Professor Sir Mark Pepys, leading immunologist, amyloidosis specialist, and drug discovery expert. Professor Mark Pepys, is there anything else you'd like to discuss regarding your work, research? Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Please share your wisdom. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. Well, there are two things this I'm very passionate about. One is, people need to understand what science is and how it is conducted. Science is not well taught. People do not have adequate scientific education in most, probably in all, the developed countries. This is unbelievable! The world is such a scientific place. We all go around with these devices in our hands. All devices are full of high-tech. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. We travel in a very high-tech manner. We communicate in these extremely high-tech ways. Yet people are not adequately taught about science, the nature of science, what it involves, the reproducibility of science. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. People do not understand the necessity for transparency and honesty. Richard Feynman, the great Nobel Laureate, an American physicist, he famously said this. "You have a duty as a scientist. when you present your hypothesis, you must show all the evidence this is against your hypothesis. You do just as much as you show the evidence in favor of it. So that people can make up their mind, do they believe your hypothesis or not?" He said "the best method I can explain this is to contrast it with advertising", OK? Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. Advertising is the complete opposite. You say "my product is the best”. You don't say "Somebody else has got something which is almost as good, or might be cheaper..." You say "no, buy my product because it is the best". That is all you ever say in advertising. Science has to be the complete opposite. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Even the scientists don't always get that. The scientists don't understand, some of them, what science is about! As in the example of association and causality. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. In the midst of that disagreement about the role of CRP, a very famous American cardiologist wrote in some comment on the web or somewhere. He fancies himself as an epidemiologist. He wrote about my failure to recognize that CRP was causative in myocardial infarction. He said it was complete ignorance and stupidity. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. How could anybody ignore the compelling body of evidence that proved that CRP causes heart attacks? We see where that went. CRP does not "cause" heart attacks. We completely disproved it eventually with genetic epidemiology. We also disproved it by all the in vivo and in vitro experiments. You have to understand what science is about. People need to be taught more about science. Because if they are not taught, the population becomes tone-deaf to science, as I say. When you are tone-deaf, you can't appreciate music. If you are tone-deaf to science, you can't understand anything about the modern world. Because you haven't been educated about it and don't know what it is about. Homeopathy is a classical example. Homeopathic medicines are nothing! They are zero. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. You've got a number of molecules you can't count in your “medicine". Because they've been diluted deliberately so far that they are not there! How can that make you better? When you've got a little pain in your big toe, it probably doesn't matter. But if you've got asthma or cancer or a bacterial infection and you rely on homeopathic "medicines", you are going to die! This is a disaster! Dr. Anton Titov, MD. It delays time to the correct diagnosis and correct treatment! The other thing this I'm very keen on is patient awareness. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. We have to make patients understand what their disease is. It is particularly acute in amyloidosis. These are the patients that I mostly deal with. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Amyloidosis is a rare disease, it is incredibly complicated. You may go on the web to find information about amyloidosis. You can find all sorts of really scary stuff. Well, it is a scary disease, it is a bad disease to have. But you need to have proper information. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. I have been very active in the last few years to develop patient awareness for our patients with amyloidosis. Patients with this disease are all around the world. We created a fully interactive website for the patients. There is a forum where they can write in and have moderated replies and so on. The patients find this extremely helpful. They can look up on this website anything about any type of amyloidosis. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. They can find out about the treatments, the complications of the treatments. What to do when some things happen. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. Patients in general find that extremely helpful. That is very important. To communicate is very important. Professor Dr. Mark Pepys, MD. I know there is a lot of patient awareness going on. It is a necessary requirement in most health services that the clinicians and centers provide this information. We have been very active in promoting amyloidosis information. Dr. Anton Titov, MD. That is an important thing to do if one can do it.