Ed’s corner of the web

As a Darwin Day “gift,” a friend of mine presented me with a copy of The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller.  The subtitle reads, “Belief in an Age of Skepticism.”  I guess I’m letting my skeptical nature show a little bit, huh?  At any rate, I love this friend dearly, and I know the gift was well meant, so I felt obliged to read the book, even if it wasn’t the sort of thing I would usually pick to curl up with.  As I made my way through the book, I began to think that it would be an interesting exercise to blog about the book as I went along.  This post, then, is an introduction to that very exercise – hopefully a series of posts about my impressions of the arguments put forth by Keller as he tries to poke holes in the common arguments against Christian belief and support the strongest reasons he sees for faith.

And just so you know how serious I am about this, I’m actually taking notes in the margins.  Close friends of mine know that I never write in books.  Even my medical school textbooks have nary a highlight or underline.  I’ve always had a hard time “defiling” a perfect printed page, and it’s still against my instinct to put pencil to the paper, even for this cause.  The things I do for you people…

As a preamble, I feel it’s necessary to give my initial impressions of the book, so that you can better know my state of mind going into this exercise.  According to the dust jacket, Keller is trying to reach out to “atheists, agnostics, and skeptics” in an attempt to make an “intellectually compelling case for God.”  Ostensibly, Keller seeks to connect with these nonbelievers, to speak in their own language and argue using their own tools – a high goal, to be sure.  But then you look at the back cover, where the first two jacket quotes come from Rick Warren and Billy Graham, with another quote further down from Christianity Today magazine – not exactly ringing endorsements from the nonbeliever crowd.  I’m not crazy enough to expect a Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, but maybe a Francis Collins?  Ken Miller?  Maybe Keller really makes some reasonable logical arguments for faith or against skepticism, but from first impressions I am – frankly – skeptical.

On Thursday, February 12th – Darwin Day, no less – I had just finished checking in on a patient in the ICU and decided to check the news.  I was greeted on the front page by this story.  I had to read the headline twice to make sure I read it right.

The vaccine court, a special court convened to determine whether petitioners were entitled to compensation from the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, had ruled on three test cases wherein parents asserted that their children had acquired autism through a combination of MMR vaccine and thimerosal from other vaccines.   The ruling was that the evidence presented did not prove a link between autism and childhood vaccines.  In fact, the evidence presented was “overwhelmingly contrary to the petitioners’ contentions.”

Many in the medical and scientific community waited for these rulings with bated breath, all the more concerned because the vaccine court had a lower standard of evidence than a regular civil trial.  Because of this lower standard, even though the scientific evidence clearly showed no link between autism and vaccines, there still remained a small chance that the petitioners could have received an award.  If that happened, it would have been ugly.  I don’t even like to think about what it would have meant for child health in this country.  But fortunately, science and reason prevailed, and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief that morning followed by a triumphant fist-in-the-air.  Just as fortunately, none of the ICU nurses saw me.

On a more sordid note, the Andrew Wakefield saga also deepened this month.  If you recall, Wakefield was the doctor who published a paper in Lancet in February of 1998 purporting a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.  Despite involving only 12 children, the paper’s effects tipped off a MMR vaccination scare that was felt throughout the world, with sharp dropoffs in MMR vaccination rates over the subsequent years.  The sketchy stuff comes when, over the course of the next several years, 10 out of 12 coauthors on the Wakefield paper jointly publish a retraction of the original paper’s conclusions, independent researchers are unable to replicate any of Wakefield’s data, and we learn that Wakefield was massively conflicted in his research – having filed patents for an alternate vaccine to replace MMR and having received over four hundred thousand pounds in fees from lawyers seeking to sue MMR vaccine manufacturers.

Right – scary.  But wait, it gets better.  This month, the London Sunday Times revealed that Wakefield may very well have cooked up the data for his landmark 1998 paper (more details here).  The audacity boggles the mind.  It angers me greatly to think that this one doctor, acting so irresponsibly, selfishly, and unethically, has caused so much damage to child health.  I am, however, at least grateful that science (and a tenacious journalist named Brian Deer) has finally caught up with this guy a little.  Hopefully with the efforts of further inquiries, peer review, and reeducation, science will be able to correct this injustice.  (If you want to read more, Orac talks a lot more about this issue here.  Wikipedia even has a decent bio on Wakefield detailing all the latest controversies.)

So all in all, with just three days left in the month, we’ve had one solid victory for science and a big step towards correcting a past wrong.  Perhaps not as fast as I would like, but still not too shabby.  Charles Darwin would, I think, have approved.

Here in the Boston area, we’ve been fortunate enough to have had a bunch of snow thus far this winter.  I say fortunate despite the fact that this is my first winter as a homeowner and law-mandated sidewalk-shoveler.  All too frequently in winters past, we’ve had good snowfall one day only to be followed by temps in the 40’s and a slushy mess the next day.  That’s if we had snow at all.  But this winter’s cold temps have kept the snow frozen, and I’ll take cold temps with snow over slightly warmer temps with wet slush any day.

Carisa and I have taken advantage of the snow as much as possible.  We’ve been out snowshoeing on five separate weekends…

…and we’ve done some cross-country skiing on three weekends, below with Fanti and Bob at our favorite place.

It’s been awesome.  As much as I enjoy all the outdoor possiblities of the other three seasons, moving in relative solitude through the hush of show-shrouded woods is an experience I relish greatly, perhaps all the more so for the limited window in which it is possible.

Many of my friends and colleagues are aware of my opposition to gifts from drug companies to physicians (I’ve blogged on this topic before).  You might ask how I can be so saintly in my virtues.  Is it my unerring internal ethical compass, my zen-like detachment to material accoutrements, my incorruptible moral fibre?  Ha!  I’ll tell you how I do it:

I get some sort of drug company freebie or sample maybe once or twice a year (unsolicited, mind you).  This was the latest one.  Some docs get free steak dinners, “seminars” in the Bahamas, and honoraria for “assisting with product development.”  I get free boxes of stinky tissues.  And boy do I mean stinky.  I’ve been trying to pawn this stuff off on the adult hospitalists, since it gives me a headache and makes our call room reek.  Who the heck would want to use this stuff?  I’ve been using the sandpaper-like paper towels out of the bathroom instead of these migraine-inducing failed science experiments.  With gifts like these, it’s no wonder I’m no friend of the practice of gift-giving.