In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory, and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into the accepted scientific body of knowledge.

At the conference, I gave a talk about the parasite Toxoplasma Gondii for the first time. It’s a single-celled parasite that can cause debilitating disease, including neurological and psychiatric problems, yet most of us are unaware that we carry it. It is one of the five most neglected parasitic infections in the United States, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I opened my talk with ‘I’m here to ruin your day!’ and I again hope that anybody who reads this piece is left feeling unsettled.

Firstly, a disclaimer. I am no biologist. I am merely an enthusiastic researcher who enjoys looking for crossovers and assumption errors in different fields. While I have consulted a number of experts in the topics I mention below, if, on reading this you spot an error, I offer a $25 reward for introducing me to data that we both agree shows that a statement in this essay is mistaken. However, I do think a large chunk of literature on these topics has a strong fallibility bias, for historical reasons I will talk about below.

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Paradigm Shifts and Accidental Discoveries in Science

Before I discuss novel ways to study and develop treatments for Toxoplasma Gondii, let’s zoom out and talk about the scientific process in more general terms. In science, the process is just as important as the discoveries. Improving our scientific processes will speed up our rate of discovery. Feyerabend claims contemporary research has over-indexed on processes such as the scientific method and this rigidness has restrained innovation. The crux of his book Against Method is that paradigm shifts in science stem from epistemological anarchism. Epistemology refers to the formulation of beliefs.  This anarchy, to any Thomas Kuhn fans, is what is necessary to achieve Kuhn’s Stage 4 phase of science, the ‘revolutionary phase’ in which new paradigms are created. In recent decades we have placed too much importance on science being consistent, while forgetting that paradigm shifts often come from those who refute mainstream assumptions. In other words, the geniuses who generated scientific paradigm shifts were anarchists to their contemporaries. Or success came when they made mistakes, take vaccines for example:

The modern medical sense of  immunity meaning “exempt from a disease” dates back to 1879, when Louis Pasteur produced the first laboratory-developed vaccine: a vaccine for chicken cholera. Pasteur happened upon his inoculation breakthrough by accident. His lab was studying fowl cholera by injecting chickens with live bacteria and recording the fatal progression of the illness. Pasteur had instructed an assistant to inject the chickens with a fresh culture of the bacteria before they both went on vacation. The assistant, however, forgot to inject the chickens before he left. When the assistant returned a month later, he finally injected the chickens with the bacteria, which was now a month old. Unlike with their typical experiments with the bacteria, this time, the chickens only showed mild signs of the disease, and survived. When they were healthy again, Pasteur injected them with fresh bacteria. The chickens did not become ill. This is how we got vaccines – by accident.

A Brief Overview of Infectious Disease

Despite how popular immunology has become as a field in recent times, it’s important to clarify some terminology.

A pathogen is an organism that causes disease, of which there are five main types: viruses, bacteria, fungi, worms and protozoa. An epidemic refers to a disease spread across a local region: for example, an isolated flu outbreak in a city. We should all know what a pandemic is by now. It is an epidemic disease that has spread over a much larger area: for example, a country, a continent or the whole world.  The next level up of disease spread is classified as endemic, and endemic diseases are the focus of this essay. An endemic disease has a level of permanence, but the term does not confine itself to a locality. Herpes simplex viruses are globally endemic (~ 3.7billion people for HSV-1 alone and there are seven other types of Herpes viruses!). A disease such as Malaria is endemic to specific regions.

For a many people, infections like Herpes simplex 1 remain asymptomatic and do not produce symptoms like the cold sores they are usually associated with. But our cultural mistake is thinking that the occasional cold sore is the main fear factor of carrying latent (dormant) infections like HSV-1. In reality, the dangers of us living with endemic diseases like HSV seem to be tied to several later on-set neurodegenerative diseases and even chronic illnesses such as cancer.

Let’s also define communicable diseases and noncommunicable diseases. Communicable diseases are what we know as infectious diseases. They spread from one person to another in many ways: contact with bodily fluids; breathing in an airborne virus; or by being bitten by an insect. Noncommunicable diseases aren’t spread from person to person (or from another organism to a person, or vice versa). They are chronic conditions that don’t seemingly stem from infection: conditions like heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, for which a complete cure is harder or rare to achieve.

However, communicable infectious disease exposure may be causing noncommunicable chronic conditions much more than we think. There is plenty of research that demonstrates the link between infectious diseases and later health issues. For one example, new research solidifies the link between Epstein-Barr Virus (the virus that causes Mono) and the chronic, debilitating neurological condition known as Multiple Sclerosis. Yet, the average person, while often being a carrier, is not aware of these risks.

When we think of pathogens, we think of immediate physical symptoms – in other words, the acute phase of illness. A growing number of biologists believe we need to change how we think of these diseases and their role in chronic illness, especially the evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald. Ewald has been at the forefront of this conversation for the last few decades, despite the biomedical industry not taking his claims seriously enough. The EBV to MS paper must have been a small victory.

As we’ve always known, but brought more into the spotlight recently with SARS-CoV-2, the infectious virus that causes COVID-19, infections can be asymptomatic (without symptoms). They can also be latent (dormant), as with the Herpes virus, which can reside in the body for years before they flare up in a myriad of different ways.  Latent pathogens, once they infect you, are with you for life.

What’s more, you have been exposed to and carry probably several, if not even dozens, of latent diseases. Maybe you had glandular fever as a kid. If so, then that Epstein-Barr virus has never left your body. Probably at least one of the Herpes viruses is hanging out in your nerve ganglia. You may have Toxoplasma Gondii in your brain, which can rob you of your agency and influence your risk tolerance and behavior. Have fertility issues? Maybe it’s from Trichomoniasis, a sexually transmitted parasite that millions of people carry and that seemingly no one has ever heard of. It is estimated that every year, 1.1 million Americans contract Trich, but hardly anyone knows because 70% of its victims show no symptoms. Trich is linked to infertility in both men and women, though couples with fertility issues aren’t always tested for it. Endemic diseases are all around us – and inside us – some which can lie dormant in our bodies for years. I list several of them and their terrifying potential chronic illness ties later on in this essay.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the medical industry championed themselves around the statement “It is time to close the book on infectious diseases, and declare the war against pestilence won.” The quote is often credited to William H. Stewart, who was Surgeon General under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, but after looking further into the quote, we have to spare Stewart of this blooper because it’s not at all clear that he ever said it. In fact, the famous quote seems to be some sort of urban legend that swept science away as dogma. Either way, believing that we had conquered infectious disease has been a dangerous assumption and has skewed decades of biomedical research and cost millions of lives.

Paul W. Ewald in his great book Plague Time puts forward that another reason for the slowing down of research in infectious diseases was scientists relying too heavily on guidelines for identifying infectious causation set forth by Robert Koch in 1880. These postulates ultimately proved not to be true in all cases. Koch himself did not make this error – he specifically cautioned against using his guidelines as the only basis for ascribing infectious causation. Despite this, many experts assumed and postulated that infection causation could only be accepted when all of these guidelines had been met. Even if important evidence of infectious causation is available, research has often been dismissed if Koch’s postulates have not all been satisfied. The problem here is that experts embraced historical postulates as dogmatic truths, which had major consequences for 20th century research. This highlights Feyerabend’s point: we often need epistemological anarchy to break the reliance on dogmatic truths. In some cases, it is the only way forward.

Thinking Outside The Box On Infectious Disease

One idea largely anarchic to the current paradigm is that endemic pathogens cause issues as broad as cancer and schizophrenia. Oddly enough, the hypothesis that viral pathogens are neurodegenerative is increasingly grounded in evidence, yet, as a society, we’re still stuck to our idea that lifestyle correlations are entirely to blame. And yes, sure, while smoking may correlate with cancer, several herpes viruses, which two-thirds of us carry, induce tumors in animal species. Wellness fanatics flinch at people smoking, but have little to no insight into the herpes virus permanently lodged in their brain cells.

Due in part to how narrow and myopic biomedical research has become, the last fifty years of research seems to have massively underestimated th