You might have noted that the previous entry on this blog was written by Coco Ballantyne, who recently joined the journal as our News intern. I'm confident she will blog about far less frivolous things than the one I'm going to write about today, so please join me in giving her a warm welcome.

Now, check out this entry from The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. In a nutshell, companies are beginning to restrict the freebies they give away at meetings, keeping them from doctors who work in specific parts of this country. For example, Lilly won't give you a cup of frozen yogurt if you have prescribing authority in Minnesota or if you are a government employee in New York.

This priceless initiative, of course, finds its origins in the criticisms that pharma companies have received for giving doctors expensive gifts, which have been regarded as an attempt to bias the choice of drugs that physicians prescribe. As the pharma industry seems to want to comply with state regulations that limit the gifts that they can give to doctors in some places, it seems that companies are pulling all the stops (no matter how silly) to make sure they remain on the safe side. I'm sure that some pundits who are obsessed with transparency in biomedicine are celebrating this victory of what I call "CFI fundamentalism".

Anyway, Minnesota docs, don't worry. Our marketing department just created some very neat Rubik cube-like toys to advertise the different journals that NPG publishes on cancer. They may not be as tasty as that frozen yogurt but, if you come to come by our booth at a future meetings, you'll be very welcome to take one of them home with you.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When it's not a trip, my day job gets in the way of my posting something to Spoonful. This week we closed the June issue of Nature Medicine, and right now I'm at the airport, about to start another 'tour'. So, while I wait for the PA system to herd us to the plane, I thought I would blog about my day as a juror.

For the second year running, a very dear friend of mine invited me to be part of the jury for an award that her organization gives to young scientists. And for the second year running, it turned out to be a fun day out.

The award recognizes young scientists in all disciplines. As a result, the jury (composed of nearly 40 people) was a very eclectic mix of basic scientists, engineers, physicists, matemathicians, you name it. There were even editors like me, whose only expertise lies on the inexact science of rejecting papers.

The discussion, which took the best part of the day to go over something like 40 finalists, was free-form. One of us would go over the candidate, and the rest would ask questions or bring up caveats about each of them, trying to understand the importance of their contributions.

I must confess that, halfway through the session, I started feeling sorry for those scholars who have to decide on, say, people's grants.

In the case of our jury, we found it was pretty tricky to decide how much weight to give to the candidates' letters of recommendation, to their number of papers and the journals in which they were published (someone referred to the high-profile journals as 'vanity journals', which struck a chord with me), to the number of citations, and to a plethora of factors that, one way or another, represent the blood, sweat and tears of a scientist.

Does a scientist who has three patents in the past five years, but only three papers, each of which had been cited just three times deserve more recognition than the scientist with five Nature papers and 1000 citations? Does a scientist who works in a hot field and has made nice contributions deserve more credit than another one who works in a less glamorous, lonelier field and has made equally profound contributions?

These questions aren't always easy to answer, but my friend got it right because she quickly realized that there's strength in numbers. So, if you have 40 judges from different fields and with different ways of evaluating science, chances are that the truly outstanding pieces of work will triumph over the rest. I'm therefore confident that our eclectic group made the right choices.

But returning to those grant evaluators, I was saying that I felt sorry for them because, if we managed to screw up and made a mistake yesterday, it won't make much of a difference for the scientists who should have won and didn't despite our best efforts. They'll carry on and will still be great scientists. In the case of grant decisions, though, getting them wrong can lead to a lab's shutdown, to fired postdocs and to truncated careers, which, alas, are becoming more and more common.

Photo by JasonUnbound

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A couple of people were asking me the other day why it is that I post some comments that we receive on this blog that are frankly bizarre. I must confess I don't know. I guess I must have a soft spot for people who are "out there", if you know what I mean.

Come to think of it, it must have started back when I was a student and needed to read the print edition of Nature, as there simply was no internet. After the classifieds, at the very end of the book, there was a section called "Scientific announcements". And every month or so, a man called D.B. James, based somewhere in Wales, would publish his scientific ideas, which, presumably, didn't meet with much support from the Nature editors. Does anyone else remember him? This is a sampler of his work, collected from issues of Nature as recent as late 2001.

When I lived in Britain, I met a scientist from the MRC who had the intention to create the D.B. James Appreciation Society, but I don't think his plan prospered. Or at least I think so, as I never got an invitation to join, and soon after that Nature decided to stop publishing James' snippets. Too bad.

At around the same time, during my stint at Nature Reviews Neuroscience, I had a closer interaction with an author whose writings were also difficult to categorize. Based somewhere in Georgia, in the US, and signing under the pseudonym Ken Al Sifr, our correspondent used to write to us every month. His letters were always flawless, even though he wrote them in a typewritter, and I seem to recall that he was particularly fond of using green ink whenever he needed to make a note on the margins of his text. In his letters, which he also sent to Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Nature Medicine, and surely to Science and Neuron, he would criticize in no uncertain terms many of the papers published by said journals, pointing us in the direction of findings published decades ago, which, according to him, compromised the novelty of the new contributions and showed that we had no idea about what we were doing running the journals.

I now regret the fact that I didn't keep any of his letters; I destroyed all of them when I move to my current job at Nature Medicine. I do remember, though, that some of them had drawings that could be construed as sexually explicit. Others included pictures of the NRN editors (which, as per the style of our reviews journals, continue to appear in every print issue). In yet others, he would paraphrase famous poems such as Marvell's 'To his coy mistress':

"The brain's a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace."

However, not all is lost. Ken Al Sifr is the author of two books, "Too many neurons" and "Your brain glossary for the brain decade", published by Vantage Press. I managed to purchase both of them, and can share with you two of his definitions from the second book. I hope they give you an idea of the content of his letters. Enjoy!

P.S. Incidentally, as far as I know he continues to write to the NRN editors. Hopefully they don't make the same mistake I made, and choose instead to keep such jewels.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Another long blogging hiatus, as I was away for about a week. Hopefully we can recover some consistency, particularly now that I found several things to blog about. A couple of them have to do with that infamous talk I gave in Madrid and the related post on this blog. Some friends have pointed me in the direction of a series of comments that some people have made about both talk and post, which might be worth talking about.

Before that, though, I got a couple of requests to post the mock cover of Nature that I presented at the talk, and I thought I would oblige. The original photograph is by Vedia, and the mock-up is by my friend and fellow NPG employee Simon Fenwick.

Readers in the USA may find the cover meaningless, as the Eurovision Song Contest is a non-event on this side of the Atlantic. But in Europe, Eurovision is more of a big deal, and this year it's got a lot more publicity than ever, due in part to contestants like the one representing Spain this year, who graced this imaginary cover. And for those interested, you should check out the Ireland representative, which is perhaps even wackier than this one.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 03:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A neuroscientist friend of mine who is an enthusiast of tango will be very interested in this article that I read in the news today. It reports that dancing tango could benefit patients with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases.

Image: PeterForret

Unfortunately, the news report doesn't have a reference for this claim, although a cursory look in PubMed discloses this paper, which showed preliminary evidence for some benefit of tango on Parkinson's patients. The news report did say, though, that the First International Congress of Tangotherapy will take place next July in Argentina. Their current speaker list looks somewhat slim for a three-day meeting, but you never know how many more people will ultimately participate, even though I didn't see any dancing-only sessions in the program.

Image: Luke Robinson

By the way, pending future evidence that tango is also good for people with Alzheimer's disease, I must be skeptical; it didn't seem to help the memory of my tango-dancing friend, who forgot about me a long time ago.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

About 1,400 years ago, Pope Gregory the Great (image below) enumerated the Seven Deadly Sins -- sins that cut the sinner off from God. Now, Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti has drawn up a new list of Seven Deadly Sins for modern times.

"To sin is to violate the relationship of man with God", stated Archbishop Girotti. So, his new list has paid special attention to what one could call "social sins" that are linked to "the phenomenon of globalization”. This is how the BBC listed the new deadly sins:

Environmental pollution
Genetic manipulation
Accumulating excessive wealth
Inflicting poverty
Drug trafficking and consumption
Morally debatable experiments
Violation of fundamental rights of human nature

Wait a minute, though. Genetic manipulation? Surely not! So, does this mean that, if someone successfully cures a congenital disease using gene therapy, this person will go to Hell? I hope not. Otherwise, the Italian authors of a paper we published over a year ago may be a bit too close to the Vatican for comfort.

And morally debatable experiments? Aren't all experiments morally debatable? I admit that I don't know all the details of what the 'Osservatore Romano', the official newspaper of the Vatican, published, but hopefully there is some clarification for the benefit of those of us Catholics who had to learn to live by the law of the original deadly sins. Do morally debatable experiments refer only to experiments in embryonic stem cells, or are there other experiments one needs to be worried about?

Sure, one can see where the Catholic church is coming from with their proclamations of the new sins. But to place a good number of fine scientists twice in such an eclectic list and in the company of drug traffickers strikes me as somewhat disturbing. Good thing I'm no longer a practicing scientist. Otherwise, I would need to do a lot of explaining next time I visit my mom.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I always thought the ‘therapy’ in ‘aromatherapy’ was something nobody took seriously, sort of like ‘low-fat’ in ‘low-fat potato chip’ or ‘recycle’ in the Microsoft desktop’s ‘recycle bin’ (only in my nicey-nice hometown of Seattle would anyone get away with coining such a platitude).

But apparently the ‘therapy’ part of aromatherapy is real enough for the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the National Institutes of Health. The institute, which we have covered before, has sponsored a trial of aromatherapy—and the results are out!

Big news: aromatherapy doesn’t work. The best thing lemon did was lift the mood and lavender didn’t even do that. Surely there are other, more interesting and potentially effective alternative therapies to study. I’m not sure what. But at least they are not studying that substance of apparently limited effectiveness, prozac.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 08:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Pretty interesting report in Nature a week ago about the NIH's proposal to revamp its peer-review process. We plan to discuss the proposal in more detail at a later date, but I cannot help but refer to the graph that accompanied the story:

What I wanna know is who the one investigator with 11 NIH grants is. Truly remarkable! I'm willing to bet that this person has no strong criticisms of the quality of peer review at the NIH.

Anyway, this graph also reminded me of those plots you see of wealth distribution in New York or London, in which a few people have a lot of money, making those cities a lot less affordable for the rest of us.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I saw this amusing paper in the latest issue of EMBO reports.

The article's title is "Six senses in the literature. The bleak sensory landscape of biomedical texts", and its authors -- Raul Rodriguez-Esteban and Andrey Rzhetsky -- argue that "scientific texts have a reputation for being factual, rational and 'dry" in contrast to other prose that is designed to evoke emotional responses". They therefore set out to obtain evidence that "the sensory-deprived writing style that dominates the biomedical literature impedes text comprehension and numbs the reader's senses and mind".

To that end, they measured the frequency of use of "sensory" words (terms related to the perception of color, smell, taste, touch, sound and time) in 250,000 articles from 78 biomedical journals and compared it to their frequency in news reports from Reuters, in articles in Wikipedia, and in the complete collected works of Poe, Shakespeare and Whitman. They found (surprise, surprise!) that articles and news reports were a lot "bleaker" in comparison to the works of literature. The figure below is some sort of homunculus that gives you an idea of the "sensory" characteristics of the different works they looked at. It shows the balance of "sensory" terms in the different bodies of work they compared, together with the average -- the face in the center.

The authors speculate that reading texts with the characteristic of a biomedical article "is similar to the effect of a long journey through a colourless flat terrain devoid of prominent features: a numbing of the senses", and suggest that "cognitively bleak biomedical texts can and should be transformed into perceptually richer prose".

All of this is well and good, but I must confess that, when I read scientific papers, I have very little patience for metaphors and analogies, which some authors, alas, love to use. Some of them are so gratuitous that it makes you wonder if their use of imagery and metaphor is itself, in fact, an attempt to "numb the reader's senses and mind".

Back when I was the Editor of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, I remember that a couple of my colleagues and I created something we dubbed "Analogy-watch" to record the most ridiculous analogies that we could find in scientific texts. (I regret to say that many of them were penned by some of our own in-house Editors.) Maybe as a result of that experience I've always tried to be careful and separate literature from science. I hope that prospective Nature Medicine authors don't rush to follow the authors' advice and instead use "sensory words" in moderation. Trust me, you don't wanna end up being part of our Analogy-watch file.

To close, I cannot help but pointing out that Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) had already observed an effect somewhat related to the one reported by Rodriguez-Esteban and Rzhetsky. I didn't see Calvin cited in the reference list, which is why I thought I would include the relevant "report" down here. (Note, you may have to save the image on your desktop, as it appears truncated in the blog page.)

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It has been too long since I have blogged, and going to a meeting seems like a good reason to start up again. I spent the weekend in Boston at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 



The most interesting talk, by Angela Belcher at MIT, had on the surface very little to do with medicine. But it was so cool I have to blog about it.  Well, Belcher says she is applying her techniques to medical devices. And she does work on viruses—bacteriophage, to be more exact. 



Phage are viruses that infect bacteria, and it’s easy to make zillions in a test tube.  Belcher is using phage engineered to produce various proteins on their coats that nucleate the formation of inorganic materials—such as the building blocks of a solar cell, or lattices of cobalt oxide to create a battery electrode. 



She uses a technique often used by biologists, called ‘phage display’ in which phages within a large population each display unique peptides on their coats.  She can then screen for the phages that have the properties she is interested in, such as the ability to seed the formation of inorganic lattices of a particular confirmation. She further hones the properties of her phage—and the materials they seed—by natural selection.

She says she is inspired by the designs of nature—such as that of the abalone. Abalone shells are primarily calcium carbonate, a substance that by itself is soft and chalky. It's proteins within the shell that prompt the calcium carbonate to assume a particularly tough and resilient conformation. 



Her goal is to generate materials that are ecologically friendly, replicable, and assemble at room temperature. She also wants her materials to be upscalable—something her lab could achieve, for instance, with successive dips of an electrode in a beaker of phage, and a beaker of inorganic material that assembles into place using the phage as a template. 

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 12:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our colleague Kate Jeffrey, who was one of the editors of Nature Medicine for most of 2007, went back to academia late last year, and it shows that she hasn't wasted any time in getting involved in exciting proyects within and out of the lab.

The other day she told me about a scientific film festival that she is co-organizing. The idea is to screen fictional films that have a scientific storyline or main character. The festival will feature some already existing films but, more importantly, they want to showcase the work of aspiring filmmakers who may be interested enough in science to make a fictional movie about it.

I'm no filmmaker, but right off the bat I can think of a couple of ideas:

1) A scientist doing his second postdoc discovers that an experiment key to his whole project will not work. The film is about the aftermath of his disappointment, during which he entertains ideas such as dropping out of science, committing scientific fraud and starting a third postdoc. Surely there is a good drama waiting to be developed there.

2) The New Yorker published earlier this year a fascinating article on "human guinea pigs", who volunteer for clinical trials. There easily is a movie in the life of a ficticious guinea pig who is involved in a trial as unfortunate as TeGenero's TGN1412 trial in 2006. The side effects would have to be not as severe as in that trial, but something that allows the director to explore human nature more fully -- something like, say, infertility.

Anyway, congratulations to Kate and her co-organizers on such a great idea. I hope they get a lot of submissions from filmmakers inspired by the project.

By the way, have a look at the trailer they created to begin to advertise the festival:

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I used to wonder why scientists seemed so skinny, until I left the lab for the office--and immediately gained fifteen pounds.

As Anna Kushnir notes in a recent post on the Nature Network, bench scientists run around all day--to the ice machine, the incubator, the symposium down the hall. And, as Kushnir observes, they have freakishly strong hands.

For the men out there, all the pipette wielding could increase the strength of their handshake--apparently a measure of reproductive fitness.

So if you're spending another 12 hour day in the lab, consider it part of a weight loss, sex-appeal regimen.

Here's to a healthy, active new year at the bench and off.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

US funding for HIV/AIDS in Africa has risen substantially in recent years, but the good this has done is more than outweighed by the sharp decline in support for family planning. That's the premise of an article in this week's Washington Post, which notes that poor family planning means more children are being born HIV positive.

Is that a fair way to look at the situation? It's certainly a provocative one. Many public health experts have advocated piggybacking HIV treatment and prevention efforts onto family planning. But instead US support for family planning has waned since 1994, and the Bush administration has pulled funds from organizations that counsel women about abortion. With such policies, it's no surprise that the United Nations has revised its estimates of the population of Kenya in 2050 from 44 to 83 million.

The benefits of family planning may seem self evident--one being reducing the rate of HIV transmission to children and reducing the burden on parents who may themselve be HIV positive. But perhaps it's not so obvious to those who make policy.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 09:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It’s been more than a week since the 47th annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. I’m finally getting around to blogging about it, with my editing deadlines for the January issue out of the way.

I only made it to the last day of the meeting but I wish I had gone to more. Just that one day was rich icool images and ideas.

My favorite: The primary cilium. Nearly every cell in our body has a single specialized cilium. I had barely heard of it. In my defense, an older cell biologist, who has been around for a while, told me that he didn't know much about it either. The meeting convinced me that this structure has languished in obscurity for too long.

The late-breaking poster session alone had seven abstracts on the primary cilium. Those abstracts implicated the cilium in coordinating several types of cell signaling events in embryonic stem cells, cancer cells and fibroblasts, common cells that make connective tissue. Apparently the appendage can act as a little cellular sensor.

The primary cilium is not just for cell biologists. A study by Klaus Piontek, Gregory Germino and collegues in this month’s issue shows how defects in the cilium lead to kidney disease. See also the News and Views by Emily Kim and Gerd Walz.

Another recent study, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, examines how the cilium contributes to setting up the left-right asymmetry of organs. Individuals with defective primary cilia are susceptible to heterotaxy--in which organs are distributed randomly on the left and right sides.

I left my day at the meeting with renewed enthusiasm for cell biology--the wellspring of biomedical advance.

If you'd like to read a real blog on the meeting, see one by Brendan Maher for Nature News:

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Good news for those of you who are tired of visiting this blog to find only posts of mine, which often read as if they came out of a gossip magazine.

First, Charlotte Schubert is back in business, as you may already know from her latest entry.

Second, I'm delighted to welcome Roxanne Khamsi, our new News Editor, whose contributions to this site I'm sure will be very interesting and timely. I'm looking forward to reading them.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 11:04 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)

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)

Over a year ago, we published a special report about fraud in science. One of the articles in the special quoted Darrell Smith, from Vanderbilt University, as saying "Graduate students would do anything to please their principal investigator".

Dr. Smith then wrote to us to clarify that "To suggest that a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow would do anything to please their principal investigator indicates a willingness to engage in unethical, illegal or immoral conduct", something that, he felt, was unthinkable for most graduate students and postdocs, who "are committed to high ethical standards in their research and would not engage in misconduct to please an advisor".

This weekend, I got a letter from someone called Chris Muller, who disagrees. He writes:

"A bunch of us were discussing Dr. Smith's commentary on how graduate students and postdocs have their own strict codes of conduct and ethics that makes them think of science first, and their PIs and their careers only afterwards. How noble! How pure! [...] I personally know graduate students, postdocs and technicians who HAVE TO think of whether their PI will be happy with a given result, and if it doesn't match the "desired" outcome, well, then they do the experiment till it does. If they didn't do this, their survival, their degree, their ability to earn a livelihood based on their chosen profession would be threatened. It's that plain and simple. What would you tell these poor sods -- to destroy their own ambition and lives to please some abstract, non-existent, popular notion of selfless and ethics-driven professional suicide to appease even ruthless careerists who spend most of their time traveling for PR, writing grants and schmoozing their way into committees to influence policy-making and, in the process, earn THEIR livelihoods and vacations to exotic, tropical and skiing locations?"

The last question is somewhat confusing, but he seems to doubt that there is such a thing as a strict code of ethics worth upholding because, if you were to stick to it, you would be committing professional suicide. Quite a radical view, although I must say that, at Nature Medicine, we have seen cases of students or postdocs who fudge data, and we have seen our fair share of referee reports that say "it seems that these people will do anything to get the right result".

To say that in science there will always be all kinds of people -- those who stick to their code of ethics no matter what and those who fudge data to please their PI -- is a platitude. What one would like to know is if Dr. Smith is right and we are looking at just a few rotten apples or at a terminal patient with metastasis in every organ. My own opinion, I regret to say, is closer to the metastatic view.

And yours?

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 08:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued their final report on the lab mishaps at Texas A&M University, a damning 21-page laundry list of the university’s incompetence.

The report also details the corrective actions necessary to get the biodefense labs, which have been shut down for more than two months, up and running again.

Speaking at a press conference earlier today, Eddie Davis, the university’s interim president, said university officials weren’t happy about the level of compliance.

I wrote about this story for our September issue, but in short, the problems at Texas A&M began in February 2006 when a researcher at Texas A&M University stuck her head and arm inside an aerosol chamber to spray the walls with disinfectant and developed the bacterial infection brucellosis. The university managed to keep the incident under wraps for over a year but the CDC eventually found out and ordered the labs closed.

The CDC’s report finds among other things that “administrative controls to prevent workers from being exposed to biohazards were not adequate” and that “most of the workers assigned to support the high-containment labs were unaware of the potential hazards of their work environment.”

These are serious charges but at the press conference, Davis seemed defensive rather than contrite. He claimed that missing vials of dangerous agents were likely to have been the result of inventory problems and later added, “Other institutions under that same level of review would probably have findings that could be reportable to the CDC.”

That’s a sobering thought given the extent and seriousness of the safety breaches at Texas A&M. For all our sakes, I hope he’s wrong.

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

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last month the state of Iowa shelled out $925,000 to settle a lawsuit filed in 2003 by a handful of people who, 70 years ago, became unwitting participants in a stuttering study that left them psychologically scarred. For some, the money came too late. Three of the six study participants represented in the lawsuit had already died. The cash went to their sons and daughters via their estates.

The trial, which was later dubbed “The Monster Study,” began in 1939. At that time (and to some extent today), stuttering was thought to be an inherited disorder. But renowned speech pathologist Wendell Johnson, himself a stutterer, had a hunch that kids could be made to become stutterers simply by being labeled as such.

To test his theory, he and his team hand-picked 22 children from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home—10 stutterers and 12 not—to participate. The children were subjected to either negative therapy (“you are a stutterer and need to work on your speech”) or positive therapy (“you speak like a completely normal child”). Though only 5 children were true stutterers, 11 children in the study were told they had a speech problem. Johnson’s grad student Mary Tudor also offered “helpful” advice: don’t speak if you can’t speak correctly; take a breath before you say a word if you think you’re going to stutter; stop and start over; put your tongue on the roof of your mouth; watch your speech all the time.

Not surprisingly, whatever ability the children had to speak fluently evaporated quickly. Some resorted to talking in haiku-like phrases (There’s a jar. There’s a fox. Got a coat on). Some stopped speaking altogether.

No one can deny that the experiment was cruel and inhumane. But that was 70 years ago. Today there are ample measures in place—institutional review boards, ethics guidelines, informed consent — designed to keep studies ethical. Monster studies are a thing of the past.

Right?

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

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to The New York Times for correcting their report on our schizophrenia paper.

And while we're talking about this, they also corrected the report on the Nature Genetics multiple sclerosis articles.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It looks like there aren't enough interns at The New York Times to do their fact checking.

This past Sunday we published a clinical trial showing that a metabotropic glutamate receptor agoinst could treat people with schizophrenia. We're of course delighted that the paper received massive news coverage, including the attention of the BBC and the NYT. But in the case of the latter, reporter Alex Brandon wrote that the findings were published by the journal Nature, which surely doesn't need any extra visibility over what they already get.

Above and beyond the fact that it's a shame to miss out on the publicity for our journal, it's always surprising and a little bit embarrassing that a publication as prestigious as the Times would make such crass mistakes. And it isn't the first time either. My colleague Myles Axton, editor of Nature Genetics, tells me that, even though his journal published two out of three high-profile papers on the genetics of multiple sclerosis this summer, Nicholas Wade made no mention of Nature Genetics and reported that the findings were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which published only one of the three papers.

Now, if it's about making funny mistakes, hats off to the people at AFP, who reported that the paper was published in the fancifully named journal "Nature Science". Maybe they know something I don't know, and the paper was turned down by Science before making its way to us. Or maybe our senior management is entertaining a surprise new launch.

Incidentally, I'd like to thank our fact checker for pointing out to me that the NYT reporter who wrote about our paper is Alex Berenson, not Brandon. Maybe we should send him over to the Times to lend a hand.

Posted by Juan Carlos Lopez at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not that this news will make anyone feel better, but Harvard University is richer than ever before. The unversity's endowment grew more than $5 billion during the 2007 fiscal year to reach a whopping $34.9 billion.

Am I the only one who is shocked by that? Just for comparison, the GDP (or purcashing power) of Burkina Faso, which is as you know, an entire country, home to 14 million people, is $18.76 billion.

The rich of course get richer because they can afford the best. The company that manages the Harvard endowment apaprently posted a 23% return on its investments. I don't suppose they'd consider managing my measly portfolio.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The US government is spending a lot of money training the next generation of PhDs so that the country can remain a leader in science. Yet each year, many American-born scientists are leaving the lab, perhaps because of the long hours, low salaries or low expectations of career advancement.

Why are the working conditions so bad? Blame the foreigners, says an anonymous American scientist in an online Science report last week.

This scientist complained that his poor working conditions are exacerbated when foreign scientists take similar jobs, and work longer hours for less money than he may be willing to do. Also, he argues, because there are so many foreign scientists wanting to work in the US, and universities have no limit on the number of scientists they can bring in, the overabundance of foreign labor keeps his salary low and discourages him from sticking with science.

I find it shocking that this scientist is blaming foreigners for the problems with American science. It would be much more reasonable for him to blame the US government for setting the typical postdoc’s salary so low, or for cutting the NIH budget, despite its supposed desire to keep America competitive globally.

In fact, according to the latest National Science Foundation survey, the number of American students enrolling in grad school for science and engineering is higher than ever. And the number of foreign students, perhaps because of visa problems, is dropping. Many American companies are actually lobbying for an increase in temporary visas so that more foreigners can enter the scientific workforce—a change that Congress is currently considering.

As we said in our June editorial, governments should set aside funding specifically for young American scientists. I also think that science can only benefit from diverse viewpoints, be they of Americans of all races, as we said in May, or of foreign scientists who can bring their perspectives and training to scientific problems.

The solution to this is not, and should not be, to limit foreign scientists from coming in. What do you think? Should Congress increase—or decrease—the number of visas issued to foreign scientists?

Posted on behalf of Eva Chmielnicki, Associate Editor, Nature Medicine

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

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)

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)

I love sleep. I need at least 7 hours to feel human and when I'm sleep-deprived, it's just so much harder to make sense of what the news articles I'm trying to edit are all about. And I'm not alone in feeling this way.

There's no doubt that sleep is good. Not getting enough sleep can make you, among other things, cranky, forgetful and obese. Scientists are now saying that if you can add on a regular midday nap, say 30 minutes three times a week, you can cut your risk of heart disease by 37%.

This might explain why heart disease is lower in countries where people take siestas, say the scientists, who followed 23,681 Greek men and women ages 20 to 86 for about six years. They published their results in this week's Archives of Internal Medicine.

I think it might also have something to do with the famous low-fat diet in Mediterranean countries. In India, where I'm from, people also take midday naps--something to do with escaping the sun's grueling rays for at least a couple of hours. India has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world.

But hey, why look a gift horse in the mouth? This is all the encouragement I've ever needed. I asked today if I could nap at work every day. You know, for my health.

My boss Juan Carlos Lopez, Nature Medicine's chief editor, hails from Mexico and spent many years in Spain. Naturally, he fully supports the concept of a midday nap — in theory.

JC, as we call him around here, says he sometimes takes a nap on the weekends, but no more than 15 minutes. "If it's more than 15 minutes, it screws up my whole day," he says.

Suportive boss that he is, he says I can try it if I want, but my colleagues will probably yell in my ear, or something equally pleasant, and wake me up.

Sigh. I guess my daily siesta will have to remain a dream.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

On Wednesday, a Senate committee passed a bill that would make it illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their genes.

This is an important step: as we know more and more about the genetic variations that predispose people to certain diseases, it will become important to make sure the information doesn't get misused in any way. The law would stop insurance companies from denying coverage to someone with a high-risk gene, for example.

That's a long way off, however. The Senate has twice passed a similar measure unanimously, but it stalled both times in the House of Representatives. With a Democrat-controlled Congress, the outcome could be different. If it is, the law might also enocurage more people to get tested. Polls show that about 85% of people think their information would get misused--not exactly a strong incentive to get tested.

Even when people are willing to be tested, predictive screens open up a whole new can of worms--what to do with that information? Should people take certain extreme preventive measures, such as radical mastectomies if they carry high-risk breast cancer mutations? Should insurance companies pay for those treatments?

My friend and fellow journalism school alum Joanna Rudnick is making a personal and powerful documentary about these very issues.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 06:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This week’s New England Journal of Medicine carried a small, but alarming, report on those ever-so-calming substances lavender and tea tree oil.

The researchers noticed that three boys who were 4, 7 and 10 years old — so all prepubescent — developed gynecomastia. That’s jargon for enlarged breasts. Apparently, more than half of boys will show some signs of this during puberty but never before.

The first things doctors look for when something like this happens is exposure to the hormone estrogen. None of the boys had been exposed to any known estrogen source — no drugs, birth control pills or soy products. But two of the boys had been using products with lavender oil and one both lavender and tea tree oil. Once they stopped using the products, their breasts returned to normal.

Based on further experiments, the doctors are saying that these oils mimic the effects of estrogen and may be triggering hormone imbalances. Given the popularity of lavender-scented soap and skin lotions, shampoos and styling products, this seems to me to be big news. Okay, it’s three boys and some in vitro data, but it’s also published in a reputable journal and deserves investigation.

This seems to be just the beginning of a long and scary saga. What about women that may carry risk genes for estrogen-sensitive cancers? What about young girls? What about the rest of us? Should I throw away my lavender roller and tea tree oil body wash?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 06:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You might have seen the New York Times article yesterday so delightfully called "Of gay sheep, modern science and bad publicity." In case the article has disappeared into the archive by the time you read this, briefly, it was a rather funny cautionary tale about a scientist who set out to study homosexuality in sheep, made one too many comments about the possible implications in people, and ended up getting skewered by the press and the blogosphere, who thought the point of his research was eventually to alter people's sexuality.

I was particularly struck by a comment that the scientist, Charles Roselli made.

Mentioning human implications, he said, is “in the nature of the way we write our grants” and talk to reporters. Scientists who do basic research find themselves in a bind, he said, adding, “We have been forced to draw connections in a way that we can justify our research.”

As a reporter, I'm guilty of this myself. Drawing human conenctions makes the story more accessible and it's an easy, if cheap, way of drawing the reader in. Even in my previous life as a scientist, I had an American Heart Association grant although my thesis, on lipid transport, was classic cell biology and had little to do with heart disease. That's where the money was, and so that's how we wrote the grant.

But all and said done, it is dishonest, isn't it? Is Roselli right? Is the system so warped now that we have to lie about human implications to justify working on important, but obscure, questions in science? Have you done it?

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If I smoked cigarettes I think I’d have to grow my own tobacco. There’s nothing inherently evil about the plant itself. The tobacco companies, on the other hand….but wait, I must retain my objectivity.

It’s tough to do that though with the most recent news. Harvard researchers have confirmed reports that the tobacco industry has raised the nicotine content of cigarettes steadily over the last several years—with the aim, of course, to get more people hooked on their product.

The recent study is sure to add fuel to efforts to bring tobacco regulation under the umbrella of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Legislation to do just that failed last year but there are signs it will be reintroduced in the new, Democratic congress. But is it a good idea?

That effort is endorsed by many public health groups, David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner and anti-tobacco gadfly, as well as Phillip Morris itself (some speculate the tobacco giant would keep its industry lead in a clamped down advertising environment). Most recently, the New York Times and the Washington Post added their voices to the call for FDA oversight.

I had heard rumors that at least one leader in the tobacco control area, UC San Francisco professor Stan Glantz, was more skeptical. So I called him up.

Glantz clarified that in principle, FDA regulation is a good thing. He’s just worried about the details.

“I think it’s obscene that the FDA doesn’t have jurisdiction over tobacco,” he told me, “The real question is how you do it.”

He says the law must be written very strictly to make sure tobacco companies can’t manipulate the agency—which doesn’t exactly have an airtight reputation when it comes to resisting political influence (think plan B contraception).

“The real risk is that you will end up with a process that will allow tobacco companies to claim that they have FDA approved cigarettes.” Unlike some tobacco control experts, Glantz is wary of efforts to create a special regulatory category for cigarettes, which he says could create room for a special brand of tobacco company mischief.

But he says there’s a better chance than last year that a good law will emerge, with a new party in charge. If congress does bring up the issue again, let’s hope it is serious about using the FDA to clamp down on cigarette companies.

Meanwhile, if you must smoke—I endorse backyard tobacco agriculture.

Posted by Charlotte Schubert at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By the time you read this, PETA will have held a demonstration today in front of the Cleveland Clinic, protesting the unauthorized killing of a dog during a sales demonstration.

On 10 January, a neurologist at the prestigious clinic induced an aneurysm in an anesthetized dog and then used a new device made by California based Micrus Endovascular Corporation to treat aneurysms. The dog was later sacrificed because of the damage caused by the aneurysm.

PETA says after a whistleblower at the clinic alerted the group about the procedure, it asked the doctor to use a high-tech silicone model instead—to no avail. It is asking the clinic to enforce the use of alternatives to animal testing wherever possible.

The Cleveland Clinic has apparently finished its preliminary investigation and disciplined the doctor, although that didn’t involve sacking him. The clinic has seen some rather trying times lately.

A local television station is reporting today that a USDA official was at the clinic. The agency could fine the clinic up to $3700 per violation and revoke its animal research license.

According to the clinic, the doctor applied to the institutional animal care and use committee for permission to induce the aneurysm, but hadn’t received a response. The clinic says they would have rejected it—and I have to agree. Although the USDA technically allows the use of animals for demonstrating medical devices, I don’t think sacrificing a dog for a sales demonstration falls under acceptable use of animals for research.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I'm a big tea drinker. And like most tea drinkers from India (and Britain), I like my tea strong and sweet and with plenty of milk. And I've always thought how great it was that with every cup, I was also becoming healthier. Tea is supposed to have antioxidants and help prevent heart disease, stroke and cancer.

Imagine my dismay when German researchers announced yesterday in the European Heart Journal that adding milk to tea completely wipes out those benefits.

Black tea, such as Darjeeling, on its own relaxes the arteries and helps blood flow, perhaps by producing nitric oxide. But when the same tea has 10% skimmed milk, those effects apaprently disappear. The scientists say this could be because milk proteins block the production of nitric oxide. This may explain why British tea drinkers don't show the same benefits as East Asian ones, who tend to drink green tea without milk.

The study doesn't seem definitive to me--it still needs to be confirmed by other groups--so I think I'm just going to hope, as I sip this milky tea, that it's not so black and white as that.

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Happy new year, everyone!

Our former intern, Emily Waltz, alerted me to Edge.org, where 160 scientists and thinkers -- including Nature's own news & features editor Oliver Morton -- have answered the question, "What are you optimistic about?" You'd think that a bunch of scientists would have little to say that's uplifting -- especially in areas such as, say, climate change, cancer or population growth -- and a few live up to that expectation, but some of the answers are downright upbeat.

Here's a small sampling:

"I am optimistic that the ascendance of open access postings of articles to the internet will transform scientific and medical publishing." -- Beatrice Golomb, professor of medicine, University of California San Diego

"I am bullish about the mind's ability to unravel the beliefs contained within it—including beliefs about its own nature." -- Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Harvard University

"I'm optimistic about the prospects for science to become a much more broadly participatory activity rather than today's largely spectator sport." Neil Gershenfeld, MIT

"The trends in China and India and elsewhere toward educating literally millions of people with scientific, engineering and technical degrees is tremendously positive." -- Nathan Myrhvold, CEO of Intellectual Ventures

"I am optimistic about humanity's coming enlightenment." -- Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia

But would it really be a group of scientists if at least one didn't say something along these lines?

"In short, we should neither be too despondent nor too elated at the trajectory of current events." -- Robert Trivers, evolutionary biologist, Rutgers University.

So tell us -- what are you most optimistic about???

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 05:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hello everyone!

Welcome to 'Spoonful of medicine', where we hope to enlighten, entertain and occasionally exasperate you with our comments on biomedical research and public health.

We hope you'll be active participants as well, letting us know when we've made sense and, of course, when you think we're stark, raving mad. We hope the proportion is at least slightly more of the former.

Initially, at least, most entries will be posted either by me, Apoorva Mandavilli, or by my colleague, Charlotte Schubert. I am the news editor and am responsible for pretty much everything you read in our news section. You can read more about me here.

Charlotte edits the News & Views section, which involves much editing of copy written by scientists. She'll say hello soon... you can read more about her here.

Let the games begin...

Posted by Apoorva Mandavilli at 03:16 PM |