|Newsletter Archive Online|
The San Francisco Tesla Society
presents a free presentation featuring
Roulette Wm. Smith, Ph.D.
"Using Logistic Reasoning to Discover the Etiology
of the Autism Spectrum and Schizophrenia"
Sunday, February 8, 2009 1 - 5 p.m. atSan Francisco Public Library
Park Branch - Lower Right Entrance
1833 Page Street @ Cole
San Francisco, CA 94117
Global positioning systems (GPS) rapidly are becoming everyday tools used in charting and navigating diverse geographic terrain. GPS employs look-ahead, anticipation, feed-forward and feedback, hazard and error detection and correction, and a variety of other techniques aimed at assuring that progress is accurate, safe, timely and relatively error-free.
Logistic reasoning (LR) and logistic intelligence (LI) are GPS-like mental tools developed by Smith between 1979 and 1983 for use in charting and navigating disciplines and scientific landscape. A 1979 application of LR and LI initially was used in accurately anticipating the 1981 onset of AIDS and the mid-1990s transmission and spread of bovine spongiform encephalopathies (BSE).
Subsequently, LR was used in demonstrating associations between Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and the epigenetic production of acid-labile a-interferon in early cases of HIV/AIDS, and in disambiguating and charting crucial distinctions between the evolution of HIV and the evolution of AIDS. LR also revealed reasons for failures in crafting neutralizing vaccines against HIV in contradistinction to successful neutralizing circumventive vaccines against opportunistic pathogens in AIDS, and probable causes of failures in several gene therapy experiments.
This report discusses novel uses of LR to disambiguate among microscopic (e.g., disciplinary), macroscopic (e.g., multidisciplinary) and telescopic (e.g., inter-, trans- and meta-disciplinary) epigenetic issues and perspectives associated with the EBV.
A 2003 report revealed associations between EBV and more than 92 hit-and-run and beneath-the-radar diseases, disorders and syndromes. Although EBV is common and ubiquitous, this report posits that stress-activated EBV secondary small RNAs (i.e., EBER-1 and EBER-2) not only are transmissible and infectious, they could be parsimonious etiologic factors contributing to the autism spectrum, schizophrenia, a variety of other neuropsychiatric disorders, and other stress-mediated phenomena. Insofar as the putative molecular mechanisms are epigenetic and generalize the prion hypothesis, LR and LI expose ethnomethodological pitfalls and the potential for significant biohazards. These tools and techniques also underscore the importance of disambiguating signal and noise issues associated with scientific, transdisciplinary and professional terrain.
Roulette Wm. Smith is the Director of the Institute for Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Studies in Palo Alto, California.