around 1.4 million American lives that would otherwise be lost to air quality.

Of the potential yearly deaths prevented, Rep. Robin Kelly of Illinois remarked at the hearing, Thats a huge number. Thats nearly three times the number of lives we lose in car accidents every year. Its twice the number of deaths caused by opioids in the past few years. And its even more than the number of Americans we lose to diabetes each year.

If the numbers are shocking, its because the science has been developing rapidly. First, says Shindell, theres been a huge upsurge in work in developing countries, in particular China, which has produced larger data sets and a wider, fuller picture of the real-world effects of exposure.

Second, where scientists used to focus almost exclusively on pollution effects for which there is an established and well-understood biological pathway, the recent production of enormous data sets (for instance, the entire population of more than 60 million Medicare patients) has allowed them to uncover new statistical correlations.

With giant data sets, you can control for socioeconomic status, temperature, hypertension and other existing conditions, and other variables, says Shindell. You can convincingly demonstrate that correlation is in fact causal, because you can rule out essentially every other possibility.

For example, scientists now know that exposure to smog (tiny, microscopic particulates) hurts prenatal and young brains. Even though they dont yet fully understand the biological mechanism, they know it reduces impulse control and degrades academic performance. Similarly, they know it hurts the kidneys, the spleen, even the nervous system.

The well-understood pathways, things like strokes, lower respiratory infections, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, only seem to capture about half the total, Shindell says. When you look at the [new] studies, you find that air pollution seems to affect almost every organ in the human body.

A recent study from the national academies of multiple countries, including the US, put it this way:

The scientific evidence is unequivocal: air pollution can harm health across the entire lifespan. It causes disease, disability and death, and impairs everyones quality of life. It damages lungs, hearts, brains, skin and other organs; it increases the risk of disease and disability, affecting virtually all systems in the human body.

About twice as many people die in total as die just from the pathways we understand, says Shindell. Weve been underestimating all along.

Alongside these updated estimates of air pollution impacts, Shindells team developed a new way of assessing the nationwide health impacts of severe heat, in order to quantify one of the best-understood effects of climate change. Combining them into one model, Shindell testified, we find impacts roughly double those that would have been obtained using older evidence.

While that may sound like a big jump, it is likely a lower bound. On both air pollution and climate change, the study omitted many effects that are clearly present but cannot yet be reliably quantified. The true numbers are almost certainly higher.

The implications of this new air quality research are far-reaching. Though the benefits of the Clean Air Act were already thought to outweigh the costs, they may be twice as high as previously estimated. The costs of Trumps rollbacks of Obamas fuel economy standards and Clean Power Plan are up to twice as large as previously estimated.

It is no coincidence that Trumps Environmental Protection Agency is trying to exclude consideration of co-benefits (often the largest class of benefits) in its air quality rulemakings. Its no coincidence that it is trying to exclude consideration of studies with anonymous participants, a category that encompasses all the latest research Shindell and others draw on. The fossil fuel lobby, which now includes the entire executive branch, has long understood that the science isnt going its way. These rule changes are its last-ditch bid to blind the government to new research.

Climate change has often been framed as an intractable problem for international coordination, a matter of shared sacrifice, with every country incentivized to be a free rider, reaping the benefits without taking on any of the costs.

But the latest air pollution research, coupled with the plunging cost of clean energy, should render that dynamic moot.

It is true that climate change can only be averted with the entire worlds cooperation; if the US reduces its emissions to net zero but the other countries of the world (especially China and India) continue on their current trajectory, it will make almost no difference in temperature. The health benefits of avoided severe heat will not manifest.

However and this is the crucial fact the air quality benefits will manifest, no matter what the rest of the world does. Shindells team ran a version of their scenario in which the US came into compliance with a 2C pathway but the rest of the world continued with current policies. We found that US action alone would bring us more than two-thirds of the health benefits of worldwide action over the next 15 years, Shindell testified, with roughly half the total over the entire 50-year period analyzed.

The air quality benefits arrive much sooner than the climate benefits. They are, at least for the next several decades, much larger. They can be secured without the cooperation of other countries. And, by generating an average of $700 billion a year in avoided health and labor costs, they will more than pay for the energy transition on their own. Climate change or no climate change, its worth ditching fossil fuels.

And if this is true in the US which, after all, has comparatively clean air it is true tenfold for countries like China and India, where air quality remains abysmal. A Lancet Commission study in 2017 found that in 2015, air pollution killed 1.81 million people in India and 1.58 million in China.

Shindells research reveals that those estimates may be woefully low. (He hopes to do similar modeling on China at some point.) The true toll may be almost double that, which is why both countries have experienced mass demonstrations against pollution in recent years that have left their governments scrambling.

Air pollution remains the leading environmental health risk factor contributing to premature death worldwide, as demonstrated repeatedly by the Global Burden of Disease studies, says Saari. Health care costs and lost worker productivity are direct economic impacts of air pollution so large they can exceed the costs of climate policy.

Shindell ended with a call to Congress, testifying that it would be unconscionable to realize these benefits could be obtained and not attempt to obtain them.

The extraordinary level of suffering humanity is currently experiencing from air pollution is not necessary for modernity; it could be reduced, at a cost well below the net social benefits, with clean energy technologies on hand.

If they are not necessary, then the millions of lives ended or degraded by fossil fuels every year are a choice. And when suffering on this scale, that is this brutally inequitable, becomes a choice, it enters the same ethical terrain as war, slavery, and genocide. The effects are more distributed over time and geography, as are the decision-making and the moral culpability, but the cumulative impact on human well-being on our longevity, health, learning, and happiness is comparable, and every bit as much worth fighting.

US policymakers have a chance to kick-start an energy transition that could save 1.4 million American lives over the next 20 years, especially among the most vulnerable, even as it creates jobs and saves consumers money. As Shindell says, it would be unconscionable not to act on it.

Will you become our 20,000th supporter? When the economy took a downturn in the spring and we started asking readers for financial contributions, we werent sure how it would go. Today, were humbled to say that nearly 20,000 people have chipped in. The reason is both lovely and surprising: Readers told us that they contribute both because they value explanation and because they value that other people can access it, too. We have always believed that explanatory journalism is vital for a functioning democracy. Thats never been more important than today, during a public health crisis, racial justice protests, a recession, and a presidential election. But our distinctive explanatory journalism is expensive, and advertising alone wont let us keep creating it at the quality and volume this moment requires. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will help keep Vox free for all. Contribute today from as little as $3.

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Air pollution is much worse than we thought. Climate change is far from the only problem with fossil fuels. - Vox.com

In her latest column, Nonie De Long says a keto diet helps the body become more efficient at using fat for energy

Dear Nutritionist:

Ive been wanting to write in for a while now but the cottage and summer gardening has kept me busy. Ive been trying to lose weight. Im a middle aged female (54) and have done Weight Watchers, but didnt keep the weight off. Im interested in giving Keto a try so I would like to know if you think its a fad and also is it safe?

Many thanks!Betty

Dear Betty,

Thank you for writing in! I get asked this question a lot actually. I will go into my reasons below, but the short answer is no its not a fad and yes, keto is safe for almost all people.

There are some medical conditions that make keto problematic, but that is not the vast majority of folks. Lets unpack the keto diet a bit to understand why its not a fad.

We have all seen diets come and go. Across the board its safe to say they would be unnecessary if we ate only natural food that we are biologically adapted to eat, in the right proportions, with some moderate movement in our daily lives.

Its a myth that dieting is natural. If we look at the vast majority of our history as a species, its food scarcity and not overeating that impacted mortality. In the developed countries to varying degrees we have now gone in the other direction.

Its also a myth that we need to be gym rats to be fit. Just look at 80-year-old farmers around the globe. Staying fit has to do with staying active - and that can be any activity from work to house keeping to gardening to walking the dog to my personal favourite - dancing around the living room. Movement keeps us fit. But diet keeps us slim.

Please read that again if you are interested in losing weight. Body composition is determined by your diet. You can not exercise off a bad diet. And trying to will leave you frustrated and often injured.

Consuming a healthy, biologically appropriate diet will get you to a good body composition - meaning the fat to lean tissue ratio, which is what we are talking about when we talk about weight loss. If you are short and stout by nature, with a lot of muscle, you are never going to diet yourself twiggy. But you can be lean, with a nice shape and healthy fat distribution.

What does that mean?

Well, a healthy person has a little fat just under their skin all over their body. An unhealthy body holds fat in the middle. That is the primary indicator of longevity, heart disease, diabetes, and a whole host of other disease states.

If you want to know your risk, look at your waist to hip ratio. If the waist is bigger or even close to your hips, youre in trouble. If you have a muffin top over your jeans or look pregnant when youre not, you can stand to lose fat, no matter how thin your overall frame is. This will reduce your disease risk more than anything you can do!

This is where keto comes in.

Historically, our ancestors had periods of plenty and periods of scarcity. They would migrate to follow food. They never got to choose a diet, as we do today. They never had processed foods.

Even growing crops and using grains is relatively new in terms of our development! For the vast majority of our development as a species we existed on what we could pick or dig and what we could hunt and catch in terms of animals.

Its also noteworthy that we used the entire animal in times of scarcity and in times of plenty there is evidence that dogs (which co-evolved with humans) ate the muscle meat while we ate the organ meat and bones. The organs were often consumed raw after a kill. Today (when dogs and humans eat natural food) that trend is reversed!

In this respect, our paleolithic ancestors would have naturally had cycles of ketosis because ketosis is what happens when the body runs on fats for fuel rather than carbohydrates or protein.

When game is the primary source of sustenance, fat becomes the natural fuel source for the body. Healthy human bodies dont use protein for energy in the presence of fat. And they dont burn fat in the presence of carbs. In a time when carbs were scarce (fruit in season, which was far less sweet than it is now, and a few tribes that used tubers more often) the body would naturally default to using fats for energy. This is ketosis. It is our natural state of being.

And its why the body stores energy as fat (the primary human fuel source) for times of scarcity. If we look at this even a century ago, we can see that even agricultural societies - before the advent of modern food production and storage technology - would lend itself to ketosis because carb rich foods are ready in the autumn and would be consumed to pad the body for the famine of winter. Then, when winter scarcity set in, the body was using its own fat to survive. This is ketosis!

With a keto diet the body becomes more efficient at using fat for energy - because during that time it burns its own fat stores, which many people now want to take advantage of. It also decreases the strain on the digestive organs and decreases inflammation (as insulin and adenosine are both highly inflammatory and both are down-regulated with this diet).

A keto diet is also very low in allergens and does not contain anti-nutrients that vegetarian proteins contain. Its easier to digest. And it contains bones, the perfect source of minerals. No other mineral source is as healthy or as sustainable. And no other nutrient group is as essential for human health and longevity.

Werent there carbs historically speaking?

For the most recent agrarian part of our development there have been carbohydrate rich foods but there were ways of consuming the carbs that made them healthier for us than what we do today.

First of all, there were no factories and processing them was lengthy so they were less plentiful. Bread was not the sticky, glutenous gooey nonsense we have today. The crop was different and the processing was different. Access was minimal due to the work to process it.

Maize (corn) was not the sweet crop we know today and it was always processed with lime or ash. This process is called nixtamalization. You can read more about it here. When this was not done there was an upsurge in pellagra, which causes psychosis, thinking problems, skin rashes, photosensitivity, and aggression.

Is it a coincidence we now have improperly processed corn in so many of our processed foods and are experiencing so many mental health conditions with these features today? Hmmmm...

Thus, returning to a diet that mimics the natural, evolutionary state of being adapted to using fat for energy (ketosis) is natural and healthy. Its often dismissed as a fad by people who say its not balanced enough or simply because its popular.

But thats what people thought about the automobile when it first came out. A fad. And dangerous. Totally impractical technology. But just because something becomes popular does not make it transitory in nature. Look at televisions. Look at industrialization. There are many many more examples.

The idea that ketosis is dangerous is fueled by people who dont understand metabolism. They confuse it with ketoacidosis, which is very dangerous. But its an entirely different thing. The truth about the keto diet is that it can reverse a host of health conditions that other diets cant. Diabetes and metabolic syndrome alone are good enough reason to hail this diet, as it does more to reverse them than any other.

The only time a keto diet is unhealthy or dangerous is when its composed of processed fatty foods like processed meats and bars and keto snacks. You will still lose weight on them, but they are not natural foods.

In the industry we call this dirty keto. Its far superior to return to a minimally processed animal based diet with natural animal fats and healthy veggies and occasional fruit.

This naturally puts us in and out of ketosis cyclically, with ample nutrients. This is the diet I advocate in my practice, not because it helps with weight loss (although it does) but because it reverses many disease states - even serious mental health conditions like psychosis and seizures. Weight loss is actually just a side effect of eating for health. Its really not the goal.

Thank you, Betty, for the great question. I hope you have a better understanding of it now. As always, if readers have a health or nutrition related question, I welcome you to write to me at nonienutritionista@gmail.com. And if youre looking for more specific health information check out my website at nonienutritionista.com, where I provide 1:1 health coaching for those who need it.

Hope everyone is enjoying this last part of such a lovely summer!

Namaste!

Nonie Nutritionista

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Is Keto a fad? And is it safe? - BradfordToday