Margie Profet

[bngenoh]

Very interesting theories about allergies being a detox mechanism.

Margie Profet was always a study in sharp contradictions.  A maverick thinker remembered for her innocent demeanor, she was a woman who paired running shorts with heavy sweaters year-round, and had a professional pedigree as eccentric as her clothing choices: Profet had multiple academic degrees but no true perch in academe. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Profet published original theories about female reproduction that pushed the boundaries of evolutionary biology, forcing an entire field to take note. Indeed, back then it was hard not to notice Margie Profet, a vibrant young woman who made a “forever impression” on grade school chums and Harvard Ph.D.s alike. Today, the most salient fact about Profet is her absence. Neither friends, former advisers, publishers, nor ex-lovers has any idea what happened to her or where she is today. Sometime between 2002 and 2005, Profet, who was then in her mid-40s, vanished without a trace.

Best known for three landmark papers in the prestigious Quarterly Review of Biology (QRB) and Evolutionary Theory, Profet recast a trio of everyday curses into a trinity of evolutionary blessings. Allergies, menstruation, and morning sickness, she argued, eliminate germs, carcinogens, and mutation-causing toxins from the body. Her theories were hotly debated among scientists but embraced by mainstream media. In quick succession, Profet landed a six-figure MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and published two books, including Protecting Your Baby-to-Be, on what to eat—and avoid—during pregnancy.

[...]

Though controversial to this day, Profet’s work is “a paradigmatic example of how evolution can offer new solutions to old medical riddles,” says Michael Jones, a retired psychiatrist who discovered her papers while researching evolutionary biology at the University of Missouri.

Now, converging research suggests that Profet’s allergy theory, which has thus far received less attention than her other work, may be her most important. Scientists have generally confirmed an inverse relationship between allergies and many types of cancer, but struggle to explain the observation. The traditional view is that allergies are an accident of nature. Profet argued that allergic reactions evolved to expel toxins, including deadly carcinogens, from the body.

Prior to Profet’s work, the only discussion of allergies as protective pertained to the finding that food intolerance expels such pathogens as parasitic worms. Profet observed that the sneezing, scratching, watery eyes, and blocked sinuses of pollen allergies all combat toxins, as do the nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea of food intolerance. In extreme cases, blood pressure drops like a rock during allergy-driven anaphylactic shock, to slow circulation when toxins come calling.

If allergies are a broad filter against toxins, then they could presumably combat known and unknown carcinogens. Might irritants that trigger hives also cause skin cancer? Could a heretofore unknown risk factor for brain tumors reside in an allergen that swells sinuses? Profet argued “yes” to such questions, filling her work with intriguing clues. Heavy metals such as arsenic and nickel are the most likely metals to cause cancer; they are also the most allergenic. Aflatoxins from fungus that grows on hay and grain are so allergenic that just thinking about them can cause an itch. They are also among the most carcinogenic substances known. Profet learned facts such as these while working with University of California at Berkeley toxicologist Bruce Ames.

In 2008, neurobiologist Paul Sherman and evolutionary biologist Janet Shellman-Sherman applied Profet’s allergic “prophylaxis hypothesis” to 646 studies dating back to 1953.

“We examined inverse relationships between allergies and cancers of tissues and organs directly exposed to the environment versus those not directly exposed,” says Sherman, who with his wife works at Cornell University. Food-borne carcinogens travel to the stomach and colon and circulate into the bloodstream; airborne carcinogens enter the lungs and brain through sinuses and airways. If Profet was correct, allergy sufferers should get fewer cancers in directly exposed areas.

After an exhaustive review, the Shermans and coauthor Erica Holland, a University of Massachusetts medical student, found this very correlation. Inverse associations with allergies are more than twice as common among cancers of the nine tissues and organ systems that interface with the external environment—mouth, throat, colon, rectum, gray matter, pancreas, skin, cervix, and lung—versus the nine that do not, including the breast andprostate gland.

The brain affords a particularly exacting laboratory for Profet’s theory, the Shermans claim. Dozens of research teams worldwide have shown allergies significantly reduce the risk of gray matter, or glial cell, cancers such as glioma, but have no measurable impact on cancers of the sheath that surrounds gray matter, the meninges. Eight studies since 2002 have shown that when ultrafine airborne particles are deposited on nasal membranes, they cross the blood–brain barrier via routes that come into contact with gray matter, but not with the meninges.

Other studies have shown allergies slash ovarian cancer risk up to 30 percent and leukemia by 40 percent. Cancers of the lung, pancreas, colon, and more than a dozen other areas of the body reflect the same “inverse allergy” effect. The Shermans published their findings in the journal that started Profet’s career—the Quarterly Review of Biology.

[...]

Yet Profet’s best known and most controversial theory focused on menstruation, a seemingly inefficient and taxing biological process that has long escaped clear understanding. Menstruation, she argued, is nature’s way of cleansing reproductive canals. “Sperm are vectors of disease,” she famously stated. Bacteria from male and female genitalia cling to sperm and travel to the uterus, a concept she suggested in a 1982 Obstetrics and Gynecology journal paper entitled “Evidence for Microbial Transfer by Spermatozoa.”

Women should stay away from oral contraceptives that suppress menstruation, Profet insisted. And when patients complain of heavy periods, doctors should test for cancer and infections.

Rethink contraception! Avoid vegetables during pregnancy! Profet’s ideas stirred controversy. But she also emerged as a crossover celebrity rarely seen in academe.

[...]

By proclaiming healthy vegetables “toxic” in her 1995 book, Protecting Your Baby-to-Be, and its 1997 sequel, Pregnancy Sickness: Using Your Body’s Natural Defenses to Protect Your Baby-to-Be, Profet incurred the wrath of prenatal nutritionists and the March of Dimes, who said she was pushing expectant mothers toward unhealthy eating at the worst possible time. 

[...]

The author of The Committee of Sleep, Barrett—a dream researcher—had followed Profet’s career in part because Profet told the media that her menstruation theory had had its genesis in a dream. (Profet’s dream involved black triangles embedded in red. The triangles were pathogens, she interpreted, red blood washing them away.)

[...]

“Margie was a wonderful, free spirit in the best, intellectual sense of the phrase—a charmer, and a beauty, too,” Mansfield says. “May God protect her, wherever she is.”

Fascinating woman, and even more fascinating life. I will be digging into her allergy theory further. This just wet my appetite. 

[voyageur]

Fascinating woman, and even more fascinating life. I will be digging into her allergy theory further. This just wet my appetite. 

This is new to me, look forward to reading further - strange about her disappearance too, as well as the sudden media swarm alongside the MacArthur Foundation grants when factored against the opposition to her theories.

[Hithere]

This was interesting bngenoh, I hadn't heard of Margie Profet before. Thanks for the link!

[truth seeker]

I read that article when it initially came out and find her and her theories fascinating as well. The link below is supposedly an update given by her mother regarding her whereabouts.

_http://weeklyscientist.blogspot.com/2009/07/margie-profets-unfinished-symphony.html

Added: Another from Nature:

_http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunites-with-family.html

[voyageur]

I read that article when it initially came out and find her and her theories fascinating as well. The link below is supposedly an update given by her mother regarding her whereabouts.

_http://weeklyscientist.blogspot.com/2009/07/margie-profets-unfinished-symphony.html

Added: Another from Nature:

_http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/missing-biologist-surfaces-reunites-with-family.html

Thank you for the two links. Although it says she is now home with family, she had injuries, was unwell and this was a curious stated causation without context:

....sustained largely by the religion she had come to early in the decade.

[nicklebleu]

Thanks for bringing this to my attention - have never heard from her before.

Very intriguing theories ... especially the ones about allergy. Medicine has always struggled to find an explanation of allergies, mostly it was said to treat parasitic infections or be associated with not enough exposure to "dirt/ germs etc." in infancy ...
This puts a whole new light on these problems.

And now that she supposedly has resurfaced, let's hope she will rekindle her scientific "career" ... not much possibility of a career if you advance theories like that ...
Anyway, I'll stay tuned and wish her all the best.

[Odyssey]

I'd never heard of this lady either but her theories on allergies make a lot of sense.  Of course, mainstream medicine seems to be completely blind to this type of sense.  I think that those of us who are on a paleo diet have proved this seeing as how allergies/skin issues etc. clear up, or at least decrease, on the diet.  The same goes for colds and flus.  I don't see them as illnesses per se; they're more of a house-cleaning.  I guess you could say the same for fatness.  If humans weren't able to shunt toxins away into adipose tissue and thereby "get fat" who knows how much sicker a person would be without this ability. 

[bngenoh]

Some evolutionary theorists see evolution as improvisational, proceeding almost haphazardly. Others, like Profet, see it as more disciplined, as a careful weighing of costs and benefits. If some significant feature of life evolves in a certain way, there must be a reason for it. [bngenoh: DUH]

[...]

THERE IS IN ANY POPULATION variation among its members. With human beings, for example, some are tall, some short, some of medium height. A statistician wanting to describe how tall a person was relative to other people might plot the distribution of heights on a graph. When plotted, heights describe a bell-shaped curve. A very few, very tall people are at one edge of the bell; a very few, very short people are at the other. Most people fall somewhere in between, bulging along the middle of the graph, the so-called norm. One common measure of distance from this norm is called a sigma after the Greek letter that is used to represent its formula.

So if the average height of American women was 5 feet 4 inches, someone who was 5 feet 7 might be one sigma away from the norm. A 6-foot woman might be three sigmas, a 7-footer five sigmas.

I remember when I was learning about evolution, and it was emphatically stated that evolution only occurs in populations, it doesn't occur in individuals, I thought huh, why the hell not, does it just spring up from nowhere? The basis of evolution is variation, individuals are the units of variation in a given population, but let's continue:

"I'm allergic to a lot of things, mostly detergents and things like that," she says. "One night, when I didn't know exactly what I was allergic to yet, I'm in bed scratching and I just remember thinking: `What is this for?'

"I knew because I had studied some immunology that there was this whole class of antibodies that does nothing but cause allergies. And I thought, `What on earth could it be there for?' I thought, `What are the symptoms of allergy?'

"It's immediate. It's unlike a viral illness or a bacteria, which are delayed, and might be days before you get any noticeable reaction. With allergies, it's immediate, within minutes. You're scratching it off, you're tearing, you're sneezing, you have diarrhea, or you vomit and you drop your blood pressure. All of these are ways to immediately expel something.

"I thought, `What could cause this? What could kill you within minutes? Viruses don't work that fast. Bacteria don't. Toxins do.' "

Profet had no idea at the time what the conventional analyses of allergy were. When she found out that most scientists believed it was either, one, a mistake, or two, a reaction to the potential presence of parasitic helminth worms in the digestive track, she was appalled.

"When I came across the helminth worm theory, I thought, `NO, they couldn't be taking this seriously. Maybe one or two immunologists think this is the reason, but this is beyond silliness.' [ blunt and to the point, my kind of gal]

"It doesn't make sense from an adaptationist viewpoint because there's not a fit between the mechanisms of allergy and the problem of worm expulsion," she says. "Worms are a chronic problem, and allergies were designed for something acute."

[...]

For reasons neither Williams nor Profet can fathom, physicians and biologists, who, after all, share the human body as a subject, seldom were aware of one another's work.

Profet says, "Physicians don't look at function. Physicians seem to think if you ask what's the function of something, it's teleological. It's an intellectual theory, and there's no practical utility.

"It's not important? It's the basis, it's the foundation for understanding physiology. And physiology is the basis for understanding medicine. Imagine if we didn't understand the function of the heart. How could you recognize heart disease? How could you define heart health? How could you do anything? How could you perform heart surgery? How would you know when to do it? What to do?"

[...]

"Science isn't a democracy," Profet says. "Voting is not the basis for truth. You don't go to some allergist and say, can I have a show of hands? That's not how you demonstrate science. I find things like that mind-boggling. [bngenoh:TRUTH]

"You know, you tell any lay person, `Guess what the immunologists think that allergy is designed for.'

"They say, `What?'
"And you say, `Little worms.'
"And they go, `Huh?' "

It is this intuitive grasp of the apparent failure of existing theory that is the basis for all of Profet's work. Her three major ideas - on pregnancy sickness, allergy and menstruation - all subject anomalous human behavior to an adaptationist critique. Why does this happen? What does it cost? What is the resulting benefit? The fundamental supposition of evolution, that all organisms are engaged in an evolutionary race for survival, is the main motivation of all of her explorations.

[...]

Most modern scientists are grown in much the same way as today's crops. They are lined up all in a row, standardized, carefully fertilized and watered, grown to uniform size. They have been domesticated. Profet is a throwback to the days before domestication. She is a precursor, foraging through the fields of human knowledge, searching for some things, happening upon others.

In her own evolutionary race, she seems to have outlasted her natural enemies. The hunter-gatherer has come back. 

Got the allergy paper abstract:

Abstract:

This paper proposes that the mammalian immune response known as "allergy" evolved as a last line of defense against the extensive array of toxic substances that exist in the environment in the form of secondary plant compounds and venoms. Whereas nonimmunological defenses typically can target only classes of toxins, the immune system is uniquely capable of the fine-tuning required to target selectively the specific molecular configurations of individual toxins. Toxic substances are commonly allergenic. The pharmacological chemicals released by the body's mast cells during an IgE antibody-mediated allergic response typically cause vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, tearing, sneezing, or scratching, which help to expel from the body the toxic substance that triggered the response; individuals frequently develop aversions to substances that have triggered such responses. A strong allergic response often includes a decrease in blood pressure, which slows the rate at which toxins circulate to target organs. The immune system identifies as toxic the following kinds of substances: (1) those low-molecular-weight substances that bind covalently to serum proteins (e.g., many plant toxins); (2) nontoxic proteins that act as carriers of toxins with low molecular weights (e.g., plant proteins associated with plant toxins); (3) specific substances of high molecular weight that harmed individuals in ancestral mammalian populations for a span of time that was significant from the standpoint of natural selection (e.g., the toxic proteins of bee venom). Substances that bind covalently to serum proteins generally are acutely toxic, and because many of these substances also bind covalently to the DNA of target cells, they are potentially mutagenic and carcinogenic as well. Thus, by protecting against acute toxicity, allergy may also defend against mutagens and carcinogens.The toxin hypothesis explains the main phenomena of allergy: why IgE-mediated allergies usually occur within minutes of exposure to an allergen and why they are often so severe; why the manifestations of allergy include vomiting, diarrhea, coughing, sneezing, scratching, tearing, and a drop in blood pressure; why covalent binding of low-molecular-weights substances to serum proteins frequently causes allergy; why allergies occur to many foods, pollens, venoms, metals, and drugs; why allergic cross-reactivity occurs to foods and pollen from unrelated botanical families; why allergy appears to be so capricious and variable; and why allergy is more prevalent in industrial societies than it is in foraging societies. This hypothesis also has implications for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of allergy.

More of her papers: _http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?filter=jid%3A10.2307%2Fj100336&Query=Margie+Profet&Search.x=0&Search.y=0&wc=on

Needless to say, this merits a trip to the college for full access and a lot of printing.