A while ago, I had a chat with Phil Campbell, who just arrived in New York after dining with royalty., and he told me something extraordinary.

We started talking about cognitive enhancement -- taking drugs to improve your cognitive skills. Of course, drugs for conditions such as ADHD and narcolepsy have been used by some people for some time, but data on their efficacy are scarce and not well controlled. The fascinating thing is that it seems that Phil heard from a reliable source that, if you wanted, you could set up a clinical trial specifically designed for a putative cognitive enhancer here in the USA. In other words, the FDA would not get on your way if your clinical trial was not for a drug aimed at curing disease, but designed to enhance your natural abilities.

I'm frankly surprised about it and wonder if this is really the case. Can anybody out there confirm or deny this? And if this is true, what would be a reliable endpoint in a trial of a cognitive enhancer? Maybe that's why you don't hear about companies going after this dream; because one doesn't have a meaningful endpoint.

One thing I can tell you: the day we have a safe cognitive enhancer, I'll be the first one to buy it.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 08:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Friday, Nature and Science shared the Premio Principe de Asturias for Communication and Humanities.

Considering that the Premios Principe de Asturias are a big deal in Spain and Latin America, I was somewhat surprised to see that the coverage that they got in the international press was somewhat minor. Not even the fact that Al Gore, Bob Dylan and Michael Schumacher were among the winners in other categories made much of a difference. I guess this goes to show that the Spaniards need to do a lot more of brand building around their Premios.

Even here at Nature Publishing Group, as international a company as we are, our awareness of the Premio Principe de Asturias was relatively limited. Rumor has it that the company had to be contacted a couple of times before realizing that the Award was legitimate and not one of those e-mail scams involving African Princes, which I'm sure all of you receive every once in a while.

I don't know, but maybe someone in Spain got wind of that rumor and wanted to equalize the score on the day of the awards. Otherwise, how can one explain that, for a few hours, a picture of Nature's editor Phil Campbell shaking the hand of Prince Felipe published in the newspaper "El Pais" referred to Phil as the Editor of Science? Or is there something we don't know, Phil?

Happily, as soon as our press officer got on the case, things were quickly sorted out, the caption was changed, and Phil could have a peaceful dinner with Spanish Royalty.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 08:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not unexpectedly, Jim Watson retired last week as Chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), about a week after a series of controversial remarks that got him, yet again, in hot water. In his statement (which, mysteriously enough, didn't come from a CSHL or other institutional e-mail address but from a Gmail mailbox), he says "the passing on of my remaining vestiges of leadership is more than overdue".

I guess one would have to agree with him. Over the years, the scientist who achieved immortality by giving us the structure of DNA has found himself too often in the eye of the storm for making comments that rub too many people the wrong way (a selection of them can be found here and here).

Why he has chosen to stay in the public eye for so long and tarnish his image with inappropriate comments, only he knows. But the other day, reading a blog in a newspaper that covered Watson's latest faux pas, you could read several comments along the lines of "What else would you expect of someone who stole Rosalind Franklin's data?" and other things to the same effect.

Is this really the way we will remember Jim Watson? I hope not, and therefore think that his retirement arrives at a good time, before this collateral damage to this legacy is still minor.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every so often, we get letters like the one below:

"Sadly I don't agree with you, the work was already acknowledge by the ... community and got a keystone scholarship. I am working in the field for more then 12 years, I think it is important and novel to so it will get a far review. I think that science and importance has nothing to do with your decision, I am sure that if this work was coming from a different lab, with a different PI sending it it was treated differentially and get a far chance and reviewed. Not surprising, I am not the only scientist that think that reviewing is about politics. Thanks for the time and consideration, I am sure this is the last manuscript I am sending to your Journal."

What can I say? Our internal review process is not about politics. What benefit would we obtain from rejecting a good paper? This is not to say that we don't make mistakes, but I can categorically say that we don't like it when we make them. And if the paper had come from a different lab, the outcome would have been the same. As I hinted in my previous post, we sometimes turn down papers from very accomplished scientists.

Now, if there are scientific arguments to challenge our decisions, we'd love to hear them, as we sometimes do reverse them. But as I said before, angry letters like the one above don't really do much for us.

Now, about this being "the last manuscript", is that a promise?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The other day I was talking to some scientists at a meeting, and one of them told me that some journals take advantage of the announcement of the Nobel Prize to send you an e-mail highlighting the papers from the Laureates that they have had the privilege to publish.

I don't know about you but such a marketing strategy strikes me as somewhat cheeky. I don't think there are plans to do the same here at NPG but, if other publishing firms are currently entertaining a similar strategy, here's an idea to turn it on its head -- send e-mails highlighting the papers from the Laureates that your journal has REJECTED and the name of the publication where they were ultimately published.

Hey! Maybe one could even use this information to develop some sort of journal ranking that could complement the infamous impact factors.

It's a shame that confidentiality issues get in the way of such an idea because, if you were to send such an e-mail, people would surely be talking about your journal...

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last month, my friend Jose Obeso invited me to a think-tank meeting on Parkinson Disease in Pamplona. It wasn't July, which is when you get a chance to run with the bulls. But even if it had been, Jose told me that he wouldn't let me run with them. "Too dangerous", he said. He also explained to me that you simply can't run all the way from the encierro (the point from which they release the bulls) to the plaza.

Broadly speaking, there are three stretches, and you have to pick one: 1) the beginning, which is uphill, making it harder for the bulls even though they are fresh; 2) the middle one, quite tricky owing to the curves and how crowded it is; and 3) the end, straight and flat, although the bulls are tired by the time they get to it.

I don't want to push the analogy too far, as those who know me are aware of how much I like to make fun of bad analogies, but I'd say that the meeting also released three bulls that people interested in Parkinson ought to fight. I won't dwell on them in detail, as there will be an article coming out of the think tank, and I wouldn't want to steal their thunder but, in broad terms, they are:

1) The definition of Parkinson -- When we talk about the disease, is it just one disease? Is early-onset Parkinson the same thing as late-onset? Are the genetic forms the same as the early-onset forms? Are genetic forms even the same as the idiopathic forms? There are several other ways to slice the Parkinson pie, and it wouldn't be a bad idea to make sure that we are talking about the same disease before trying to solve it.

2) Models of Parkinson -- A lot of the work on oxidative damage (a favorite idea in the Parkinson field) has been done in cultured cells, and people are painfully aware of the shortcomings of the chemical models, including the use of MPTP. It seems that the field is in desperate need of new models, particularly those that exploit the insights from genetic forms of Parkinson.

3) Mechanisms in Parkinson -- There seems to be a deep disconnection between the solid data coming out of the genetic analyses and what's going on at the level of the mitochondria in the dopaminergic neurons. In a nutshell, Parkinson remains a mechanistic black box. And if this is the case even when we have a good genetic starting point, the situation regarding idiopathic forms of the disease is even more bleak.

After all, maybe the analogy isn't too bad, because I'm certainly not discovering anything those in the field know already. Alas, it would seem that many people in the field do prefer running away from these three bulls rather than chasing them. One of my readings of the meeting was that, until these issues aren't tackled head on, the Parkinson field will not see the breakthroughs it's been looking for.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The scientific community shunned Nobel laureate James Watson, of double-helix fame, this week after he suggested that Africa’s prospect is “gloomy” because blacks are not as intelligent as other races. Watson was quoted by the UK’s Sunday Times as saying, “All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.”

The backlash was swift. On Wednesday, the Science Museum in London cancelled a sold-out talk Watson was scheduled to give this evening. A day later the board of trustees at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where Watson serves as chancellor, suspended Watson’s administrative responsibilities. Watson, who had plans to tour the UK promoting his new book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, apologized and came home.

As a scientist, Watson should know better than to make such sweeping generalizations. I can think of a few other reasons to be gloomy about Africa’s prospects: AIDS, a history of intense colonization, and the persistence of corrupt leadership, to name just a few.

James Watson is wrong, but should he be silenced?

Posted on behalf of Cassandra Willyard, Nature Medicine's news intern.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Checking the literature in preparation for our monthly News & Views meeting, my colleague Clare Thomas spotted this recent paper from PLoS Pathogens:

HMBA Releases P-TEFb from HEXIM1 and 7SK snRNA via PI3K/Akt and Activates HIV Transcription

No offense intended to the authors or the editors, but I think it's safe to say that there's one too many abbreviations in the title.

Can anyone out there trump it?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Is it just me, or do people in the US pay more attention to scientific misconduct than, say, Europeans? Maybe it's not just me; a recent editorial by Xavier Bosch in BMJ argues that Europe lags significantly behind the US in monitoring scientific integrity.

In the US, many institutions and have departments in charge of handling allegations of misconduct. And failing this, the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) deals with cases of misconduct and fosters scientific honesty at a national level. Furthermore, the ORI is taken very seriously; if you're facing the possibility of an ORI investigation, you are very likely to make sure your lab comes clean as soon as possible to try to keep their officers from paying you a visit.

In Europe, monitoring of scientific integrity is fragmented. Each country deals with the problem as they see fit, and the editorial does a good job of telling you what happens in what country. From my own experience, Spain is not an example of good practices. We once had an allegation of misconduct and could never get anybody from the university in question to get involved.

Bosch also puts forward some possible solutions to the problem. He seems to think that tackling it at a pan-European level would be the best way forward. This certainly makes sense if we consider that many European papers report the work of labs from different countries and that European funding promotes the formation of international networks.

The flip side of this is that European bureaucracy has a reputation for slowness and inefficiency. It is therefore easy to imagine an allegation of misconduct getting lost in the Kafkian labyrinths of the European Union's offices in Brussels, slowly ripening like a good French wine, but turning into vinegar for those who made the accusation and those who are trying to reproduce a piece of work that may be flawed.

In other words, the creation of a "European ORI" would be of value only if its procedures are streamlined and is not hindered by European policy and National laws. If it isn't given enough authority and autonomy, and is dragged down by bureaucratic procedures, then what sounds like a good idea in principle is also likely to turn into vinegar.

An alternative, also mentioned by Bosch, is the creation of ORIs in those countries in which research integirty is currently not monitored. This may sound less dramatic, but it strikes me as more useful, specifically in the context of the push by some journals (including ours) to encourage authors to disclose the specific contribution of each person in the author list to the work being reported. So, if there are problems with the confocal images, the Western blots or the statistical analysis, one can know without ambiguity who is responsible and who should be investigated by the local authorities.

Regardless of whether one prefers national or pan-European solutions, one thing's for sure: Europe has a lot of catching up to do on this front.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Speaking of Apoorva, before she left the journal she managed to produce a fitting swan song -- a collection of reports called "Science on a shoestring". In this collection, we present the stories of some scientists who, using materials as simple as litmus paper, bamboo and blenders, prove that science on a shoestring is possible.

We hope that these stories are inspiring, not only to other people who may not have the resources to do research, but also to those in rich labs, who often complain about their grants being rejected and about equipment being too expensive.

Back in Mexico, when I was starting in research, I do remember having to wash the plastic pipettes, as well as the pipette tips to reuse as many times as possible. We also had to remove the bottom of plastic graduated cylinders and glue a spout to them so that we could quantify the volume of liquid that our animals drank during their behavioral training. And we had these very elaborate contraptions to distill water, which was a precious commodity.

But that's enough reminiscing for one day. Instead, tell us what's happening in your neck of the woods. Do you also have to come up with clever inventions to compensate for the paucity of resources?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Ok, now that Apoorva has left, I guess we'll need to blog more to keep Spoonful of Medicine alive. So, let's get things started with a brief mention of this month's Nature Medicine editorial.

In it, we imagine a world in which scientists could publish no more than 20 papers throughout their whole careers as a means to reduce scientific "inflation" -- the huge proliferation of scientific papers and journals, many of which add very little or even nothing to scientific knowledge.

If we adopted this 20-paper rule, many articles reporting incremental advances would no longer be written, and many specialized journals would disappear. And with far fewer papers to read, each one reporting a much more complete piece of research, search committees or funding bodies could directly evaluate the work of a given scientist, instead of leaning on surrogate indicators such as a journal's impact factor or number of citations, "evil" numbers that many of researchers love to hate.

We may not even need journals (and editors) anymore; everything would be published in preprint servers like those used by physicists, and the community would simply evaluate and rank the different contributions as they become available. This way, the whole community could act as reviewers, doing away with the existing peer-review process, another favorite target of many disgruntled scientists.

Of course, the key issue is whether you, as a working scientist, would agree to the 20-paper rule for the sake of cleaning up the scientific literature and improving on the peer-review process. Any takers?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A new study published Monday in Environmental Health Perspectives revives fears about the pesticide environmentalists everywhere love to hate: DDT. Researchers examined 129 women who were exposed to the pesticide as children and found that the women had a whopping 400% increase in breast cancer risk.

This isn't the first time the link between breast cancer and DDT has been examined, but previous studies were either inconclusive, questionable or found no link. The difference this time, according to the researchers, is that these baby boomer women were exposed to the pesticide in the 1950s and 60s, before they were 14 years old. The age of exposure has a great deal to do with breast cancer risk, apparently.

I have some doubts about the study because of its size, but even if it is confirmed by other research, it's important to emphasize that the study was looking at women who were exposed to the pesticide as it was used in the 1940s and 50s, when it was sprayed widely — one might say recklessly — for agricultural purposes. That's now banned in most parts of the world.

Where it is used, DDT is sprayed indoors, in very small quantities, for malaria control. And in fact, it's the most powerful tool available against the mosquitoes that spread malaria. That's why, despite its sketchy reputation, the WHO and others decided to support its use in Africa, as I reported last summer. Studies like this are often misused and misinterpreted. But the consequences of dismissing DDT's benefits are far too serious to contemplate.

**

On a completely unrelated note, yesterday was my last day as senior news editor at Nature Medicine. As of next week, I'm joining the Simons Foundation, where I'll be helping to create an online community for autism researchers. It's been a pleasure contributing to this blog, however infrequently I've done it lately. I hope you've enjoyed reading it — and will join me on my personal blog, which I hope to have up and running sometime soon.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)