medicine
oracknows | April 24, 2007As I mentioned before, I was at the American Association for Cancer Research Meeting in Los Angeles last week. During the meeting, I happened to attend a plenary session talk by the Director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI), Dr. John Niederhuber, whose topic was the rather dire NCI funding situation. I've written about this topic before, both in general, in terms of my personal experience "sweating to the NIH paylines," to lamenting at how we as biomedical researchers are in essence treated as freelance money sources for medical schools. Coupling Dr. Niederhuber's talk at the meeting…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike...
What did I ever do to deserve this? Specifically, your remarks about our creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor:
In his "response," "Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes...It's been fun while it lasted, but the game's over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please…
j7uy5 | April 23, 2007From
BBC:
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6575767.stm">Fat-fighting
baby milk criticised
Plans to add a hormone which suppresses hunger to baby formula food is
unlikely to work say experts.
University of Buckingham researchers are looking at adding leptin to
formula milk to curb future over-eating.
But experts said the work detailed in Chemistry and Industry was
"wildly optimistic science fiction" and questioned testing leptin on
babies.
Babies fed with formula grow more quickly than breast-fed babies - who
have a lower risk…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Those arguing the "conventional" view that sound science and epidemiological studies have failed to find a link between vaccines and autism are often tarred with the "pharma shill" brush. Meanwhile, researchers who have ever taken drug company money (particularly if it's from a drug company that makes vaccines) are castigated for having a serious conflict of interest, even to the point where conflicts of interest are invented or exaggerated beyond any reasonable recognition to tar the investigator with the dreaded "pharma shill" label.
Don't get me wrong. Possible conflicts of interest should…
oracknows | April 21, 2007I hadn't planned on writing again about the horrific massacre at Virginia Tech. After all, what more could I say that hasn't been said before in the blogospheric chatter that's erupted in the five days since the killings? Despicably, everyone's blaming their favorite cause. Fundamentalists are blaming atheism, secularism, and even Charles Darwin for the rampage. We have people making the ridiculous claim that more liberal concealed carry gun laws would have stopped the rampage before so many people died. Never mind that the price over the years for maybe--just maybe--stopping a rare homicidal…
j7uy5 | April 20, 2007If,
after reading my earlier posts this week, you are thinking that strange
things happen in the pharmaceutical market, you are right.
But strange things happen in the stock market too.
A pharmaceutical company,
rel="tag">Amgen, just saw the price of its stock
shares jump by 3.9%. The reason: they released a study that
shows that their drug,
rel="tag">Aranesp, is no more dangerous than
placebo! Hurray! Our drug does not kill patients!
The oddity of this has been
href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-amgen20apr20,1,2635142.story?coll=la-headlines-business">noticed…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
oracknows | April 20, 2007Chinese scientists have made a remote controlled pigeon. By planting micro electrodes in the pigeon's brain, the scientists can make the bird fly up, down, left or right."I'm looking for a boy named John Conner. Have you seen him?"
Chief scientist Su Xuecheng explains, ""The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon's brain according to electronic signals sent by the scientists via computer, mirroring natural signals generated by the brain."
Whether or not the pigeon is going to defend the city of Detroit from a gang of criminal masterminds, who are headquartered in a toxic waste dump…
j7uy5 | April 20, 2007If
you have glanced at this blog over the past week, you've noticed that I
wrote three posts about the opportunity -- and the pressing need -- for
reform at the FDA. Mike the Mad Biologist had an interesting
take on this, from an entirely different perspective:
href="http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2007/04/e_coli_conservatives_e_coli_li.php">E.
coli Conservatives, E. coli Liberals, and the FDA.
His post is more amusing than mine were. Perhaps you were
wondering why I would put up three boring posts in a row. I
don't usually do that. Or at least I hope I don't.
Here is…
oracknows | April 19, 2007Bear with us on this one...it might get a little complicated:
Wasps from the genus Copidosoma lay two eggs into a host egg (for example a moth or butterfly egg). One of these two eggs is male and one is female. The male and female larvae then begin multiplying--much like single celled organisms--into a thousand copies of themselves inside the egg. Thus the female "sisters" are more closely related to each other than they are to their brothers, and vice versa. The host egg, however, can only accommodate about half of the thousands of larvae now writhing around within it.Congratulations! It's…
oracknows | April 19, 2007The latest Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Blissful Entropy (cool blog name). Check it out!
oracknows | April 19, 2007Earlier this month, a "mercury mom" named Christine Heeren posted a most disturbing video to YouTube. Not long after, Kevin Leitch became aware of it and wrote about it, shortly after which the video was made a "private video" that only those given permission could view. Fortunately, Kevin had also downloaded the video and has made it available here.
It's a disturbing video on many levels, portraying, as it does, Ms. Heeren's autistic son being subjected to chelation therapy with EDTA, a therapy based on a failed hypothesis (that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines "causes" or "contributes…
oracknows | April 18, 2007A small pod of narwhals, Monodon MonocerosFor centuries, humans have speculated on narwhals' bizarre horns, believing them to be everything from supernatural appendages to spear fishing weapons to tools for poking around on the ocean floor. In 2005 a team from Harvard and the National Institute of Standards and Technology put a horn under an electron microscope and discovered that it was actually covered in nerve endings, more than 10 million total, tunneling from the center of the horn to the outer surface. As it seems, the horn is a highly advanced, completely unique sense organ, probably…
grrlscientist | April 18, 2007tags: cancer, chromosomes, aneuploidy
There is an article about cancer in this month's issue of Scientific American written by pioneering the virologist, Peter Duesberg. For those of you to whom his name sounds vaguely familiar, Duesberg became famous by claiming that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. Fortunately, this article does not go into his radical ideas about HIV. Instead, this piece explores his more plausible hypothesis regarding the cause of cancer, which proposes that the source for many cancers is aneuploidy: a condition where the cell's chromosomes are scrambled -- duplicated, broken,…
oracknows | April 18, 2007The latest Grand Rounds was posted yesterday at Fat Doctor. Lots of great stuff, as usual.
oracknows | April 18, 2007I remain confused.
Yes, I know that people who don't like me very much or at least don't like the message that I lay down here day in, day out, week in, week out probably aren't surprised at this startling admission, but I don't mean it in a general fashion (although no doubt those aforementioned people will take it that way). No, in 10 days or so since I first weighed in about it, I remain confused at the vociferously hostile reaction that Chris Mooney's and Matthew Nisbet's recent article in Science, Framing Science, and their follow up article published on Sunday in the Washington Post.…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007The
first two posts in this series are
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">here
and
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a_1.php">here.
The final editorial in the NEJM's three-part series on FDA reform takes
it's title from a line in the Institute of Medicine report:
href="http://www.iom.edu/CMS/3793/26341.aspx">The Future of
Drug Safety: "This [is] a golden moment of opportunity to
improve fundamentally the way FDA regulation
considers and responds to the evolving understanding…
oracknows | April 17, 2007Researchers in Mexico have documented wild spider monkeys rubbing themselves with fragrant, chewed up leaves. Though the exact purpose of this behavior is yet to be proven, it appears as if the scents "may play a role int he context of social communication, possibly for signaling of social status or to increase sexual attractiveness," according to an article in the online journal, Primates.
My name's Marcel...Sagitarius.
Laura Hernandez-Salazar of Veracruz University in Mexico and colleagues witnessed "20 episodes of self-anointing, that is, the application of scent-bearing material onto the…
ddobbs | April 17, 2007From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.
As the PLOS Biology review notes,
Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21…
oracknows | April 17, 2007From fellow ScienceBlogger Abel, I'm made aware of an excellent post on the Health Care Renewal Blog about the financial reality of being an academic physician in a modern U.S. medical school. It's an excellent overview of how medical schools view clinical faculty as, in essence, cash cows that have to bring in the cash and pay for themselves. The same thing actually applies to basic scientists as well, and I do have to quibble a bit with the internal medicine-centered view of the various ways that faculty are expected to bring in money, which do not necessarily apply to academic surgery…