A few weekends ago I made the mistake of volunteering for a fund-raising festival at the local toddler stomping ground. The afternoon hit 90 degrees, with full humidity. Determined to be a good mom, and a good citizen, I went to the park anyway.

The place was packed with kids, whining to ride a pony and eat pink cupcakes. The adults were sweaty, distracted and grumpy. But at least they did not have my job!

I got to feed little children this:

I knew, in a vague way, that mass-produced popcorn wasn’t a great thing. But this was in another realm entirely: a 2:1 ratio of popcorn to coconut oil, tinged with some yellow substance. My job was to extrude the pure supersaturated ooze into the sizzling machine and joyfully dispense the popcorn product.

Apparently it’s not too different from what kids must be eating every day. According to a September 1 report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), “Local actions to prevent childhood obesity,” 16.3 percent of children and adolescents in the US between the ages of two and 19 are obese.

People started flocking to my hot corner of the playground. Parents tactfully steered their children clear of the plastic-colored cake items and to what they might have thought, in their harried state, looked a little more like normal food. Admittedly, the popcorn people did a good job with the artificial butter, it had a certain chemotactic pull.

Holding back an urge to run home fast, I instead carefully placed an unopened plastic pod of kernels on the table. Surely, with the goop right in front of them, people would hesitate before grabbing a bag of popcorn.

No such luck. Cranky parents yanked at the cheerful striped bags, shoving quarters in my hand. Grubby 8 year olds came back for seconds. It was like some sort of food hell. When a pregnant woman came up my frozen smile cracked:

“You might not want to eat that,” I said, imagining what Yellow #6 Lake (E110) did to embryonic digits. She was unfazed by my meddling, “Oh! It’s not for me! It’s for my son!”

My only conclusion from the experience is that kids will eat whatever is in front of them and that harried parents will do little to stop it. Parents are a poor filter against the proliferation of junk food targeted to children (my favorite is this baby-bottle-shaped candy, marketed by teeny bopper band the Jonas Brothers, in a wildly popular YouTube video).

If the IOM had its way I’d be prosecuted. One of their recommendations: “Implement local ordinances to restrict mobile vending of calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods near schools and public playgrounds.”

During my hours pouring grease and yellow stuff into a machine, and inserting it into the veins of my neighbors’ children, only one child paused. He looked at the package, turned it over gingerly, and walked away.

I had poisoned many, and saved one. I went home with my two-year old, face flecked with neon frosting, to contemplate my crime.

You can’t fault this years meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction for its lack of diversity. The lineup included scientists who study marsupial possums, environmental toxins, the mechanics of DNA silencing, and a cluster of Texans who keep a herd of sheep close at hand near their lab.

I am now a step closer to understanding the wonders of the pig uterus—which gestates an embryo that within a day goes from a 1 cm sphere to a 1 meter long thread (“Like dental floss,” explained one researcher.) I’m more wary than before of that uibiquitous stuff that lines food cans (bisphenol A; BPA). And I am threatening to turn into a scold against soy infant formula (studies at the meeting showed that estrogen-like compounds in the formula can shut down DNA in young animals in a process called methylation).

I’m late on the uptake blogging about the meeting—the usual excuses about trying to meet editing deadlines while attending the sessions, loose proofs, wayward authors. And I only went for two days—Monday, July 20 and Tuesday, July 21. But even belatedly, some of the highlights of the meeting, which took place in Pittsburgh, still seem worth touching on.

On Monday, researchers presented a cluster of studies where they attempted to freeze oocytes—the trendy way to promote fertility in countries such as Italy, where freezing of tiny embryos presents a legal quandary. No one has hit on the answer yet—upon thawing, the oocytes still seem to lose too many chromosomes. But some researchers are getting closer.

Theresa Woodruff, for instance, presented data on preserving fertility in women undergoing cancer treatment, showing how her group can culture human ovarian follicles that produce fully-sized oocytes. She hosted a conference on the subject in Chicago this July, the ‘Oncofertility Reflections on the Humanities and Social Sciences ’ bringing together religious and legal experts with ethicists and scientists to discuss the ramifications of the emerging technology. That seems like a smart thing to do for a researcher working a system that has the potential to bump up the upper age of female reproduction.

Much of the Pittsburgh meeting focused on reproductive toxins, not surprising given that chair of the meeting was Pat Hunt, known for her work suggesting that BPA may act through estrogen receptors to affect developmental processes such as the integrity of chromosomes in the oocyte.

She invited John Peterson, publisher of “Environmental Health News” to give a rundown of BPA research and government regulation. He pointed out that 90 percent of 232 animal studies funded by the government have found an effect of BPA at levels beneath that considered safe by the US Food and Drug Administration. He provided examples of industry influence at US regulatory agencies and argued they use outdated scientific standards to evaluate toxins. But I’m still not clear on why countries such as Canada have banned BPA in baby bottles while the FDA seems to be thinking about reviewing the data yet again.

That same evening organizers invited a firebrand who speaks up for animal research. Tom Holder, who founded the United-Kingdom-based group ‘Speaking of Research’ looks about 18 and he speaks with the urgency of a politician gunning for office. He warned that the intimidation tactics of animal-rights groups in California threaten to turn the state ‘into the next Oxford’, known as a target of such groups. He showed how his organization is working to show the public in the UK how animal research help people, and directed scientists to his group’s website to learn of ways they can help.

To me, the poster sessions were the highlight. Along with the possum researchers, there were people working on fertility in elephants, cattle and manatees. “There is usually a bunchof panda people, but not this year,” ’ lamented one researcher.

One poster caught my attention in particular. Swine researchers provide evidence that suckling pigs obtain a critical hormone, relaxin, through their mother’s milk—the hormone in turn seems to be required for the proper expression of developmental genes in the cervix. It may be a stretch, but perhaps the milk is helping to properly prepare the piglets to birth the next generation.

It’s tough for me to get to work in DC without seeing posters on the subway with pink rosy pigs, asking “Who’s hogging our antibiotics?”

The Pew Charitable Trusts has initiated a campaign to limit the use of antibiotics in livestock. As the ads point out, routine use of antibiotics in farm animals can foster the development of antibiotic-resistance bacteria than can infect humans.

For years, microbiologists have raised their thin, meager voices against this practice. But now they seemed to be joined by some other voices that might carry wider impact. For instance, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in this March against rourtine use of antibiotics in agriculture. Last week Principal deputy FDA commissioner Joshua Sharfstein, testified before congress on the issue, saying:

“Purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use” says Sharfstein.

The problem is that many animals, raised in cramped quarters, receive antibiotics in their feed much of their lives. Cows that eat corn, instead of grass, are more susceptible to infection. Even the the family farm I took my kid to last month, the friendly one with the pettable happy cows, fed their chickens bags of “Medicated” feed.

Bills to restrict the practice have been kicking around the US Congress for years now, but agriculture interests have kept them from going anywhere. It’s conceivable this year’s version might have a better chance.

Direct to consumer advertising of drugs has been a target of FDA and pharmaceutical company critics. After the debacle of Vioxx, in which the heavily advertised drug was pulled from the market, many called for stricter regulation of such advertisements, or an outright ban. There’s been some tightening of drug advertising oversight by the FDA: for instance, the agency recently told General Mills to stop claiming that Cheerios is “clinically proven to reduce cholesterol.”

But advocates for reform may have been missing an easy target: Pharmaceutical companies receive tax deductions for such advertisements. This week, congressman Charles Rangel proposed dropping this deduction, which could raise as much as $37 billion over 10 years—money he says could be put towards overhauling health care. The big four television networks oppose this idea, noting that advertising employs millions of people in the United States.

What do you think? Is this a worthy tax deduction, or is Rangel right to call for its elimination?

Cancer breakthroughs often get their first airing at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. This year’s meeting was no exception.

One finding getting a lot of press has its origins in a pair of studies in Nature in 2005. The studies showed how to selectively kill cancer cells deficient in BRCA1 and BRCA2, genes that are mutated in some of the deadliest breast and ovarian cancers.

The agent that does the killing is called a PARP inhibitor. And trial results released last week show some pretty promising results.

Olaparib, a PARP inhibitor under development by AstraZeneca PLC, shrank tumors in more than a third of women whose breast cancers had BRCA mutations. The trial did not have a control arm, but the data look encouraging, considering the agent was given alone, without other drugs, and that the subjects had already had an average of 3 chemotherapy regimens. A similar trial showed that the drug could also shrink advanced ovarian tumors in subjects with BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations.

A truer test of whether a drug is likely to help patients is whether it can prolong survival. A randomized, controlled trial of BS1-201, under development by Sanofi-Aventis SA, examined this question in 116 women with some pretty nasty tumors: their breast cancer had metastasized to other parts of their body and was ‘triple negative’, meaning it lacked receptors on their tumors for estrogen, progesterone and HER2, each of which are targets for current therapies. The drug prolonged survival by three and a half months, to 9.2 months, when added to a standard chemotherapy regimen.

Bigger studies are needed, but the findings so far validate a concept with deep origins in basic research. BRCA1 and BRCA2 facilitate DNA repair, a function that emerged after years of painstaking research. PARP (poly(ADP)-ribose polymerase) mediates DNA repair also, but in a distinct way. The Nature studies exposed cells lacking BRCA1 or BRCA2 to PARP inhibitors and showed that these cells get nailed: their DNA is such a fragmented mess that they die.

Mice deficient in PARP are viable, fertile and tumor-free, which bodes well for the side effect profile of these drugs. Subjects who received the drugs reported only mild side effects, including nausea and fatigue.

Other highlights at ASCO include promising findings with multikinase inhibitors, which can block several types of proteins that go astray in tumor cells. Cancer vaccine approaches also got a boost with positive findings from trials in melanoma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Normally I’m bored to tears reading articles about our broken health care system in the United States and how to fix it. I’d almost rather rememorize the steps of glucose metabolism—the absolutely worst part of being a biology major.

But finally someone has made the subect readable—that expert at medical prose, Atul Gawande. His article in the latest issue of the New Yorker is an insightful read.

He takes us on a tour of McAllen, Texas, the town with the most expensive health care system in the country. Here, it seems, doctors routinely send patients to surgery who might not need it. Doctors have financial relationships, some legal, some apparently not, with hospitals and other institutions that do surgery, imaging and testing. It all has the effect of funneling money into doctors’ wallets and ramping up the costs for Medicare, the primary payer in the county.

In contrast, he notes that the famous Mayo Clinic provides much less expensive care. The incentives in this system, and others like it, are set up so that doctors focus more on the patient; they spend more time with them, they consult more with specialists in other fields, and perform fewer unecessary procedures. The result is not only less expense, but radically better patient care.

As the debate on health care ramps up this summer, I’m happy that there are some people out there who devour policy papers on health care like it’s candy. For them, this might be old news. For the rest of us, Gawande makes it come alive.

Hard-hitting head of CDC

Last Friday, President Obama chose a firebrand to head the US Centers for Disease Control.

Thomas Frieden is known for pushing through a ban on smoking in public spaces in New York City, where he has served as health commissioner since 2002. He refused to take that position until the mayor promised to back his plan. After that he took aim at artificial trans fats in restaurants, instituting a ban that inspired other communities to do the same.

He’s likely to put the CDC’s focus back on tobacco, the nation’s number one killer. But he’s also got the creds on infectious disease—having bolstered needle exchange and condom distribution programs in New York, along with supporting a controversial program to increase HIV testing. In the early 1990’s, he ran the city’s tuberculosis program, putting the kibosh on an illness that had taken hold in the city’s vulnerable populations.

Not all of his ideas have been conventional, and some are unpopular. To get an idea of how he gets things done, see this profile by our former news editor, Apoorva Mandavilli.

In the flurry of closing our May issue last week, one of the authors working with me balked.

“If I’d known you were going to ask me to sign so many forms, I wouldn’t have said yes to commenting! ”

Ok, so we felt like a faceless, inflexible bureaucracy. And, our staff duly explained —in the bureaucratic monotone of an email correspondence–why we need so many %##** forms!

One of those—the conflict of interest form—has become a familiar staple at biomedical journals, conferences, and just about every where else physician-scientists set foot. Except in their own home: Too many research institutions still have weak conflict of interest policies.

The Institute of Medicine has now joined a host of other organizations weighing in on the issue. This week they released their report on financial conflict of interest, outlining a series of recommendations for institutions, including medical colleges.

The report weighs about as much as ‘Molecular Biology of the Cell’—and its contributors seem themselves to have been thoroughly vetted for conflict of interest. Overall, its recommendations, though thorough, are perhaps not surprising. For instance, the report said that, with certain well-vetted exceptions, physicians should not participate in clinical trials in which they have a financial interest in the outcome , and professional societies should not accept direct industry funding for developing clinical guidelines.

The report also recommends that Congress pass legislation—which is being considered—that would require medical device and pharmaceutical companies to disclose publicly all payments they make to physicians. With such a database, medical colleges could make sure researchers—even ones who claim they are next to God—are being straight with them.

All of this sounds good to me. But there’s one recommendation I particularly agree with: get all the conflict of interest scolds—that includes us—on the same boat. Essentially, the report called for more uniformity in policies.

At the press conference announcing the report, committee chair Bernard Lo mused that some software developer (presumably someone ‘detail oriented’) could make filling out the forms, with all their various formats, easier.

Here—fighting sheaves of paper, irritated authors and corrupted pdf files—that’s a reform I could get behind!