China may be eager to claim a top spot in the international scientific community, but before it can move forward, it must first face up to its past.

Just last week, it seems that government authorities prevented a prominent AIDS activist, Gao Yaojie, from traveling from her apartment in Zhengzhou to Beijing for a visa to attend an awards ceremony in the United States. She is slated to be honored this March by the Vital Voices Global Partnership, a nonprofit group with Hillary Clinton on its board.

Yaojie is well-known for uncovering the unsafe blood donation practices in Henan province in the 1990s that ultimately infected more than tens of thousands of individuals with HIV. In state-run facilities, blood from multiple donors was mixed together before being infused back into the donors' bloodstream—a practice that continued for years as Henan officials attempted to cover it up .

For her tireless effort to expose the scandal, Yaojie, a 79-year-old physician, endured government harassment and surveillance. According to some reports, the current effort to keep her quiet stems from a wish to avoid embarrassing Li Keqiang, the former governor and party chief of Henan, who is rumored to be in line for the presidency.

No official seems to have been punished for his role in the plasma trade, according to reporting by the Economist. Victims of the scandal have been promised drugs and reparations by the government, but it’s also unclear how that effort is progressing.

China recently lifted some of its restrictions on foreign reporters, in advance of the Olympic Games. Hopefully some will be able to use the opportunity to dig deeper into the legacy of this government-sanctioned and silenced disaster.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The most popular news item on Yahoo yesterday was a Reuters article about a potential new cancer drug. Intrigued, I read the article but couldn't understand why it was news.

The article is a cutesy account of how the researcher, Katherine Schaefer, had mistakenly added massive amounts of a PPAR-gamma modulator to a cancer cell line and killed them. That apparently led Schaefer to test this substance as a cancer drug in various other cancer cell lines and in mice.

As most biologists can tell you, almost anything added in massive amounts will kill cells. It's fortunate that this one does seem promising, but let's be realistic. So far, it seems effective in mice, which are a far, far cry from humans. Even if everything works well, a less than 10% chance, it will be at least 15 years before a drug version sees the light of day.

This particular article was published in the International Journal of Cancer--and not in the fictitious International Cancer Research as the Reuters article said--but a quick PubMed search reveals that Schaefer first published a link between PPAR-gamma and cancer in 2005. So even that aspect wasn't new.

Although scientists do often hype their findings, Schaefer herself seems perfectly reasonable. When I told her I was surpised her paper had been covered so widely, she said, "You and me both." Apparently, this was the work of an energetic PR person at her university who, I must say, deserves to be congratulated. She spun the story admirably well as a tale of lucky accidents, a wire service journalist bit and bingo! I could say something here about the dangers of over-hyping science, but I'll restrain myself.

At least the publicity has already had one good outcome. Schaeffer says she's had emails from people she hasn't heard from in 15 years or more. Happy accident indeed!

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)