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Transcript of the Episode One supplement from the documentary "On the Back of a Tiger"
video:Episode One Supplemental: Dr. Ray Peat
---
B&J: Hi Ray its Brad and Jeremy, how are you?
RP: I'm very good
B&J: 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.
RP: 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 their 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 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 in the serum or a solution containing both sodium and potassium ions for example the hair will selectively take up potassium ions out of solution relatively excluding sodium ions and that's something that the mainstream biologists for several decades have simply not wanted to look at that. They say that there's a semi permeable barrier doing at letting in one kind of ion preferably the potassium which has a lower surface of water attached water molecules and that whole idea of a semi permeable barrier membrane has been discredited for 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 distribution... unequal distribution. Long ago Gilbert Ling showed that if you block the energy systems of a cell, it still just like ear hair being completely dead will selectively associate potassium. Ling 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 a matter of... it's analogous to the solubility of something.
AS Troshin, about the time Ling was working on his theory, 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 as osmometers; which if there's a semipermeable 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 dialysis membrane for example made from an intestine. it's a not at all analogous to the hypothetical cell membrane. And AS 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 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.
B&J: So as the follow-up or one follow-up is; why does does any of this matter? Like, why does it matter that the membrane pumps and channel's theory may be incorrect and that Gilbert's theory or something like it may be more correct? How does that impact…?
RP: 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 of its effects 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 the cell is a coordinated cooperative phase system and everything you do to that phase is going to change its properties. The membrane... the basic assumption of the foolish membrane hypothesis is that cells are controlled by that semipermeable or ‘pumping’ property of the surface membrane. Because the ions are equally randomly distributed on either side to the membrane you need something to account for why they’re non randomly distributed.
AS Troshin thought of it as a simple matter of of solubility, but the Association induction shows that the… specifically the ions are governed by the electrical properties of the proteins which are influenced by everything. So 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, Sydney Bernhardt, spend his whole career and a few years after I left graduate school he pretty much finished what it had been working on showing that even the glycolytic mechanism 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 were 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.
B&J: 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.
RP: Yeah, you know everything.... when I talk to cardiologists or pulmonologists or any of the specialties, they build important therapeutic approaches on that assumption of a standard explanation of how enzymes work, how hormones act on cells, and so on. If you've followed 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 from the carbon dioxide itself acting on the cell structure.
B&J: Could we do like a experiment as if let's say we're now like 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 where research is done
RP: 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 and 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. Muscle cramps heart hardening of the heart Muscle losing contractive force, nerve symptoms- 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.
B&J: Do you think that it would also continuing this experiment how would it trickle down scientists sort of using the or considering the AI h as the 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?
RP: The drug research industry is so far unrelated to reality has it 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
B&J: Do you think considering the AIH or taking it seriously, could affect some chronic diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, or heart disease?
RP: 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 soft 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...the last eighty 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.
B&J: 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 of water and proteins and
RP: Yeah fuel... fuel oxygen and sugar or the equivalent. Sydney 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… Sydney Fox showed that a random mixture of amino acids polymerizes spontaneously into protein-like elongated molecules and that if you put water on that hot protein substance it produces very symmetrical cell-like particles about the size of a big bacterium; spontaneously forming these spheres... microspheres, and these, the spontaneously formed proteins, have enzyme-like functions. He showed that precursors of the nucleic acids could be polymerized by the 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 two hundred 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. The thermodynamic thinking likewise was fitted to associate the idea that God created a universe and that it has been running down ever since, trending 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.
B&J: Let's talk in terms of metaphors or analogy. I liked how you said that pumps and channels are like there being motors or engines on the surface of the cell or another, something that Pollak had said was that pumps and channels are sort of like doggy doors that only let in certain size dogs. What would be an analogy....?
RP: ...And I have to have an attendant to push the wrong dogs out
B&J: What would be an analogy for the AIH in that sense then?
RP: 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. Dogs 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.
B&J: 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?
RP: If you look at nature; hair, clay, and anything that is a selective ion preferring substance you simply see that's a natural properties 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, potassium throughout the world's soil tends to prefer to associate with potassium.
B&J: How did you first hear of the AIH? what were you doing you know research wise or scientifically?
RP: I had just enrolled in graduate school and I was taking my first course in nerve biology
and as the lectures went on by about the fourth week I decided that the professor giving the standard
line was a crackpot. He would refers to papers in the 50s and 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 and I realized that most of the other articles found better than the ones he was referring to us and so as weeks went by I read more and more about the history. Looking at the articles he would refer to us. I would read the whole rest of the journal and I started seeing Gilbert Ling'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 and said “how is it these people are going on about this membrane regulation?” and 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”.
B&J: And would you say that without adjusting our understanding of the basic model that we’ll kind of be at a stand still?
RP: 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 diseases, and so on.
B&J: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?
RP: Oh no, there all along there have been people who were just less diligent and energetic in doing the work. Troshin’s basic book on sorption is something everyone should read. It will revolutionize your thinking just 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.
B&J: Besides that one letter that you wrote to him and that you got a reply from, did you two ever chat or were exchanged more letters or chat on the phone?
RP: Um, 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 enjoyed your letters, as if it had been a regular thing but he kept a good file of who had written to him obviously .
B&J: Is there a chance that Gilbert's wrong in the AIH is wrong or some parts of it?
RP: Well in the1970’s 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 Londyn-Langmuir theory i think he was using, and he said no that this one works alright.
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 mass to arrive at, where as Polanyi’s Isotherm would give you a sketchy approach to it right from the start.
B&J: 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 is so easy for lay people to understand.
RP: I don’t think it’s easy for anyone to understand. There are only a few membranes that will make it work that resemble in anyway the hypothetical membrane and the phospholipid bilayer membrane, all kinds of facts contradicted 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 that their assertion that it's there doing something.
B&J: Do you feel as though it was 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?
RP: 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 it was, since I didn't have that background it was immediately obvious that the whole membrane pump thing was 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 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 were experiments have been going on that are getting some more mainstream traction or anything you've seen that you're sort of hopeful about?
RP: A guy in Germany at Alm University; Andre Sommer, is doing the organized water in cells approach and 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 or 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 every where in every context is a purely platonic idealist doctrine no evidence whatsoever it is saying that the elements of matter are nothing but a mathematical changeless thing, until they change and the change is only described by a randomness describing statistical approach. Even (?) 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 and that sort of thing once you have the membrane assumption that things move randomly inside of cells even Leibniz’s recognition would turn on the whole whole approach.
B&J: do you have any hope whatsoever that something like the AIH or something like the AIH will eventually one day be taken seriously?
RP: Yeah 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.
B&J: Who do you think would do that?
RP: Theoretically Bernie Sanders could say “look at all of this criminal waste of resources on phony medical approaches, phony military approaches”. There would be roughly 20 trillion dollars a year left to do something intelligent.
B&J: That would be amazing! Well thank you so much Ray, yeah we really appreciate your time
Ray: O-....
video:Episode One Supplemental: Dr. Ray Peat
---
B&J: Hi Ray its Brad and Jeremy, how are you?
RP: I'm very good
B&J: 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.
RP: 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 their 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 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 in the serum or a solution containing both sodium and potassium ions for example the hair will selectively take up potassium ions out of solution relatively excluding sodium ions and that's something that the mainstream biologists for several decades have simply not wanted to look at that. They say that there's a semi permeable barrier doing at letting in one kind of ion preferably the potassium which has a lower surface of water attached water molecules and that whole idea of a semi permeable barrier membrane has been discredited for 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 distribution... unequal distribution. Long ago Gilbert Ling showed that if you block the energy systems of a cell, it still just like ear hair being completely dead will selectively associate potassium. Ling 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 a matter of... it's analogous to the solubility of something.
AS Troshin, about the time Ling was working on his theory, 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 as osmometers; which if there's a semipermeable 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 dialysis membrane for example made from an intestine. it's a not at all analogous to the hypothetical cell membrane. And AS 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 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.
B&J: So as the follow-up or one follow-up is; why does does any of this matter? Like, why does it matter that the membrane pumps and channel's theory may be incorrect and that Gilbert's theory or something like it may be more correct? How does that impact…?
RP: 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 of its effects 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 the cell is a coordinated cooperative phase system and everything you do to that phase is going to change its properties. The membrane... the basic assumption of the foolish membrane hypothesis is that cells are controlled by that semipermeable or ‘pumping’ property of the surface membrane. Because the ions are equally randomly distributed on either side to the membrane you need something to account for why they’re non randomly distributed.
AS Troshin thought of it as a simple matter of of solubility, but the Association induction shows that the… specifically the ions are governed by the electrical properties of the proteins which are influenced by everything. So 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, Sydney Bernhardt, spend his whole career and a few years after I left graduate school he pretty much finished what it had been working on showing that even the glycolytic mechanism 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 were 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.
B&J: 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.
RP: Yeah, you know everything.... when I talk to cardiologists or pulmonologists or any of the specialties, they build important therapeutic approaches on that assumption of a standard explanation of how enzymes work, how hormones act on cells, and so on. If you've followed 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 from the carbon dioxide itself acting on the cell structure.
B&J: Could we do like a experiment as if let's say we're now like 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 where research is done
RP: 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 and 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. Muscle cramps heart hardening of the heart Muscle losing contractive force, nerve symptoms- 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.
B&J: Do you think that it would also continuing this experiment how would it trickle down scientists sort of using the or considering the AI h as the 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?
RP: The drug research industry is so far unrelated to reality has it 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
B&J: Do you think considering the AIH or taking it seriously, could affect some chronic diseases like Alzheimer's, cancer, or heart disease?
RP: 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 soft 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...the last eighty 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.
B&J: 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 of water and proteins and
RP: Yeah fuel... fuel oxygen and sugar or the equivalent. Sydney 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… Sydney Fox showed that a random mixture of amino acids polymerizes spontaneously into protein-like elongated molecules and that if you put water on that hot protein substance it produces very symmetrical cell-like particles about the size of a big bacterium; spontaneously forming these spheres... microspheres, and these, the spontaneously formed proteins, have enzyme-like functions. He showed that precursors of the nucleic acids could be polymerized by the 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 two hundred 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. The thermodynamic thinking likewise was fitted to associate the idea that God created a universe and that it has been running down ever since, trending 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.
B&J: Let's talk in terms of metaphors or analogy. I liked how you said that pumps and channels are like there being motors or engines on the surface of the cell or another, something that Pollak had said was that pumps and channels are sort of like doggy doors that only let in certain size dogs. What would be an analogy....?
RP: ...And I have to have an attendant to push the wrong dogs out
B&J: What would be an analogy for the AIH in that sense then?
RP: 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. Dogs 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.
B&J: 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?
RP: If you look at nature; hair, clay, and anything that is a selective ion preferring substance you simply see that's a natural properties 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, potassium throughout the world's soil tends to prefer to associate with potassium.
B&J: How did you first hear of the AIH? what were you doing you know research wise or scientifically?
RP: I had just enrolled in graduate school and I was taking my first course in nerve biology
and as the lectures went on by about the fourth week I decided that the professor giving the standard
line was a crackpot. He would refers to papers in the 50s and 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 and I realized that most of the other articles found better than the ones he was referring to us and so as weeks went by I read more and more about the history. Looking at the articles he would refer to us. I would read the whole rest of the journal and I started seeing Gilbert Ling'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 and said “how is it these people are going on about this membrane regulation?” and 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”.
B&J: And would you say that without adjusting our understanding of the basic model that we’ll kind of be at a stand still?
RP: 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 diseases, and so on.
B&J: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?
RP: Oh no, there all along there have been people who were just less diligent and energetic in doing the work. Troshin’s basic book on sorption is something everyone should read. It will revolutionize your thinking just 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.
B&J: Besides that one letter that you wrote to him and that you got a reply from, did you two ever chat or were exchanged more letters or chat on the phone?
RP: Um, 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 enjoyed your letters, as if it had been a regular thing but he kept a good file of who had written to him obviously .
B&J: Is there a chance that Gilbert's wrong in the AIH is wrong or some parts of it?
RP: Well in the1970’s 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 Londyn-Langmuir theory i think he was using, and he said no that this one works alright.
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 mass to arrive at, where as Polanyi’s Isotherm would give you a sketchy approach to it right from the start.
B&J: 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 is so easy for lay people to understand.
RP: I don’t think it’s easy for anyone to understand. There are only a few membranes that will make it work that resemble in anyway the hypothetical membrane and the phospholipid bilayer membrane, all kinds of facts contradicted 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 that their assertion that it's there doing something.
B&J: Do you feel as though it was 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?
RP: 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 it was, since I didn't have that background it was immediately obvious that the whole membrane pump thing was 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 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 were experiments have been going on that are getting some more mainstream traction or anything you've seen that you're sort of hopeful about?
RP: A guy in Germany at Alm University; Andre Sommer, is doing the organized water in cells approach and 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 or 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 every where in every context is a purely platonic idealist doctrine no evidence whatsoever it is saying that the elements of matter are nothing but a mathematical changeless thing, until they change and the change is only described by a randomness describing statistical approach. Even (?) 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 and that sort of thing once you have the membrane assumption that things move randomly inside of cells even Leibniz’s recognition would turn on the whole whole approach.
B&J: do you have any hope whatsoever that something like the AIH or something like the AIH will eventually one day be taken seriously?
RP: Yeah 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.
B&J: Who do you think would do that?
RP: Theoretically Bernie Sanders could say “look at all of this criminal waste of resources on phony medical approaches, phony military approaches”. There would be roughly 20 trillion dollars a year left to do something intelligent.
B&J: That would be amazing! Well thank you so much Ray, yeah we really appreciate your time
Ray: O-....
