GQ's new "Rock Stars of Science" campaign should give not just disease sufferers, but America's scientists, hope.
When it comes to factory farming, policies require transparent reasoning. We need not be shy about expressing our ethical predilections in the realm of caring for animals but we should be cautious in presuming that those predilections are supported by science.
From a biological standpoint, socially cooperative behaviors could be an end in themselves, as far as your unconscious brain is concerned. But financial systems and policies ignoring the often-unconscious human social instincts do so at their peril.
Biotechnology can help the poor, but whether it will depends on people of good will taking the time to understand and consider the arguments in some detail.
Crops yields must improve to feed a hungry planet amid global warming, but that will require more ecology-based farming and less biotechnology.
With more attention to the empirical applications of modern neuroscience, we can better understand the connections between predictors of success and individual variability in training and learning. Equivalence may not be the key to preparing the modern soldier.
The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season begins this week—but forecasts of a tamer year should make us raise our guard, not lower it.
Research begun in the 1990s is relevant now more than ever, and what we know about the relationship between health and climate will be crucial as communities adapt to a warming world.
It’s not the campaign anymore. Some of the best tools for getting the President’s message out require special consideration on WhiteHouse.gov. Swire explains the laws that constrain and the rules that advance new media for the government.
It’s the very simple health care concept with the very fancy name. Jonathan Moreno and Ruth Faden Discuss comparative effectiveness research, which examines the benefits of different procedures used to treat the same illness, allowing health care providers to make the best decisions about options for patients.
Last week, the Obama administration unveiled its Open Government Initiative, a set of online tools and a process of public engagement for making its operations more transparent. In this podcast, we talk about the project with deputy chief technology officer for open government Beth Noveck.
It's about time everyone is celebrating Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education—she is, after all, perhaps the leading day-to-day defender of science in America.
Managing financial conflicts of interest is a complicated policy matter, as researchers and their institutions often receive both public and private funding to support research that leads to new treatments. But research also indicates these conflicts are widespread and ingrained. How far should we go in addressing the issue?
The “war on cancer” devotes too much in search of new cures and too little to understanding the results of existing oncology therapies.
Tom Paulson, formerly of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, now a freelance writer, carpenter, and building contractor, epitomizes the story of the science writer in our time.
Ensuring scientific integrity in government is a marvelous goal—but achieving it will hardly be simple, even under this administration.
Arizona State University over the past six years has engaged in a significant institutional transformation. One of the results is the SkySong Innovation Center, a nucleus for a community of entrepreneurs dedicated to innovation and learning.
The past eight years were a bad time for scientific integrity in government research. Grifo, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says we must protect government researchers, make science-based policymaking more transparent, and monitor potential abuses.
Smart government can and must deliver a reasoned, evidence-based health plan for all. Compassion demands it. Is that so much to ask for this holiday?
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.
Drawing lessons from other countries’ regulatory successes could help temper the commercial pressures in the U.S. assisted reproduction sector, without in any way diminishing reproductive rights.
Scientists need professional research technicians the way doctors need professional nurses, but grant-based research programs rarely provide for these key positions.
The Manufacturing Extension Partnership program’s evolving strategies to spur competitiveness and innovation among small- and medium-sized businesses adjusts to new challenges.
Public health measures that reduce the potential for spreading disease through groups of people present a strong defense in the face of an outbreak. We should have been talking about them earlier.
Recently revealed documents just add to the evidence that sowing doubt about global warming seems to have been in part a political strategy.
Controlling infections once they reach the human population is crucial, but the origin of many pathogens may lie in factory farming operations, where potent diseases develop.
“Open innovation” challenges the assumptions made by university technology transfer offices about maximizing the value of their intellectual property.
Using specially engineered proteins instead of DNA to coax mice cells back into an embryonic state is promising, but doesn’t resolve many potential problems. For regenerative medicine research in humans, embryonic stem cells remain the gold standard.
A raft of scientific evidence in recent years, along with a recent book, demonstrates that environment has a very strong impact on an individual’s brain development. The work effectively rebuts most of the lingering arguments over the controversial Bell Curve hypothesis.
The Flemish government’s 20 years of cluster building offers U.S. policymakers some key lessons on how to guide technology innovation.
Amid a global economic downturn during which other nations are boosting their already significant public- and private-sector efforts to build more competitive, innovation-led economies, the United States stands almost alone in the world without a national innovation framework.
Increasingly complicated fMRI research demands increasingly sophisticated evaluations of its validity. We should neither ignore the serious problems with fMRI, nor dismiss its potential to make important scientific discoveries.
Nearly 50 years after C.P. Snow's famous "Two Cultures" lecture, what can we learn from its polemical aftermath, and its author's savage battles with literary critic F.R. Leavis?
Creating a vibrant entrepreneurship ecosystem is key to fostering broad-based economic growth and competitiveness. Astute policymaking is necessary.
The answer is a mix of politics and profits, two things that should not get in the way of national standards for school nutrition to help better educate our youngsters.
The new rules on embryonic stem cell research weigh ethical considerations and sound science. Now that’s progressive.
Three key "knobs" that our leaders can use to fine tune their climate policies—the role of EPA, the payment of dividends, and the auctioning of permits—will make it easier to achieve legislative or policy victory. And if they get the bass, volume, and tone just right, they can still win.
The machines aren’t just great educational tools. Indeed, the field of robotics may hold solutions to major problems in military transport, providing health care for an aging population, and keeping our floors clean, according to Tandy Trower of Microsoft Robotics.
How can you design the products of tomorrow and create the innovations that will keep the country advancing if you don't learn how to make anything? Robots can help.
A flood of grant applications for Recovery Act funds, a heap of comments on the proposed stem cell policy, and feedback on how to manage conflicts of interest among researchers—here’s a look at some of the key numbers related to the big policy stories at the National Institutes of Health:
20,894: The total number of Challenge Grants applications received by the NIH.
At least $200 million of Recovery Act funds will support these new grants. These applications come on top of the 16,312 regular applications received for the current funding cycle. Some 18,000 reviewers will help read and score them all, a workload that has NIH Center for Scientific Review Director Antonio Scarpa worried about the time it will take for each reader and the inevitable low acceptance rate. The projects that are funded will generate jobs, grow the economy, and support the search for cures.
49,015: The total number of comments the NIH received on its draft Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research.
Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider reports that the Institutes’ policy chief estimates the amount is roughly equivalent to when the NIH issued draft guidelines on the same issue in 1999.
$5,000: The threshold for earnings that should trigger mandatory disclosure under financial conflict of interest rules for NIH-funded researchers, as recommended by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the Association of American Universities.
The two major academic associations, which both represent significant proportions of the institutions where scientists conduct NIH-funded research, submitted their joint comments in a letter Wednesday. NIH grantees are currently obliged to report a financial interest if they earn more than $10,000 in income or own more than $10,000 in stock plus 5 percent interest in a company, but the AAMC and AAU believe the threshold is too low to ensure research integrity. The recommendations were in response to the NIH’s request for comments on promoting objectivity in research. Patti Tereskerz recently explained the complexity of managing the conflicts of interest that result from the necessary mix of public and private research funding in Science Progress—including those that arise from corporations funding research through foundations and nonprofit institutes.
Getting a piece of the biotechnology industry to boost a state economy is a great idea, but it’s complicated. Successfully incubating a regional biotech cluster requires more than building million-dollar laboratories and hoping top researchers appear, Shaila Dewin reports in the New York Times.
Despite the challenges, 27 states paid up to $100,000 for a spot on the exhibition floor at the annual Biotechnology Industry Organization International Convention last month. The Convention is the largest assembly of the biotechnology industry and attracted over 20,000 participants this year, including industry executives, scientists, and politicians.
The numbers make it clear why states are vying for biotech companies to do business in their cities; BIO indicates that each job in the bioscience sector creates 5.8 additional jobs in the national economy, and every dollar of National Institutes of Health funding generates more than twice that amount in state economic output.
Several experts on innovation clusters—the regional hubs like California’s tech-heavy Silicon Valley or metropolitan Boston, a major life sciences center—have taken in-depth looks on Science Progress at the policies and partnerships that can foster their growth and boost regional economies.
Cities in the biotech game should capitalize on their existing strengths, like Atlanta with its Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dewin writes. As well, Pennsylvania complemented its own state resources when it formed the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, a nonprofit biotechnology initiative that provides support for entrepreneurial life-sciences enterprises, in 2000. Since Pennsylvania has the third-highest number of colleges and universities in the United States, PLSG took advantage of university research grants and helped commercialize university technologies, which benefit from nearby regional markets. Using already available assets may be crucial since there is a real threat of losing the benefits—including jobs—of biotech developments to other innovation clusters if companies need to relocate to access other resources, Dewin wrote.
Salmonella outbreaks from peanuts and tomatoes are scary enough, but consider the repercussions of contaminated medications people take several times a day. The Food and Drug Administration reported that 95 Americans died from ingesting tainted blood-thinning medication last year. The FDA believed the drug, heparin, was “intentionally contaminated” in China—a main source of counterfeit medicines.
The FDA defines counterfeit medicines as “fake or copycat medicines” that may be contaminated, contain the wrong active ingredients, or contain the wrong amount of ingredients. The FDA Counterfeit Drug Task Force is currently improving their ability to track and trace medications in a manner similar to tracking systems proposed to speed contaminated food recalls. Ilisa Bernstein, director of pharmacy affairs in the Office of the Commissioner at the FDA, explained the new efforts at the American Enterprise Institute’s “The Global Impact of Fake Medicine” event yesterday.
The Prescription Drug Marketing Act of 1987 requires drug distributors to record the chain of custody, or pedigree, of drugs to increase accountability and transparency, but its implementation is challenging, Bernstein said. Radio-frequency Identification tags, small bar codes, and other electronic technologies are currently used to track drug products, but some companies are slow to adopt them. In addition to boosting traceability, the United States can toughen penalties for counterfeit drug manufacturers to discourage the practice, Bernstein said.
Image: NSF
ScienceInsider reports that the World Health Organization is couching its language so carefully that at a press briefing yesterday, a spokesperson said it is now “really very close” to calling the international H1N1 influenza outbreak a “pandemic.” At issue is the need to communicate disease risk without triggering unnecessary panic. The WHO pandemic alert system designed in 2003 relies upon geography, defining “pandemic” as sustained community-level spread of a disease in two WHO global regions. But critics of the system point out that it fails to account for severity, which Jon Cohen reports “is tricky to define as it includes everything from the virulence of a particular influenza strain to the vulnerability of a particular population and its ability to respond.”
The public health experts at Effect Measure have been following the discussion over what to call the world-wide epidemic, and interpreted the WHO press briefing like this: “everyone, WHO included, thinks a pandemic is well underway.” But they look to deeds, not dictionaries for solutions to an outbreak that has infected a reported 27,737 people worldwide:
Meanwhile we now have the long predicted influenza pandemic. It’s neither so scary nor so benign that we can afford to either hide under the bed or ignore it. What we must do is roll up our sleeves and manage the consequences.
The question of what the word “pandemic” means has gotten so entangled in the media coverage of the outbreak that The New York Times yesterday dug into the history of the term, revealing that the public health community hasn’t yet agreed on how to define it: Read more »
The Integrated Risk Information System is an Environmental Protection Agency database of information on the human health effects of exposure to environmental contaminants. Before getting cataloged in the system, a contaminant must go through the IRIS process, a set of steps to evaluate the substance that include EPA review, interagency science consultation, and external peer review. Critics of the process complain that it can take decades to assess the danger level of substances that may continue to jeopardize public health. However, EPA announced significant updates to the procedure last month that will streamline the review process to an average of 23 months.
This morning, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Subcommittee on Oversight held a joint hearing on “Scientific Integrity and Transparency Reforms at the Environmental Protection Agency,” which included discussion of the new procedures. Lisa Jackson, administrator of the EPA, testified on how the new IRIS process will help fulfill President Obama’s memorandum on scientific integrity by increasing transparency in science-based regulation.
EPA will now manage the entire IRIS review process, rather than the Office of Management and Budget, Jackson said. Dr. Francesca Grifo, Senior Scientist and Director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, discussed the importance of this change in control in a Science Progress podcast last month. The OMB previously had the power to change scientific advice, Grifo said, and described the problematic regulatory process under the Bush administration. “What we saw in the past was, rather than be courageous and come out and talk about which parts were policy and which parts were science, we saw changes in the science to cover up an often unpopular policy decision,” she said. Grifo explained in that interview that administration policy could break with the scientific advice, but the reasoning had to be clear, rather than resorting to an obfuscation of the data. “The key here is for all of us to see the scientific basis,” she said.
The new IRIS process requires that all written scientific comments on IRIS drafts provided by federal agencies be made public. Furthermore, most contaminant evaluations will be available on IRIS within two years of the review start date, Jackson said. The condensed process not only presents health-related information to the public more quickly, but also eliminates steps agencies could potentially use to inhibit the process, explained John B. Stephenson, director of natural resources & environment at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Under the old rules, agencies could declare a need for additional research to suspend the IRIS process and prevent or delay a substance from being added to the database. This gave agencies time to present studies that conflicted with the original “best available science,” Stephenson said.
Image: AP
“Ghostwriting” is the ethically fraught practice of intentionally excluding major contributors of an article from its byline or acknowledgements, and instead hiring respected experts in the field as named authors to give the appearance of credibility and neutrality. The problem has been around in scientific journals for decades, and industries may use it as a tactic to promote products with favorable research results (the issue made headlines last spring). The tobacco industry was accused of some early examples of ghostwriting. And just last week, New York Times writers Barry Meier and Duff Wilson reported a related problem involving forged authorship of a study at the nation’s premiere military research hospital, the Walter Reed Medical Center. Read more »
Just last week, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would ramp up its transparency efforts, beginning with the creation of a task force focused on the issue. In keeping with other transparency efforts within the the new administration, the FDA now has its own transparency blog.
Paul Blumental explains the importance of the task force over at the Sunlight Foundation Blog:
This transparency effort may be one of the more important ones for the administration, as most Americans rely on the FDA to provide accurate information as to whether a drug or device is not to be used, or what dangers may exist. An FDA that does not have the trust of consumers would assuredly cause increased risks in health decisions and lead to profit loses for companies manufacturing drugs and devices. Transparency is essential to instill trust in this area.
For the moment, posts on the blog indicate that the first order of discussion will be the questions posed in the Federal Reister notice of last week requesting comment on the agency’s operations. First up, “How can the agency better explain its operations, activities, processes and decision making?”
In effect, the blog functions much like the Office of Science and Technology Policy blog did when collecting information on the president’s scientific integrity memo. It puts the contents of the official Register notice online and grafts comment functionality onto the content—offering a method for simple feedback that should have been available on Regulations.gov long ago. The advantage here is that the conversation happens on the agency site, where it can include ideas presented in the voice of key policymakers, be surrounded by information and branding specific to the agency, and attract input from those already paying attention to agency efforts. Feedback is still welcome in the official online docket system, but the discussion in the comments is, at the moment, far more lively.
(HT: GenomeWeb)
In order to feed a growing, hungry world amidst a warming climate, we have to produce more food. Solutions to the problem of how to increase crop yields include both ecology-based farming and biotechnology approaches. But how do we define biotechnology? And can it support progressive approaches to improving prospects for the poor farmers of the world? This series on the issue gathers perspectives from experts who take a hard look at the science, the economics, and the complexities of agricultural development.
Today, we’ve posted the first two commentaries on this important issue. Paul B. Thompson of Michigan State University asks, “Can Agricultural Biotechnology Help the Poor?” It can, he argues, but progressives need to step back and look at the philosophical underpinnings of development strategies in order to fully comprehend the issues at stake. As well, Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists looks at the proposed Global Food Security Act of 2009 and interrogates why it singles out “genetically modified technology,” as opposed to other methods, as a way to boost crop yields. “Genetic Engineering Comes Up Short,” when compared to conventional techniques, he argues.
Cutting back on smoking could reduce U.S. health care spending by nearly $100 billion a year, thanks to the reduction in costly tobacco-related maladies, reports the Associated Press. The Congressional Budget Office expects the Family Smoking and Tobacco Control Act (H.R. 1256) to cut the use of tobacco products among underage users by 11 percent and reduce the population of adult tobacco users by 2 percent by 2019.
The bill would provide the Food and Drug Administration with unprecedented control over the tobacco industry. This act allows FDA to require full disclosure of ingredient lists and to order tobacco companies to reduce the amount of harmful ingredients in their products. It would also change warning label content and increase label size, as well as ban marketing to minors. The Secretary of Health and Human Services reserves the authority to mandate additional changes to warning labels that benefit public health. The legislation also prohibits labeling cigarette packets with phrases like “light” and “low tar,” which are often deceiving to consumers and mask the health risks. It would also forbid the sale of most flavored cigarettes.
For the moment, cigarettes remain unregulated drug delivery systems. Here’s a look at some of the most recent data on national smoking trends:
19.8 percent of adults in the United States (43.4 million people) were current smokers in 2007.
30 percent of all cancer deaths involve smoking as the primary cause.
443,000 people died prematurely every year as a result of smoking and exposure to tobacco smoke during the period between 2000 and 2004.
During that same period, smoking caused $98 billion in productivity losses each year.
For every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, 20 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.
20 percent of high school students were smokers in 2007.
3,600 people between the ages of 12 and 17 pick up smoking everyday.
Image: flickr user Sami__
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