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New York Post
3 days ago
- New York Post
How the sons of Teddy Roosevelt discovered the mythical Giant Panda
Among the great hunters and adventurers of the Roaring 1920s were the two eldest sons of Teddy Roosevelt, America's 26th president, former New York governor and one of the country's most energetic and famous figures. The Roosevelt family had funded museums to fill their halls with exhibits of virtually every large animal known to man, but for one — the elusive and legendary creature, the giant black and white panda. 7 Ted and Kermit Roosevelt in 1926 during their ambitions and unprecedented journey across the Himalayas to find the mythical Giant Panda. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Emboldened by their legendary lineage, Ted Jr. and Kermit Roosevelt decided to follow in the footsteps of their big-game-hunting father who had brought back kills of lions, tigers, elephants and bears — often exhibited in New York City's American Museum of Natural History, which the boys' grandfather had co-founded in 1869. Pursuing fame and glory — as well as hoping to escape the shadow of their father — the brothers set out for remote, and inhospitable Himalayan mountains in Asia, which had yet to be explored by Westerners. Their goal was to find the panda thought to be some kind of polar bear — but a beast that many believed did not exist. And the brothers faced a punishing route up a 16,000-foot peak with howling winter storms. As Nathalia Holt writes in her deeply researched nonfiction account, 'The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda' )One Signal Publishers): 'The animal the brothers coveted looked like no other species in the world . . . a black and white bear so rare that many people did not believe it was real. 7 The brother's legendary, swashbuckling father, Pres. Teddy Roosevelt, the pioneering naturalists who inspired his sons' search for the Giant Panda Getty Images 'Not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives would say precisely where the creature lived, what it ate, or how it behaved . . . The Roosevelts desired this one animal so acutely that they could barely speak about it with each other, much less anyone else,' the author observes. Few people in the Republic of China had ever seen the panda, but there was a probable reference to it in Chinese literature in the early Third Century, according to the author. And proof of its existence arose when Joseph Milner, a missionary, donated the skin he had purchased of a giant panda to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1919. A French missionary, Armand David, had hired hunters in the Chinese province of Sichuan in 1869 to collect interesting specimens. They returned with a lifeless body of an unidentified animal, possibly the panda. David skinned it and shipped the pelt to Paris to be identified by experts. But scientists would not confirm it was authentic. 7 The Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the distance, one of the many jew-dropping backdrops to the brothers' East Asian Panda quest in 1929. Photograph by Herbert Stevens In 1929, the determined Roosevelt siblings began an expedition to finally find this elusive bear, more legend than fact, in the inhospitable bamboo forests of the Tibetan Plateau in the high Himalayas. The brothers were accompanied by naturalists, trackers, guides, interpreters and scientists, and funded by Chicago's Field Museum and a wealthy donor. The Roosevelts were unprepared for what they faced: treacherous glacier crossings of the Himalayas, raiders ready to attack travelers, and air so thin that it was easy to die of oxygen deprivation. But they were driven by their ambitions to find a beast in the clouds that was considered the most challenging trophy on earth. The trail that crossed China and Tibet was desolate and forbidding with its intense wind, snow and ice, writes Holt. Indeed, there was 'no tent strong enough' to withstand the mountain squalls, and no fire hot enough to warm the explorers. 'These were the Roosevelts. They bore an air of invulnerability that had carried the entire group forward into this treacherous environment,' writes Holt — even when passing through a region called the Valley of Death, located in what is today the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, that was said to be full of evil spirits that haunted people while they slept — never to awaken. During the trek, forest walls closed in on all sides, and the extremely high mountain elevation made it difficult to breathe. There were bandits — including a 'band of eight hundred Tibetan marauders' — who roamed the rugged terrain. 7 Ted and Kermit Roosevelt in 1926 along with local associates who helped them with their quest to find the mythical Giant Panda. Courtesy of the Library of Congress One night, their team of mules mysteriously disappeared and starvation became a stark possibility with few provisions left beyond dried green peas and rice. A Tibetan lamasery provided nourishment before the crew moved on in blizzard-like storms. While the elusive panda remained little more than a fantasy, the scientists captured birds, broke their necks and skinned them. Capturing as many specimens as they could for natural history museums, an entire family of nine golden snub-nosed monkeys — the last of their kind — was killed in the name of science. After rugged days and nights, the expedition was finally on the panda's trail when reports of a white bear sighting came from a nearby village. The natives considered this beast a 'supernatural being, a sort of demi-god,' writes Holt. The villagers never tried to capture it and only agreed to take the white hunters in search of it — for money. At the base of a tree trunk, panda scat was discovered with bamboo in it, known to be the daily diet of the panda, along with its coarse white hair. 7 Today Giant Pandas still remain among the Earth's rarest creatures — often presented by the Chinese government to foreign nations as gifts of international diplomacy. Getty Images A trail of paw prints in the snow and half-munched bamboo quickly led them to their ultimate target. He was shot and killed on sight — a panda! 'For the explorers, it felt like the end,' writes Holt. 'In the five months of their expedition, the party had collected five thousand bird skins, two thousand small mammals, and forty big mammals,' but not the great bear. 'It was only here, at the end, that the brothers realized they had been wrong and the panda wasn't the wild, bellicose predator they had expected,' writes Holt. The gentleness of 'the panda had permanently altered their sense of purpose — and immediately following the panda hunt they were struck by illness.' A cut on Ted's leg became infected with bacteria spreading up his torso. News coming in revealed that Kermit's shipping business was headed to bankruptcy, and he had to return to New York. As soon as Kermit left, Ted felt himself emotionally and physically unraveling, according to Holt. 'His body ached from months of sleeping on the ground, repeated illness, and hard climbing,' Holt writes. 'Together we had shivered in the bitter winter cold of the high mountains and sweltered in the damp heat of the semi-tropics. Together we had passed through troubles ranging from lost mules to bandits. Now in all probability we would never meet again,' Ted later wrote. He came down with malaria and was admitted to a Saigon hospital where doctors found he had dysentery, caused by bacteria or parasites. The two brothers had always depended on each and now they were separated and barely speaking. 7 Author Nathalia Holt. Credit Larkin Holt Kermit's company was bleeding money and, worse, he had become an alcoholic. With his marriage unravelling, he started having affairs. In June 1943, he placed a revolver under his chin and pulled the trigger. Ted lived a year longer. They had awakened a pandamonium with pandas now being hunted for excessive sums becoming one of the rarest mammals on earth. 'A dark shadow had fallen across their lives the moment the brothers had simultaneously pulled their triggers,' writes the author. 'The panda hunt had forever altered his life,' writes Holt, and they had awakened a 'panda-monium' with pandas now being hunted for excessive sums becoming one of the rarest mammals on earth.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Supreme Court's Radical Right Turn Is About Restoring Patriarchy, Plain and Simple
This essay is excerpted and adapted from Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, which was published by One Signal Publishers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on Tuesday. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the dissenters warned that 'one result of today's decision is certain: the curtailment of women's rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.' In the framework of the biggest hit film the following year, the Barbie movie, the decision to eliminate a woman's right to reproductive freedom was a Ken-surrection—a move to restore a patriarchy where men are on top. Overruling Roe was just the opening salvo in this fight, which has raged ever since and only been exacerbated by Donald Trump's return to the White House. The decision overruling Roe illustrates how the Supreme Court can make constitutional law worse through a cycle that merges feelings and politics with courts and law. The feeling behind the process that produced Dobbs was patriarchy. Those are now the vibes animating this area of law after Republicans turned assorted feelings about feminism and gender roles into a political strategy, and Republican justices channeled the big feelings about feminism and women's sexual liberation to hard launch a gender counterrevolution. Originalism was merely a vessel for Republicans' anti-feminist thoughts and prayers, but that ideology goes well beyond the jurisprudential methodology of originalism. Which means the law may as well. As the feminist movement of the mid-1900s took off, so too did a strand of anti-feminist male grievance politics. After Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, the constitutional amendment that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, a countermovement pushed states not to ratify the measure. A young lawyer who worked in the Richard Nixon administration wrote a memo offering various objections to the ERA. That lawyer's name was William H. Rehnquist (the same William H. Rehnquist who Nixon would later nominate to the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan would make chief justice of the United States). Rehnquist blasted the ERA's 'overtones of dislike and distaste for the traditional difference between men and women in the family unit' and warned that outlawing sex discrimination would cause 'the eventual elimination' and 'dissolution of the family.' Phyllis Schlafly, one of the principal organizers against the amendment, urged the country to reject the ERA on the ground that 'women's lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother and on the family as the basic unit of society.' She also accused feminists of 'promoting' 'day-care centers for babies instead of homes' (among other things). The Republican Party decided to incorporate these feelings into a political strategy. They came up with more anodyne-sounding language to describe their anti-women's-liberation platform—a promise to restore 'traditional family values.' That led to an affinity between conservative religious voters, especially white evangelical voters, and the Republican Party. But the politics of gender hierarchy didn't exactly win over the ladies. While the Republican Party won over evangelical voters in the 1980s, they also lost women voters as women began to consistently prefer Democratic presidential candidates. Republicans initially seemed almost surprised that women fled the party, and they struggled with how to respond (without having to embrace women's rights, of course). Nixon staffers acknowledged they had a 'woman problem,' and Reagan promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court to shore up Republicans' support among women voters. But at some point, a fair number of Republicans started to view losing women as the inevitable and acceptable cost of their political strategy of male grievance. In 2021, then Republican Senate candidate and future vice president J.D. Vance derided Democrats as 'a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable.' When his remarks resurfaced during the 2024 presidential campaign, Vance said, 'Obviously it was a sarcastic comment. I've got nothing against cats.' That same year, Republican congressional representative and future Republican nominee for attorney general Matt Gaetz boasted to the press about the GOP's strategy for replacing lost women voters with minority men voters: 'For every Karen we lose, there's a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.' That ascendant 'separate sex roles are good actually!' worldview was already being funneled into the jurisprudential method known as originalism. Originalism took off at around the same time that the Republican Party decided to run against feminism and to embrace originalism as a way to do that. Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese said, in front of the entire American Bar Association, that a 'jurisprudence of original intention' was the way to challenge 'the radical egalitarianism and expansive civil libertarianism of the' Supreme Court that had recognized some measure of constitutional protections for women's sexual and bodily autonomy. Originalism had (and still has) a natural symbiosis with a Republican Party that was looking to restore certain traditions such as gender roles related to the family. A key premise of originalism is that the Supreme Court has erred by departing from some righteous past that must be restored. (Patriarchy—the righteous past is patriarchy.) Originalism directs decisionmakers to ask what the Constitution meant when it was ratified or amended (in the 1700s or 1800s). That outsources the content of our fundamental laws, including what rights we have, to a group of people who were probably more sympathetic than the modern electorate to Republicans' platform of gender traditionalism—the white men (Kens) who drafted and ratified the Constitution and many of its amendments. The court's decision overruling Roe illustrates this well. Dobbs declared there was no constitutional right to decide to have an abortion because 'until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to an abortion.' Never mind that women couldn't fully participated in civic society or electoral politics until the latter part of the 20th century. For the majority in Dobbs, it didn't seem to be a bug that their jurisprudential method ignored women. If anything, it may have been a feature, since the Republican justices didn't have to consider the views of the hysterical women who wanted to control their bodies, their lives, and their futures. The majority could instead consult a group that was more sympathetic to the whole 'traditional family values' thing—the dudes (Kens) who ran things in the 1700s and 1800s. It's eerily and conveniently similar to the stated preference of the 2024 Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, who said, in 2020, that he'd like to 'go back to the America where women couldn't vote because that was when the Republican Party had a better reputation.' Ladies and gentlemen (but mostly for the gentlemen, because patriarchy) … originalism! To this day, originalism fits the Republican Party's political project: It kind of parrots the party's 2016, 2020, and 2024 slogan 'Make America Great Again,' which, like originalism, promises a return to the way things were. (Patriarchy—that's the way things were.) It's important to see the ideology, not just the methodology, that's at work here, in the political party that brought us Dobbs—because the ideology will push the law in ways that go well beyond the methodology. The Trump administration pulled funding for research to protect pregnant women from domestic violence, labeling it a 'DEI' initiative. They slashed funding for family planning programs. They fired the Navy's first female chief, creating an all-male corps of four-star generals and admiral leadership positions. They fired the first woman to serve as Commandant of the Coast Guard and issued a statement disparaging her leadership and 'excessive focus' on DEI policies. The Department of Education rescinded the guidance that indicated name, image, and likeness payments to student athletes should be equal between men and women. The administration has disrupted and destabilized federal funding for rape crisis centers and removed funding opportunities from the website for the federal office on violence against women. They even tried to blame the deadly plane crash at Washington National Airport on 'DEI policies,' which they seemingly used to refer to the mere presence of women (and racial minorities) in important federal jobs. The ideology is, as ever, about subordinating women and elevating men—it is excluding women's voices, and women themselves, from public life. They are sending the message that women are unfit for political leadership and many aspects of civic life. Because that was the ideology at work in Dobbs, the implications for the law go well beyond those matters in which the justices might invoke originalism. This term, the court is hearing a major case involving women's health care, Medina v. Planned Parenthood of South Atlantic. The decision arises out of states' attempts to 'defund Planned Parenthood'—in this case, to bar Planned Parenthood from participating in the Medicaid program (which supplies health insurance to various needy populations). Removing Planned Parenthood jeopardizes women's health care because Planned Parenthood is often the health care provider for indigent and needy populations. In some areas, particularly rural ones, Planned Parenthood is the only health care provider for women. The question in Medina is whether federal law—the Medicaid Act, and the general civil rights statute, Section 1983, allow private individuals (either patients or providers) to sue and challenge a state's exclusion of Planned Parenthood from Medicaid. Originalism is nowhere in the case, since the matter turns on the interpretation of federal statutes rather than the Constitution. But the ideology behind the originalism in Dobbs is. Cases in the lower federal courts underscore the same. Federal courts have heard, or are hearing, challenges to states' exclusion of contraception from the Title X family planning program—another matter that has nothing to do with originalism. A district court in Texas is still sitting on a group of Republican-led states' challenge to mifepristone, one of the two drugs in the medication abortion protocol. In that case, the states are arguing that suppressing teen birth rates injures them, as if teenage girls' true calling is to serve as baby incubators for the states. When the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion insisted that no other rights would fall. The statement was ridiculous at the time, and has aged even worse over the last three years. The Republican justices' transformation of the law, and the political movement they are part of, was never just about 'abortion.' They are about women's place in the law, and the country.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
How greed and profit fueled one failed Alzheimer drug
On May 3, 2021, Matt Price drove his 73-year-old father Stephen from their New Jersey home to a medical strip mall on the Jersey Shore, for his first injection of an experimental drug called simufilam. Cassava Sciences, a Texas biopharma company, had developed simufilam to treat (and possibly cure) Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia that afflicts tens of millions of people worldwide. When Matt, 27, first heard about simufilam, 'it sounded exciting,' writes Charles Piller in his new book, 'Doctored: Fraud, Arrogance, and Tragedy in the Quest to Cure Alzheimer's' (Atria/One Signal Publishers), out now. Rather than simply calming symptoms, simufilam promised 'to slow, stop, or reverse cognitive decline — or for people who have no symptoms, prevent them — by attacking Alzheimer's biochemical cause,' writes Piller. It was based on a long-debated notion called the 'amyloid hypothesis,' which argued that Alzheimer's is caused by the buildup of the protein amyloid in the brain. 'If true, its removal would lead to a cure,' writes Piller. The discovery was shocking, especially given that it'd been introduced by a small biotech company that previously specialized in opioid painkillers and 'had never taken a drug to market in its fifteen years of existence,' writes Piller. 'Yet it claimed to have discovered a new molecule that stabbed the dark heart of the terrible illness.' Even in the beginning, Matt Price, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist and global-health specialist, had his doubts. Cassava's theory, which had not yet been validated by independent researchers, 'seemed weird and a bit thin,' Matt told the author. His concerns would soon be confirmed by a whistleblower, who produced 'convincing evidence that lab studies at the heart of the dominant hypothesis for the cause of Alzheimer's disease might have been based on bogus data,' writes Piller. The amyloid hypothesis wasn't just wrong, but it took valuable resources away from other promising theories on how to treat Alzheimer's. It was just the latest example, writes Piller, 'of the exaggeration, hype, and sheer fakery and fraud that has characterized Alzheimer's research for decades.' And it's not a problem confined to Alzheimer's research alone. As of this month, at least 55,000 medical and scholarly studies have been retracted, according to the Retraction Watch database from the Center of Scientific Integrity. And it's estimated that there may be as many as several hundred thousand fake studies still circulating and not yet identified. Even when they are exposed, journals are often slow to retract the bogus studies, if it happens at all. It's not just an issue of wasted research dollars. 'It makes people start to distrust the clinical research enterprise,' says Price. Simufilam began as an experimental drug — code-named PTI-125 — developed by neuroscientists Lindsay Burns and Hoau-Yan Wang. It was designed to target filamin A, which becomes twisted into an abnormal shape and causes inflammation in the brain, promoting the formation of myloid-beta proteins. PTI-125, the researchers suggested, could reverse those terrible effects. The drug was renamed simufilam in August of 2020, and in preliminary studies, patients started showing improvement after just a month — 'extraordinary for any Alzheimer's trial,' writes Piller. Simufilam began to seem like the holy grail, 'the dream drug that generations of researchers had searched for in vain,' the author writes. By late July 2021, the tiny biopharma company, whose sample size for their simufilam experiments was a minuscule fifty participants, suddenly had a market valuation of $5.4 billion. The victory was short-lived. On Aug. 18, 2021, just weeks after the company's stock reached record highs, two neuroscientists — Geoffrey Pitt of Weill Cornell Medical College and David Bredt, a former executive at drugmakers Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson — submitted a 'citizen petition' to the FDA, asking them to take a closer look at simufilam. Their main concern was that the drug's development 'contained manipulated scientific images,' writes Piller. 'In short, they asserted, the work looked like it had been doctored.' To help prove their suspicions, they brought in Matthew Schrag, a neurologist and neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, who would become 'the most important whistleblower in the history of Alzheimer's,' writes Piller. When they asked for Schrag's help, 'my response was, 'You think I'm stupid enough to do that?' ' Schrag told the author. 'Apparently, I was.' Using ImageJ and MIPAV, software developed and endorsed by the NIH, Schrag carefully studied the images used in the simufilam study. He had a 'seasoned eye for detecting digital manipulation with common software programs,' writes Piller. Almost immediately, he spotted proof of manipulation. 'Schrag saw micrographs — magnifications of microscopic features of brain tissue — that seemed obviously cloned,' writes Piller. 'Yet they were presented as findings for different experimental conditions.' Schrag worried that he wasn't just uncovering evidence of research misconduct, but something much larger and more ominous. 'How had those problems gone unnoticed for years or even decades?' Piller writes. '[Schrag] wondered nervously: What other Alzheimer's research should be reconsidered with skeptical eyes?' Schrag had an uphill battle, mostly because 'disproving someone else's experiment can be a death wish in science,' writes Piller. Or as Schrag explained to the author, 'The field is absolutely calibrated to the newest, most interesting, most cutting-edge discovery. It disincentivizes replication at every turn.' Piller shared Schrag's findings with over a dozen experts, including several top Alzheimer's researchers. While most were hesitant to go on the record saying anything negative about the original research, some — like Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer's expert at the University of Kentucky who would later become editor of Alzheimer's & Dementia — admitted that several images showed 'shockingly blatant' signs of tampering. But others, like Dennis Selkoe, a Harvard professor of neurologic diseases and a celebrated Alzheimer's researcher, 'chastised' the author for his criticism of the 'objective evidence' that reducing amyloid in the human brain produces better cognitive outcomes. 'I'm on the right side of history,' argued Selkoe, who Piller accuses of being part of the 'Amyloid Mafia.' George Perry, a scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio and editor of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, agreed with Piller that many Alzheimer's researchers are too hellbent on being correct. 'The major goal of these people is to win—if it isn't the Nobel Prize, it's God's glory,' Perry told the author. 'To be acknowledged that they really did something great. They don't want the amyloid hypothesis to die, because then they have no legacy.' Schrag delivered his Cassava dossier to the NIH in 2021, providing 'forensic street cred' to doubts about the research, writes Piller. Two years later, in 2023, a university panel found Hoau-Yan guilty of 'egregious misconduct' because of his work for Cassava. Last September, the company agreed to pay $40 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for misleading investors. And then in November, Cassava acknowledged that simufilam failed to deliver the results they'd expected in a phase 3 clinical trial, and the company would be discontinuing research. Their stock plummeted by more than 80% after the announcement. Schrag wasn't surprised by the outcome. 'You can cheat to get a paper,' he told the author. 'You can cheat to get a degree. You can cheat to get a grant. You can't cheat to cure a disease. Biology doesn't care.'
