The Stanley Medical Research Institute, a Maryland-based philanthropy, is donating $100 million to uncover the genes important in mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to an article in today's Boston Globe.

The money is going to the Broad Institute, led by genome bigwig Eric Lander, who was one of the driving forces behind the cancer genome. I've already noted the criticisms against that project, and some of the same apply here. Sure, technology now allows us to find the genetic variations between different people and the researchers will no doubt find masses of data.

But these are extremely complex disorders, each involving multiple genes. What roles do those genes play in the disease? Without understanding how the different genes interact and what the impact is of the different variations, the data will be all but meaningless. For example, scientists from the cancer genome project are reporting in this week's Nature that the number of mutations that drive cancer is much larger than they expected.

To the institute's credit, the mental illness project's results will be publicly available — the more scientists who can analyze the data the better. Lander is quoted in the Globe as saying, "If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and you can sift the whole haystack, you'll find the needle."

Hmmm.... I don't think that was the message of the idiom.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

My New Yorker mag arrived Monday with an article about a topic that's all too familiar to us, here at Nature Medicine. Science reporter Michael Specter wrote about AIDS denialists — or dissenters as they like to call themselves — who say either that HIV does not cause AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good, and that most scientists are in the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry. That last bit may be debatable, but to us and to everyone we consider credible, there's no doubt that HIV causes AIDS or that antiretroviral drugs are safe.

I'm happy the New Yorker gave this urgent and deeply troubling issue some much-needed attention, but I'm a bit disappointed with its tepid tone. If you get through the whole article — and I suppose many of the magazine's readers do — you come away with the feeling that the denialists are certainly wrong. But the first few pages give so much space to Peter Duesberg, the most famous denialist, and to the potential benefits of South Africa's traditional medicines that you might almost be tempted to think these people have a fair point. After all, who among us hasn't thought that scientists can be too harsh on those who don't agree with the reigning hypothesis or that they don't pay enough attention to traditional therapies?

But this is not your average scientific disagreement. There is NO question that HIV causes AIDS and to follow the "he said-she said" school of journalism in this case, strikes me as tame and... well, I'll leave it there. I hope the New Yorker piece goes some way to repairing the damage caused last year by an article in Harper's by dissenter Celia Farber.

For our part, we've covered the resurgence of denialists and the activities, in particular, of one Matthias Rath, who markets multivitamins as a cure for AIDS. Scientists and AIDS activists have sued the South African government and Rath for conducting trials of the so-called vitamin cures.

These denialists like to distort scientists' own statements to support their theories and have even misappropriated sentences from one of our scientific reports, which we explicitly countered in an editorial last year after the Harper's piece appeared. And we hope more of the mainstream press steps up to cover this issue.

Update: We have decided not to accept any more comments on this post, as the discussion between the two camps is not productive. We don't want this blog to perpetuate a discussion that has already received too much attention

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

What are FDA officials thinking?

The FDA is poised to approve a front-line antibiotic used for mengingitis and other human infections for use in cattle, according to a report in Sunday’s Washington Post. Approval of the antibiotic could lead to antibiotic resistance developing in animals, and then spreading to people.

Apparently the agency is not thinking; it seems instead to be following a ‘guidance document'.

And that document goes against the advice of the agency’s own scientific experts, the American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups.

These health groups point to evidence that antibiotic use in animals is linked to the development of antibiotic resistance in the human population. In fact, an FDA advisory committee voted 6 to 4 against approving animal use of the antibiotic, cefquinome, a fourth-generation cephalosporin.

Nonetheless, Stephen Sundloff, the head of the FDA’s Veterinary Medicine Center, told panel members that their vote was “not binding”. Instead, he told the committee that the FDA was bound by “Guidance for Industry #152” which limits bans on antibiotic use in animals; the details are a bit mind-numbing but it seems that it’s only easy to ban an antibiotic for animal use if the drug threatens treatments for food-borne illnesses.

That’s way too narrow a definition, given the ability of bacteria to exchange resistance genes. Let’s hope that, in the end, the FDA is able to make a common-sense and scientifically sound decision.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 06:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last week, the Office of Women's Careers at Massachusetts General Hospital showed that with a little bit of financial help, young women scientists who temporarily leave the lab can successfully reclaim their careers when they come back.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, the biochemistry department had 30 faculty members — and only 2 were women.

The situation seems to have improved somewhat and 8 of the 37 principal investigators are women. The graduate student pool, in contrast, was half women when I was there and is at least that now.

You know where this is heading. Women are overwhelmingly the majority among biology majors in college, many make it to graduate school but then drop out along the way to the top. There are a hundred opinions — some, like Larry Summers', quite controversial — about why that happens. And we'd like to hear your views about that too.

But one indisputable factor is that when women scientists leave the lab to have a baby, it's very difficult for them to maintain research productivity. There are a scattered few programs to help women at this vulnerable point in their careers, which we wrote about in 2004 in the news feature, A lab of her own.

The MGH program, described in a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine, gives two-year "bridge grants" of up to $50,000 to junior researchers who also care for young children. In the first nine years of the program, 90% of the recipients have remained at the MGH and more than half have received academic promotions at Harvard Medical School.

The amount is modest to be sure, but it helps the recipients — 40 so far — find practical solutions to their quandary. For example, Karen K. Miller, a 1999 recipient, applied her grant toward hiring a research assistant who continued Miller's work on anorexia nervosa while she was away. It also shows an institution's commitment to helping them with their careers — something many women scientists say is sorely needed.

Good news is that Harvard University, which recently found itself a woman president, is already exploring a similar model to help women at the university.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

You probably know that pondering the universe and its mysterious ways can soothe a broken heart. Apparently, it can also physically heal the heart.

Scientists are reporting in the journal Ethnicity & Disease that practicing transcendental meditation improves the heart's functioning (as measured by a six-minute walk test), helps relieve depression and generally improves the quality of life in people with congestive heart failure.

The randomized study has a small sample size: 23 African American men and women with the average age of 64, who had all been hospitalized for heart failure, abd observed for three and six months.

But this strikes me as one of those win-win strategies. Even if the physical improvement is small, I buy the lifestyle effect. I'm one of those New Yorkers who can never fully shut down, but I bet meditating every day would make me more er, serene, and indirectly more healthy.

(And for those of you who're Seinfeld fans, yes, that's a shout out to the show.)

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Did you know that one out of every three people is infected with the bacteria that cuase tuberculosis (TB)?

There's this mistaken impression that TB is no longer a problem, that 'consumption' as it was once called, long ago lost its power to kill. But in fact, 125 years after Mycobacterium tuberculosis was identified, the disease kills nearly 2 million people a year.

24 March 2007 is World TB day and partly in recognition of that, we've put together a special supplement about TB in our March issue.

News from the special is chock full of statistics, features and profiles of key players. One feature article exposes a power struggle between scientists who work with HIV and those who work with tuberculosis (TB), which is undermining the fight against both diseases.

TB is the leading cause of death among those infected with HIV and in some African countries, about 60% of those with TB are also HIV-positive. Yet, the two communities continue to work separately, diagnosing and treating one disease without taking the other into account.

One sore point for TB scientists is that TB research gets less than a tenth of the money allotted to HIV/AIDS each year. Existing drugs and vaccines for TB were developed decades ago so the infrastructure and expertise for TB need to be built up from scratch. But without enough money, says another article in the special, researchers are struggling to do the research needed to find new drugs and vaccines.

Other news articles describe the public-private partnerships that are helping to solve this funding crisis and the new drugs, vaccines and diagnostic tests in the pipeline.

The special also carries scientific commentaries about the threat of extensively drug-resistant TB, which is virtually incurable, and about the scientific challenges in developing new TB drugs.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about this special. Tell us what you liked--and what you didn't like--about our coverage.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some people have been picking on those adorable girl scouts for peddling their cookies—as if every little girl were really some sort of evil trans-fat pusher, single-handedly blimping up America. Ok, the main force behind this anti-American sentiment seems to be one woman who set up a small activist group and website, “National Action against Obesity.” But she managed to get herself on the O’Reilly Factor.

Like good citizens, the Girl Scouts have responded—reducing the levels of trans-fats in their cookies. According to FDA standards for ingredient labels each cookie contains zero trans-fat. Well, the trans-fat is not quite gone, since the FDA counts less than 0.5 grams of trans fat as “zero”. Just don’t eat the whole box.

Way to go girl scouts—give me a double order of those Do-Si-Dos.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 05:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)