Monthly Archives: March 2007

Young mothers in science

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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.

Serenity now!

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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.)

That “ancient” scourge, TB

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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.

Thinning the mint

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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.

Drug lord visits earth

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Almost any day of the week in Washington, DC you can go to a public hearing—and if you’re lucky you’ll be entertained at the sight of some harried public servant squirming under the relentless questioning of our elected representatives. Last week’s intended victim was Andrew von Eschenbach, head of that beleaguered agency, the US Food and Drug Administration.

Von Eschenbach appeared before Senate and House appropriations subcommittees to defend the proposed 2008 FDA budget. On Wednesday I wandered down to the capitol—source of straitjacket dull fashion and casualty of a recent impertinent smoking ban, courtesy of Nancy Pelosi—to check out the action at the House.

I have to admit that I should have taken better notes. But every time von Eschenbach opened his mouth I wanted to fall asleep; he must have used the word “system” about 18 times and “process” at least 22.

Still, I woke up when representatives began grilling von Eschenbach about news reports that he planned to cut funding for the FDA’s Office of Women’s Health—ostensibly in retaliation for the office’s support for over-the-counter “Plan B” contraception.

He called the reports, “inaccurate.” but he failed to assuage the committee, saying, “I haven’t made that decision yet.” Congress will have to wait till March 15 to learn if funding will be retained. I must admit I was a bit disappointed: He obviously wasn’t squirming enough.

Von Eschenbach also faced a phalanx of representatives concerned about food safety. He could not say when a long-overdue report on this summer’s spinach outbreak would appear, had no opinion on whether irradiation was underused to zap food, and I’m still not sure what he would do if he was, hypothetically, given $20 million more for food safety. But he did use one of those words again. How to shore up the food supply? “This is a systems problem that requires a systems approach.”

Representative Sam Farr from California’s spinach district was not impressed, “It’s a mystery why they [the FDA] would come before us with so few concrete answers,” he said in a press release.

Committee members also did not let von Eschenbach off lightly when it came to drug safety, grilling him about the approval of the antibiotic Ketek—itself a subject of separate hearings. Von Eschenbach defended the FDA’s record on conflict of interest among members of its advisory committees, saying it was broadening access to experts and that the agency “Is taking a process improvement approach to this.”

The committee’s chair, Rosa DeLauro from Connecticut, seems like the smartest of the bunch, bristling with sharp questions and a record of sponsoring a measure to grant the agency greater authority over post-marketing surveillance.

She and other committee members could be strong advocates for positive change at the FDA, especially if von Eschenbach begins to work better with the congressmen who have authority over his budget. Now that’s a process worth improving.

Retractions, confirmations and everything in between

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The Scientist recently published a “”https://www.the-scientist.com/article/home/52864/“>Guide to retractions” written by Andrea Gawrylewski.

She makes a good point that there has been a proliferation of terms to create awareness that something’s not right about a paper. “Expression of Concern Reaffirmed”? That’s one I hadn’t heard before.

In our neck of the woods, I’m embarrassed to say that we are rather old fashioned. We only have Addenda, Corrigenda, Errata and Retractions (which, for consistency, we should start calling ‘Retracta’, I guess).

I suspect that this paucity of terms will be a bit disappointing to some of our readers, particularly to those who write to alert us that someone committed some form of misconduct that invalidates the conclusions of a paper and then discover that we didn’t even “express our concern”, let alone reaffirm it.

This is not to say that we don’t care when someone lets us know that a paper may have fraudulent data. But the reality is that many of the allegations we receive are not documented at all and/or are anonymous. In other words, it’s hard to take seriously an e-mail saying:

“Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. is the result of scientific fraud.

Sincerely yours,

A friend of Nature Medicine"

Sometimes, people accuse colleagues of what one could call ‘fraud by proxy’:

“Please be aware that the paper by Hornmeister et al. that you are currently considering may be the result of scientific fraud, as he has a paper under investigation at another journal.

Sincerely yours,

Another concerned friend of Nature Medicine"

It’s then amusing to discover that, roughly half the time, we are not even considering a paper by Dr. Hornmeister.

Retracting, expressing concerns or writing an editor’s warning about a paper is a serious matter, not only for the authors, but also for the journal that published the work. Of course, all of us want to get the scientific record straight, but I don’t think that making ill-documented, anonymous accusations is a good beginning. We have previously published in the journal suggestions about what to do when you suspect someone has committed fraud. If I’m not mistaken, throwing the stone and then hiding around the corner was not one of them.

We welcome your “expressions of concern”, but please back them up with evidence and be prepared to stand behind them. As long as we continue receiving vague accusations from “friends of Nature Medicine”, Dr. Hornmeister can continue to sleep peacefully.

Money for a moral stance

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Can the US government compel non-governmental organziations (NGOs) to condemn prostitution?

Yes, if those NGOs want to qualify for government funds. That’s the upshot of a ruling on Tuesday by a federal appeals court.

Since 2003, the US has required that to qualify for funds from the $15 billion PEPFAR program for AIDS, nonprofit groups abroad have to explicitly oppose prostitution and sex trafficking.

NGOs say that taking an explicit antiprostitution stance would make it harder for them to work with sex workers, one of the highest risk groups for HIV infection. In 2005, Brazil refused $40 million from the US rather than comply with the requriements.

Even within the US, the law has been controversial and has gone through a long process of rulings and counter-rulings.

In 2005, after the law expanded to include US groups, DKT International, a Washington D.C-based organization, sued the government, arguing that the law violated its free speech rights.

Last year, a lower court agreed and ruled that the law is unconstitutional. But on Tuesday, US Circuit Judge A Raymond Randolph reversed that ruling, saying that the US Congress has authorized the Bush administration to fund these groups “on such terms and conditions as the President may determine.”

What do you think? Are these acceptable strings?