The Spoonful of Medicine reports that Paula Deen, a regular presenter on the Food Network cooking show, most known for her indulgent recipes, has type 2 diabetes. She will be supporting a leading a campaign called ‘Diabetes in a New Light’, which is being launched by Novo Nordisk to promote their $500 million-a-year diabetes drug, Victoza (liraglutide).
Success for Deen and her new pharma partner is going to require an earnest and complete transformation on her part, one that clearly did not begin immediately after her diagnosis in 2008. Since then, Deen has continued to host cooking shows featuring ultra-high-fat, carbohydrate-rich dishes—not exactly the healthy diet she is now promoting on behalf of Novo. But “she’s relatable, she’s charismatic and she is living with diabetes,” says Ken Inchausti, director of media relations for Novo’s US operations. “We need people to see her as a patient now.”
Celebrity endorsements of drugs are not without controversy, so feel free to join in the discussion.
United States sheds high-tech jobs
Nature Jobs reports that the United States lost more than a quarter of its high-technology manufacturing jobs over the last decade, according to a new report from the National Science Board:
In a statement, the NSB’s José-Marie Griffiths said the world had changed dramatically in the past decade. “Other nations clearly recognise the economic and social benefits of investing in R&D and education, and they are challenging the United States’ leadership position,” said Griffiths. “We are seeing the result in the very real, and substantial, loss of good jobs.”
You can find out more details in the blog post.
A year of neuroscience
Action Potential, run by Nature Neuroscience have created a text cloud from the titles and abstracts of 83 neuroscience papers published in Nature in 2011. Frequency is represented by font size.
Not too surprisingly, “neurons” came out on top (149 occurrences).
Follow the post for another cloud created from the locations of corresponding authors.
Killer Flu
Trade Secrets have been discussing the worldwide furore which has erupted over the so-called “killer flu” that came out of laboratories in The Netherlands and in Wisconsin:
Essentially, for those living under a rock somewhere, both groups managed to convert infectious H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) viruses from being non-aerosol transmissible, to being aerosol-transmissible in ferrets. This is a big deal, because (a) H5N1 as it is presently found in the wild is difficult to transmit between ferrets or between people, (b) ferrets are the best-accepted model for transmission of influenza viruses in humans.
A body named the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity in the USA has recommended to the US Department of Health and Human Services that the journals which may publish this work should withhold important studies relating to the methodology and certain specific results. Find out more in the post.
#ArsenicLife
Scitable’s Eric Sawyer explains in his latest post, Seaweed Biofuel, #ArsenicLife, and Synthetic Bioweapons, that there have been a few interesting developments in synthetic biology/science recently. In order to summarise these happenings, he has condensed them all into one single post:
If you haven’t been following Rosie Redfield’s work on the highly criticized discovery of DNA containing arsenic3, as much an experiment in open science4as in biology, then sadly you’re a bit too late. After months of control experiments and troubleshooting growth conditions of the strain GFAJ-1, Redfield and her collaborators have provided strong evidence that what Wolfe-Simon et al. found was not arsenic life. In her technical comment5, Redfield criticized the author’s purification of the DNA, claiming that the observation was contaminating arsenic, not arsenic replacing phosphorus in the DNA. Her evidence against the claim made by Wolfe-Simon et al. can be summed up in this single graph.
Continue to the post for a full explanation of the graph and to hear the other stories.
Race defence
Nature Middle East’s Indigenus blog have been reporting on University of Connecticut Health Center researcher Dipak Das, found guilty of fabrication and falsification of data.
The researcher who worked on the health benefits of a chemical in red wine fabricated data in 145 separate research projects, a three-year investigation by the university has found. University officials have notified 11 scientific journal studies co-authored by Dipak Das of the fraud. TheJadavpurUniversityalumnus, whose work focused on the grape skin antioxidant resveratrol, responded to the inquiry in a 2010 letter saying it was a “conspiracy against Indian scientists”.
What do you think about this story? Please leave your thoughts in the comment thread.
Climate Change vs. Science Mumbo-Jumbo?
Paige Brown is discsussing climate change this week and encourages you to take her poll, Climate Change vs. Science Mumbo-Jumbo? Feel free to join in and make sure you check out the image below which shows the monthly global images from NASA Earth Observatory. (Source: Wiki)
Finally
Viktor Poor is enlightening his readers to the latest diet trend – the alkaline diet. Want to change your pH?
