Steiner Schools And Education, KMUD, 2015

[Dan W]

Download of the audio file: https://raypeatforum.com/community/attachments/kmud-151120-steiner-schools-and-education-mp3.1831/

The original transcript not verified can be found in the second reply in this thread, as a pdf file.

 

[burtlancast]

Raymond Peat, Ph.D.

Steiner Schools And Education

KMUD, 20-11-2015​

(Transcribed by “the ever handsome Jeff M”, verified by Burtlancast)


AM: Andrew Murray
SJM: Sarah Johanneson Murray
RP: Ray Peat



AM: Welcome to this month’s “Ask Your Herb Doctor” my name is Andrew Murray

SJM: My name is Sarah Johanason Murray.

AM: We were both trained in England and graduated there with a degree in herbal medicine, and clients consult with us regarding their health issues and we recommend personalized advice and nutrition supplements, herbs, diet, and lifestyle, We can be reached toll free, after the show or Monday thru Friday 9-5, at: 1-888-WBM-HERB or at www.westernbotanicalmedicine.com .
So for tonight’s show this November, clock’s have gone back, it’s getting colder, and winter is on its way, and hopefully we’ll get some rain on the way. For this month’s show, Dr Peat is going to join us here, and we are fortunate to have him on the show, and I know people here who listened to the show fairly frequently and who have heard Dr. Peat speak on a wide range of topics, well tonight’s topic is the exception believe it or not. And I won’t speak for him he will speak for himself as usual. I am going to bring up the topic of Rudolf Steiner schools, and anthroposophy and biodynamic gardening and medicines etc. etc. all sort of thing that tie into a sort of very complete system that Rudolf Steiner brought out in the early 1900s. I know Dr Peat has his own very personal and pertinent background in education, but in that way we can in that hopefully we can get Dr. Peat to talk about that, I haven’t actually asked him, but we’ll see. So Dr. Peat are you with us ?

RP: Yes.

AM: Thanks so much for joining us, and for those of people who haven’t heard us and just tuned in for the first time could you just give an outline of your academic and professional background.

RP: I studied humanities as an undergraduate and eventually went to graduate school in biology, although linguistics and painting had been most of my previous study. Since graduating with a PHD in biology, I have done a lot of counseling in nutrition, and general health issues.

AM: Ok, well, I think what I wanted to get at and it’s not something I have written up beforehand or discussed with you, and you can always say no. In terms of your work, in education and academics, would you like to mention anything about a college that you were part of at one time?

RP: Yeah; it was very, very directly related to everything I did before and after. I had been a critical consumer of education right from the first grade. I knew how to read when I got to school. So, I didn’t take it very seriously when they went through their routines. My third, fourth and fifth grade experience was exceptional in a one room country school, where there were eight grades in one room; so that made it more interesting. It was completely unregimented, and I think that gave me the idea that maybe kids would do better in a freer learning environment. And of my college experience, I found that there were only 2 or 3 college professors that knew anything that I wanted to learn. My first teaching assignment confirmed me in the belief that the institution tended to be an impediment to learning. The trustees had their ideas of what the students should do with their lives. The students’ and teacher’s interests, really, were antagonistic to the trustees’. And as a result of that I got an idea of starting a school in Mexico where we could be somewhat beyond the reach of the trustees and the government types who wanted to tell us what we couldn’t study and talk about.

AM: What year was this if I might ask?

RP: 1961. And I had been reading and studying William Blake’s work; so I named the school Blake College. The idea was that we would incorporate it; but the students and teachers would be the only trustees. And, so, there would be no curriculum; students would bring up topics they wanted to study; instructors could offer courses; students didn’t have to attend. Just a complete independence. But everyone was interested in something. We had the idea that, since the students would use their bachelor’s degree to go on for a masters or PHD, that the requirement for getting the degree should be passing the GRE (Graduate Record Exam.), that students normally have to take to qualify for graduate school.

AM: And that’s established in the US (because I am unfamiliar with it) ?

RP: Yes. It’s a very standardized system. At that time, they had both advanced tests (in specialized fields) and a general area test. And we said that if a student could pass at the 87% of American college graduate level on that test, that they can have their degree because practically any graduate school in the country would be willing to have someone who scored in the upper 12% of American standards. And, as it turned out students generally chose to take that exam after being there only a few months (6, 7 or 8 months). And their average was over the 90th percentile. No one flunked the test. You could see the process happening; people would come thinking that they needed to be structured somehow. But what they learned was that they were full of knowledge, and their business would be to structure reality for themselves. To make sense of what they already knew, and use that orientation to then ask questions about what they really wanted to learn. And so they could use any resources that we had; they would ask anyone of the teachers to help them find the resources or figure out the problems. And you could just see a very quick change in their sense of confidence about knowledge.

AM: Don’t want to sound too ignorant, but you were saying the students could go to this school and within a few months, they would take this exam and then score in the 90th percentile. How much of that would you say is due to them being the right type of students who choose to go to that institution at that place and have that free minded or critical thinking or maybe alternative thinking as opposed to what they would learn while they were in that place for that amount of time that enabled them to then score highly, I am not sure I grasp what you are saying. In terms of a years education or two years education and then being examined on that, is not what you are saying is it?

RP: No; some of them had been flunk-outs at state universities and such. A couple of them had even scored poorly on standardized tests, and thought they were idiots ( chuckles). And when they had the opportunity not to be imposed upon, and to be able to talk to other students and teachers, they realized how much they knew, and could think about what they knew, and who they were. And you could see the change from someone who felt helpless coming around to seeing themselves as a responsible citizen: having all of the abilities that anyone has.

SJM: And then they went on to score in the 90th percent in the college entrance exams?

RP: Yes, they varied from around 90th percentile up to about 98th percentile.

SJM: And did they get accepted into colleges?

RP: Yes. But for some of the state schools, simply having that high score wasn’t enough. So, some of them had to go private graduate schools. But all of the good schools let them in on the basis of their scores.

SJM: Without having had their previous bachelors or masters ?


RP: Yeah.


SJM: It’s incredible.

AM: Yes, excellent. I never did intend to ask you that question but it ties into it very well, the thought that I had when drawing up tonight’s show, the Steiner school environment would be a good discussive topic. I know that you have been involved in education for a very long time, and you obviously have a very different approach to problem solving that’s radical, and its very cutting edge in the terms of the way science understands the concepts that you describe so eloquently in your own way that current research is proving. The topic of education, especially Steiner school education for all the benefits that we will bring out this evening, how that ties in with herbal medicine, biodynamic gardening, sustainability, conscious behavior as sentient human beings, regardless of gender, race, or political background, none of those things are going to matter, but for the pure sake of cultivation of consciousness, the Steiner system of education does seem to be full of little gems that if more people were aware of and the Steiner concepts were better known and more generally disseminated, and people had a chance to send their kids to Steiner schools, I think there would be a huge conscious rise, and a call for it. In terms of educational background of Steiner and developments, we’ll get into that to, there’s some very different approaches to their readiness for education, and that’s something we can also discuss as time goes on. You are listening to “Ask The Herb Doctor”, from 7:30 to 8:00 callers are welcome to ask any questions about these topics Steiner schools, biodynamics, a free thinking lack of government control, and the number if you live in the area is 923-9211, but for those of you who live out of state the toll free number is 18005683723. We would love to hear from you perhaps if you have been to a Steiner school or you switched from a public school to a Steiner school and how you saw the changes.
Getting back to you Dr Peat and the college, and your philosophy surrounding the college: you said there was no curriculum ?

RP: Right! We had the people...the professors who were doing it just for fun, basically. We only paid a couple of professors. There just wasn’t enough money for tuition (payed by the students). But there were well known people peers; lots of [inaudible] professors; writers, psychology professors, and even a math professor. Usually they would end up saying they were learning more from the students than they had to teach the students. When you look at the ideology of public education over the last couple hundred years, you see that a whole theory of what an organism is, is related to the theory of education. And what they’re doing is based on an authoritarian social system that’s based on a mechanical conception of what the person is. And the progress of biological knowledge in the last 50 years has eliminated some of the problems with the theory of education that the brain is the body’s energy organizing system. And if you have education that conflicts with the body’s own processes, you’re going to impair the body’s energy system. Leading to reduction of ability, and creating a tendency to lack adaptability, in biological as well as mental processes.

SJM: Are you speaking about like children being forced to sit for 8 hours a day?

RP: Yea. There’s been studies for example in New York city, kids were given an IQ tests every year that they were in grade school, and they saw these slum kids coming in with an average IQ; each year their scores would get lower as they spent the years sitting in school, being oppressed. And we saw, with our students at Blake, just the opposite happened very quickly; they would come out of their oppression and realize that they were creative minds, not just passive learners. And that same process was discovered in rat studies over 50 years ago; the rat that was given an entertaining free environment became more intelligent, grew a bigger brain with a thicker cortex, and their offspring would have a bigger brain and be more intelligent.


AM: So, it could be inherited, passed on to the...


RP: Yes. And so, the students were being impaired by bad public schools, or, actually, probably passing it on to generations of oppressed...

AM: I find it interesting that reading about Steiner and his philosophies, and he must have borrowed this from Galen. The four HUMOR classification of personalities he used in his temperamental assessment of children that would enable them to be themselves, children of these characters would be segregated, within a classroom environment, or given different curricula to follow that best suited their temperament, and he mentioned, the melancholic, the sanguine, the phlegmatic, and the choleric and these classic temperaments here were actually described by Galen in 400 BC, and had formed part of the tenet for alchemical medicine for healing via information on the humors. Without getting to out there and too unscientific, there’s a lot of scientific rationale to support it. He used the children and their temperaments to guide their education. What do you think about that?

RP: Yea. We called it student-centered education, following on Carl Rogers’ client- centered therapy. He used a non-corrective approach of empathy with the client. And in our non curriculum, the sense of empathy was really the guiding principle. The teachers and students tried to understand each other, and they together created questions that none of them had thought about before. So, the empathy... tried to listen to the character, or personality, of the other person, which would, if you had them categorized according to humors and such, that would be a way of organizing that process. But with our small group it was a purely individual adaptive-empathetic approach.

AM: Ok. Once again we are looking at Steiner and how he was described by his peers as having created this system of education. And I have some of this in my background, during education in England. The students themselves were taught to depict some of these scientific concepts in their own words and drawings, rather than capturing these ideas from textbooks, and the students that came out of Steiner schools, or rather, the Steiner schools were shown to have an above average number of students that became doctors, engineers, scholars of the humanities, and scientists, because they were able to investigate the world about them in a much more objective and scientific manner than regular schools who taught students by repetition or memory, and without truly applying their own bases for understanding a concept in their own terms.

RP: The typical professor has his understanding of how a student’s brain works. And they think they have to impose their abstractions and such - that science textbook idea that the professor has assimilated - they think they have to impose that on the student’s brain. But the actuality of a student’s brain and personality is analogous to any organism. A simple mammal, for example, understands physics very well. Birds, crows in particular, are very intelligent, and can figure out physical processes and make predictions that many graduate students in physics wouldn’t understand (chuckle).

SJM: They can predict that if you left meat out on that rock the day before, it might be there the next day at the same time (chuckles).

AM: The other real important point about Steiner education, and I’ll ask you a question about some of the previous history of I’ll say education and it’s themes, I am not sitting here making an argument against education, I am just illuminating the alternatives. Looking at the holistic side of all sorts of things and education is one of them. From a Steiner perspective the main thing was the method of inquiry, and how this strengthened the interest and ability to observe. That was the main fundamental guide that every student being individual would have unique ideas and unique talents that they could bring to bare on the science. It’s a very science based rational education, I don’t know. I think when I first heard the word Steiner, I thought it was kind of a loose, hippy education where you could just sit around and play games and perhaps play music, and that wasn’t particularly intelligent it was actually completely the opposite. Given the individual’s creative ability in an environment where they are not stressed they are not forced to perform and they are not forced to compete which I think does lead to a bunch of repression of expression, especially amongst individuals that are not naturally competitive, because we aren’t all naturally competitive. Given the sense to inquire and find the natural world wonderful which I think is an excellent, excellent way to show the people the natural world is an excellent teacher in its own right. And I think that is leads right into the whole philosophy of biodynamic cultivation and the whole dynamic of giving back to the earth, for lack of a better phrase, to not just take away but to build up, support and sustain and all these kinda cool hip terms that we hear now, as a part of being hip. That could be a very real part of being a conscious human being. In terms of getting them to cultivate a sense of the wholeness of nature, which a person is not separated from or alienated from, that will enable them to get a better grasp of concepts individually that free thinking people and could bring to the table that would possibly not be brought out in regular teaching environments. So what do you think about the whole thing from the ages of 3 to 7 there’s no pressure whatsoever to learn ABC’s and to learn rudimentary facts and figures, but the child is to be immersed in an environment of nature where they are to look at nature with awe, and get into gardening and create that whole side of their being before they do anything structured with math and science.

SJM: I think as well, they don’t read til they’re 10 ( on average, i think that’s when they start teaching them to read).

RP: In my [youth] experience, I saw people reading and talking about things they saw in the newspapers. And so, i just spontaneously wanted to see what they were doing. It had nothing to do with the curriculum or being taught, I just wanted to find out what was so interesting. And at the Summerhill School, started by A.S. Neil, in England, in 1921... It was finally recognized in the 1960s by universities and such, as really having achieved something in education. He had no curriculum at all. Students could stay there for 12 years if they wanted, and not study. But the ones who did stay there and graduated were superior in their achievements to those who had gone through taking classes every day for 12 years. They demonstrated that the curriculum is completely unnecessary. If the student is aware that there is something to learn they can learn it just in a flash, compared to what the schools expect of them.

SJM: Didn’t you tell me one time that you learned to read because you wanted to read the comics?

RP: Yea. The funnies were the first thing. Alley Oop, and Smokey Stover and such were my favorites. But then, my parents had a shoe-box full of the Little blue books, classics who were printed in very small size. Then the newspapers; I wondered to hear what was going on with the war. So, i learned the various types of things that were available.

SJM: And what year was that? And how old were you?

RP: Four.

AM: You are listening to “ask your herb doctor” on KMUD Garberville on 91.1 FM. And from now until the end of the show If you would like to call into the show with your questions related or unrelated to this month’s discussion of free thinking education, Steiner schools, biodynamics, etc. number for the area is 923-3911, or if you are out of the area there’s an 800 number, which is 18005683723. We have doctor Peat with us and we are very welcome to have him on the show again.
Dr. Peat, again I was wondering, and I suppose we don’t want to get in too far because it sounds more like politics than anything else, in terms of education I know that in this country I think around the beginning of the seventies home schooling started to become prominent or possible, and I think in the early days there was quite a bit of a movement against it both probably federally and on a state level. What do you think of the concepts of home schooling in terms of the over riding and again I don’t want to get to political about this, and I am not asking you to be political about it either, in terms of state schools, the state being the government and the people put it in power really to do the people’s bidding and not to be told what to do by. State schools that educate our children obviously have their own agendas, I think you can see this a lot in some of the subjects that are borne out and taught in schools, and this comparative analysis with home-schooled children, and how the rise of state education came to become totalitarian, a kind of totalitarian source of education in this and many other countries. I read that there was at one point in time the concept of education of the children by the government was foreign, because at one point in time both of the parents didn’t work, and the woman would stay home, and be the homemaker and take care of the children, and ultimately school them and get together in groups, while the male person was the person who did all the physical hard work, all the kinds of things that bring food in and keep the household going. Taxation came into play in the early forties, federal taxation, which made it actually financially unsound to have just one person working and actually caused the need for two people to be working in order to make ends meet and actually the children were left for the question for what were the children for, you just could work and pay more taxes. Without getting too political about it, I know there’s a case in point for having that freedom of choice and it’s something they don’t really talk about these days. Do you have anything to say about that from a perspective of being an educator or looking at where it was and where it has come to now? I guess we do have a free choice: home schools do exist here in America..

RP: I think the State can set the curriculum to a great extent even with home schooling. The federal government approves the agencies that accredit high schools, and colleges, and universities. And so, there are private accrediting agencies which really are responsible to no one. They are kind of an abstract authority that the citizens can’t affect directly. The government approves them because they meet the government’s ideological standards, apparently. And the state bureaucracies are setup so that no school can grant degrees, or credits, or transcripts if they don’t conform to those accrediting agencies. So really the power to grant a transcript or a degree is pretty much a matter of mind control (unless people realize that there is reality and then there’s the official curriculum (chuckles)). My experience in grade school and high school was just not to pay too much attention to them. In high school, some of our teachers were openly fascists and Hitler worshipers. Racists and such. So it was just a matter of getting through it without having to interact too much with them.

AM: I hear this from you a lot, when you are either talking to me or on the radio show in terms of the way that you think, the way that you conceptualize, the way you bring to life concepts you won’t find in mainstream medical journals, in mainstream government type research, you won’t find typically in any abundance unless you are looking for independent research that you find on the web, and all the research that’s being done by PHD students when they are writing their papers for submissions for peer review to get published. In terms of that free thinking, which brings about that lack of control that lack of dominance in the direction of the thinking, I know that you have had experience with that, you mentioned that when you were studying that most of your professors didn’t even really understand what it was you were trying to get across to them. That you read and researched the papers in the libraries that since were withdrawn. You had a very different way of looking at it that they were completely dumbfounded by because it was not typical route, repeat repetitive statements…

RP: The system (not only the explicit accrediting process and agencies and curriculum, but the official high status publications, journals, publishing houses), like all of major institutions, has ulterior motives. And you have to look for people who are motivated by reality. I remember a few years ago, someone in the White House said that “Your problem is that you belong to the reality-based community. While we are creating a new reality, you’re studying the old one.” The concept of a reality-based community was officially, in the White House at that time, a futile outsider business that was being left behind. But I think there is still possibilities in the reality-based community.

AM: Yeah, i hope so. We can begin our callers. Let’s see where this caller is coming from. Caller you are on the air. Caller where are you calling from?

CALLER: I am from Colorado Springs.

AM: What’s you question?

CALLER: Dr Peat I was wondering if you had any suggestions for a person who wants to self educate in biology?

RP: Having access to a really good university library, i think, is important. The journals are too expensive; even buying them over the internet costs 30 or 40 dollars per article. Like the university of Colorado; it probably has a good science library where you can find journal and current, recent books, old books, old journals and such. And if you have questions and things that you think you should know, just start looking them up in the library, asking anyone that has possible information on that subject. Sometimes, professors can be helpful if they don’t know what your real purpose in is (chuckles).

CALLER: Do you have any specific textbook suggestions?

RP: No, there were good textbooks published periodically many years ago. But in the last ten or twenty years, even the textbooks I worked with have been revised, under the name of the good [original] author. Now, most textbooks are created by committees that look for the professors who have the biggest classes; preferably professors who have 400 or 500 students in each class. And then, they say something nice in the textbook about the work of that professor, and that means that for every relatively clever professor, they sell an extra 500 books at a 100 dollars profit each. So, the text books become really a matter of profit for the publisher [inaudible] than information for the student.

SJM: Didn’t you recommend a physiology textbook that was published in maybe the 50’s or 60’s? Wasn’t there a physiology one that you said if you could find the original one, it was pretty accurate?

RP: Oh yeah, I am not sure which one I was referring to but there are some good ones from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. I have a little handbook of physiology from 1965 that has the basic information, and doesn’t have the stuff on membrane pumps and channels, misleading a lot of present students.

AM: What was the name, was it index medicus, that you said that at the university in Oregon had all this data that someone had taken out of the library..?

RP: No. That was biological abstracts, which had references to international journals, all fields related to biology. And when i would compare Index Medicus (which was the paper precursor to pubmed= National Library of Medecine) I found that any interesting discovery of recent years that I found in the journals or in the biological abstracts...it took usually about 10 or 20 years before it would show up in Index Medicus. And then it would be a put down, as :“These people are now saying that coenzyme Q10 has biological value.” And they would scoff. They would scoff for a few years, and then 30 years after it was published in the scientific literature, the medical literature would finally accept it.

AM: So Dr. Peat, to get on to the topic of medicinal and anthroposophy, you did mention the “Iscador”, and I don’t know if anyone listening knows what it is but it is an anthroposophical preparation, and that is closely allied to the Alchemical preparation of Viscum Album, the European mistletoe. Do you want to say anything about European mistletoe and how that’s come about?

RP: No. I have just been following the issue for more than 50 years. I knew people in the biodynamic/Steiner approach; and they told me various interesting things about the influences of fields created by the moon cycles and so on. And, following up on some of that stuff, I found out that there were fairly mainline researchers continuing ideas that Steiner had proposed, doing the interaction between the moon cycles and botanical processes. From the 20’s thru the 40’s there were several people doing very good research unrelated apparently to Steiner, but showing that organisms are biologically coordinated through the earth and moon fields.

AM: That’s the basis for lunar planting. I know entire calendars are based on the phases of the moon and show the benefits or the adverse effects of planting or doing things during certain phases of the moon. That’s resonance, the way the moon effects water through gravitational pull and the biological effects it exerts over all of us as water filled beings so that not just seeds, but animals and human beings. That we all feel these influences and there’s a lot of real scientific approach to it.

RP: For people who want some other background besides Steiner; Harold Saxton Burr, a book “The fields of life”; he was a Yale a professor who did some of the measurements showing these lunar cycles. A professor named Brown, at Indiana University, did a whole series of biological cycle studies: both day and lunar cycles . S.W. Tromp was a dutch biologist and ecologist who wrote a book called “Psychical physics” on how the nervous system interacts with these fields.


AM: That also reminds me, about the pathology amongst Steiner school students versus students in the general population, Steiner school students had a statistically significant, a lower incidence of gastrointestinal distress, as one of the symptoms of the stress that was brought out in a more conventional environment as opposed to the more liberal, in terms of free thinking, not the kind of modern sense of the word liberal, but a kind of liberating environment. A little bit like the animal experiments you first mentioned when we started talking. The rats that were given the sort of environmental enrichment, having better and greater intelligence, and their progeny benefiting from that also. In terms of the lack of stress, the lack of competition. The stress that competition initiates, because competition is not necessarily a bad thing. Except most people usually compete with each other in a negative way. What do you think about a mind body connection and I think we all agree that it’s a real connection, both in our nervous system and in our psyches.

RP: The issue of learned helplessness, or inescapable stress, that shows up first in the stomach as ulcers, and the intestine as bleeding. But it’s really happening in the brain; and if it continues you can see it now with MRI’s studies of the brain. You can see the chronic stress thins the cortex of the brain; it makes the brain smaller and emptier. The main parts of the brain that relate the digestive damage to the nerve damage, for example, the serotonin system, contains components of excitatory processes (like the toxic excitatory amino acids, glutamic excitation) that release nitric oxide. Nitric oxide reduces the energy producing capacity of the brain, leads to atrophy. The intestine releases both serotonin and nitric oxide. The system goes back and forth between the brain and the intestine, affecting every other organ in the process. You can see these same processes even in fruit flies. If a fruit fly has a traumatic brain injury, for example, it develops ulcers and a leaky intestine. Fruit flies are just like us (chuckles).

SJM: Or we are just like fruit flies. And that makes me think of lemon balm, because it’s so calming on the nervous system, but it’s also soothing on the intestinal tract. So when you were saying there’s such a link there, it really made me think of lemon balm and chamomile.

RP: Yea. Keeping the brain steroids up and the inhibitory GABA transmitters up, this preserves the brain and all of the organs. Keeping the brain energy up keeps the structure up.


AM: We have a caller.


CALLER: Are chia seeds good for stomach and intestinal problems ?


RP: They’re good for making funny fuzzy animals (chuckles).


CALLER: But not really for treating oneself ?


RP: No. I don’t really know any virtue they have as a food.


SJM: They’re very mucilaginous.


AM: What do you think about intestinal mucilages ? Because i think that’s the key component in chia seeds; other ladies are talking about slippery elm, or psyllium husks, or flax seeds, being all mucilaginous.


RP: Yea. As long as they aren’t allergenic in themselves. I’ve known a few people who’ve had a bad reaction to even psyllium seeds.


CALLER: But the omegas 3 in them are bad or not ?


RP: There isn’t much; i think it’s the risk of an allergic reaction to some of the proteins in them that would be the only risk.


SJM: You would have to eat a lot of them to get a really large dose of omega oils.


AM: Do you use chia seeds because you have issues with constipation ? Cascara helps a lot for bowel movements.


CALLER: Yes; the chia seeds helped a lot with my constipation.


RP: I just didn’t have any experience with them myself. But i know psyllium seeds work for many people.


CALLER; I think i tried them before, and got intestinal cramps.


SJM: Then you’re obviously had an allergic reaction to the psyllium.


AM: Dr Peat, i wanted to ask you about the latest scientific findings about a product called lanosterol, used to treat cataracts without surgery. It’s extremely inexpensive and it works.


RP: I was just a little surprised to see a big publication in Nature. And this group, at the University of California, San Diego, was actually reversing the majority in something like a dozen rabbits, and then dogs. Both using eye-drops and injecting it directly into the eyeball. They actually got established cataracts to clear up. And when i wrote a newsletter about cataracts, a couple of years ago, i noticed that research in treating and curing cataracts had been suppressed because of the immense amount of money there is in removing the lens during cataract surgery; it’s a multi-million dollars business. And that money interest had just wiped out practically all curative research in eye studies.


AM: Interesting. Hopefully lanosterol doesn’t get suppressed and buried in the future.


RP: Mushrooms happen to be a good source of that steroid. It’s a precursor of cholesterol.


AM: Thank you, Dr Peat.

 

[burtlancast]

Here's the original transcript posted by Dan, as a pdf file.

 

[Blossom]

but showing that organisms are biologically coordinated through the (birth?) and moon fields.

I think (birth?) here might be 'Earth'.

 

[burtlancast]

I think (birth?) here might be 'Earth'.

I think you're right.

Good catch.

 

[Blossom]

I think you're right.

Good catch.

You're welcome. I'd like to start helping with transcripts but I've only been involved with one when you first started the project. If you could refresh my memory and guide me on how to get involved that would be great.

 

[burtlancast]

If you could refresh my memory and guide me on how to get involved that would be great.

Very quickly, only Ray's words need to be verbatim; all the other interventions can be resumed, paraphrased, etc

Each segment needs to be checked by someone else before being posted as finished.

You can either chose to transcribe an entire interview by yourself (you'll have to cut the 5 or 10 min segments yourself) or you can chose a part in the batch projects (there remains about 2 in need of volunteers).

There's no time limit; but max 2 months should be a reasonable interval.

All the other rules are secondary. :)

 

[Blossom]

or you can chose a part in the batch projects (there remains about 2 in need of volunteers).

I like this option.

 

[burtlancast]

I like this option.

There's 8 remaining parts in the Blake project (Project 8 (NON FULL): William Blake and Art's relationship to Science, Politics and science, 2014)
and 10 remaining parts in the ONE RADIO project (Project 5 (NON FULL): ONE RADIO NETWORK INTERVIEW 2014 (VERIFICATION ONLY))

And i would like to remind that absolutely anyone can start a batch project for an interview he likes ! He can use my headpost template if he wishes.

 

[Blossom]

Thanks @burtlancast, I signed up!

 

[Amazoniac]

SJM: Didn’t you recommend a physiology textbook that was published in maybe the 50’s or 60’s? Wasn’t there a physiology one that you said if you could find the original one, it was pretty accurate?

RP: Oh yeah, I am not sure which one I was referring to but there are some good ones from the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. I have a little handbook of physiology from 1965 that has the basic information, and doesn’t have the stuff on membrane pumps and channels, misleading a lot of present students.

?

Handbook of Physiology
but - Publisher: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins (May 1965)
1.7 pounds, maybe they are selling a brick instead

Physiology and anatomy: Donald M. McCashland, Benjamin W., ; Landolt, Paul A., Pace: Amazon.com: Books

I honestly have no idea..

 

[Amazoniac]

Leg shavers,
I think that the best bet to find any of those books other than going to a good library, on the section covered in dust and spider webs, is using this:
Internet Archive Search: physiology
You can try adding the year of publishing or an author. There are many books available, even those from the 19th century.