It's always exciting to hear about scientific breakthroughs, and the news today is truly remarkable: scientists at two different places (the Univ. of Wisconsin and Kyoto Univ.) have managed to turn human skin cells into embryonic stem (ES) cells. This has been the "holy grail" of stem cell research for the past ten years, and until today it wasn't at all clear when it would be achieved. The media is full of the news, and rightly so.
The promise of these ES cells is fantastic, almost the stuff of science fiction. With re-programmed ES cells, we should be able to grow replacement tissues for almost any organ in the human body, using a person's own cells as a source. By using your own cells, the problems with organ rejection that plague transplant patients are eliminated. I predict that, once this becomes reality, the first attempts will be to replace non-critical tissues such as cartilege (my knees could use it!), and if those are successful, we'll move on to growing replacements for things like kidneys, livers, lungs, and heart tissue. This is likely years away, but it really does seem feasible now. And of course - though none of today's news stories seem to mention this - the hope of life extension through permanently young organs seems much brighter now.
Of course, there are many caveats. This is basic research, not clinical practice, and the first problem is that both groups used retroviruses to transform skin cells into ES cells. The idea is simple: retroviruses insert themselves into the host DNA, so the two groups (Shinya Yamanaka in Kyoto, James Thomson in Wisconsin) each identified four genes that seemed to be able to turn normal cells into ES cells. Intriguingly, the two groups used four different genes - Yamanaka used oct3, sox2, klf4, and c-myc, while Thomson used oct3, sox2, nanog, and lin28. (See their papers in the journals Cell and Science for details.) They created one retrovirus for each gene, and then infected skin cells with all four retroviruses. The result is that some skin cells, about 1/10,000, got all four extra genes (of course they already had one copy of each gene), and purely by chance the genes were inserted into their genomes in such a way that they turned on. The randomness of the method is one thing that needs work - if a retrovirus inserts in the wrong place, it will disrupt normal functions, and the resulting ES cells will be defective.
I've already been asked whether this means that we can abandon research on human embryonic stem cells created from fertilized human eggs - this is the research that President Bush and other conservative Republicans have opposed, based on religious reasons. The answer is a resounding no, as Thomson already said. Among other things, we need "real" ES lines to be able to determine if the new ES cells are truly pluripotent; that is, to see if they're as good as the real thing. One should always be very skeptical when politicians - especially politicians as anti-science as Bush - make assertions about the implications of any scientific result. (An aside: I'm a member of the Maryland Stem Cell Commission, which determines how to allocate the state funding that my state has set aside to promote human ES research, but I don't do stem cell research myself and I'm not eligible to receive these funds.)
These and other caveats aside, though, today is a good day for science. What a great way to start the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., with real hope for the future.
Flu vaccine blunder
I got my flu shot - did you get yours? Well, you should.
There, now that I've said that, I can explain why the shot might not do you any good. Unfortunately, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and WHO (World Health Organization), who jointly decide what flu strains to put into the vaccine each year, may have made a serious mistake this year. I don't want to criticize these organizations, which do wonderful work each year that benefits public health in countless ways, but if I'm going to be consistent, I can't keep silent when I see a mistake, even if I like the organization(s) behind it.
The short version of the problem is that the CDC/WHO panel decided to put the same strain of H3N2 (the most common type of human flu) into the vaccine this year as we had last year. They made this decision despite the fact that the data clearly showed that a new H3N2 was emerging. The consequence is likely to be - I fear - that those of us who get the flu shot will have almost no protection against this year's flu. Not good.
Some background: the flu shot has 3 strains in it: H3N2, H1N1, and influenza B. Last year was a mild season dominated by H1N1, which is usually mild. The CDC/WHO committee decided to replace the H1N1 in the shot, using a recent isolate - so if you get the shot, then at least you're protected against H1N1. However, H3N2 is dominant in most years, and "bad" flu years are always H3N2-dominant. Why do I say a new strain was emerging? Well, here is some of the data:
In this chart, which shows flu cases throughout last season (2006-7), the blue bars indicate H1N1 cases and the red bars show H3N2. (Yellow bars are untyped, so we don't know what those are.) Notice that through the middle of the season, which was in mid- to late-February, H1 was dominant. But in the later part of the season, from March on, H3 became dominant, and by late March almost all the cases were H3N2. Clearly, H3N2 was taking over again.
The WHO's own report on this data admits that a new strain was emerging. So why did they choose an OLD strain - from 2005, no less! - for this year's vaccine? Here is what their report says: "An increasing proportion of isolates was distinguishable both antigenically and genetically from the vaccine strains; however, antigenic analysis did not reveal the emergence of a sufficiently well characterized antigenically variant group." In other words, the new isolates were clearly different from the vaccine strain (A/Wisconsin/67/2005), but they weren't sure which of the new isolates was going to be the new one. They also reported that "the lack of egg isolates precluded the selection of a new vaccine candidate"; in other words, they weren't sure if they could grow the new isolates in eggs, which is how we make vaccines here in the U.S. (Using eggs is an outdated system that must be changed, but I'll have to save that topic for another blog.)
So the bottom line is that: (a) they knew that a new strain was emerging, (b) they weren't sure if we could grow it in eggs, and (c) they weren't sure which of the new isolates was the best choice for the vaccine. So they decided to put the old strain in the vaccine, even though they knew it was ineffective. In fact, their own data show that it was only effective in about 34-58% of cases last season - a number that is likely to be much lower this year.
Part of the problem is that the panel that chooses the flu vaccine strains continues to rely heavily on traditional serotyping methods rather than the newer, more precise genotyping methods available through influenza genome sequencing. A related problem is that the CDC doesn't release its influenza genome data, as I and others have pointed out in the past. (See our letter to Nature on this topic from March 30, 2006 - despite numerous calls to release data immediately, the CDC and WHO still sit on their flu data, often holding it for years.)
Why doesn't the CDC release flu genome data immediately? Part of the problem, though they won't admit it, is that they don't want to be second-guessed by "outsiders" on what strain to put into the vaccine next year. The data used to make this decision should have been available last winter, but the CDC only shares it with three other WHO collaborating centers (more info here). Of course they are trying to do the right thing - to choose the right vaccine strain - but they shouldn't be afraid of hearing the advice and opinions of other scientists who might disagree with them.
Still, get your flu shot. Maybe we'll get lucky and we'll have another H1N1 flu season. I hope so.
There, now that I've said that, I can explain why the shot might not do you any good. Unfortunately, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) and WHO (World Health Organization), who jointly decide what flu strains to put into the vaccine each year, may have made a serious mistake this year. I don't want to criticize these organizations, which do wonderful work each year that benefits public health in countless ways, but if I'm going to be consistent, I can't keep silent when I see a mistake, even if I like the organization(s) behind it.
The short version of the problem is that the CDC/WHO panel decided to put the same strain of H3N2 (the most common type of human flu) into the vaccine this year as we had last year. They made this decision despite the fact that the data clearly showed that a new H3N2 was emerging. The consequence is likely to be - I fear - that those of us who get the flu shot will have almost no protection against this year's flu. Not good.
Some background: the flu shot has 3 strains in it: H3N2, H1N1, and influenza B. Last year was a mild season dominated by H1N1, which is usually mild. The CDC/WHO committee decided to replace the H1N1 in the shot, using a recent isolate - so if you get the shot, then at least you're protected against H1N1. However, H3N2 is dominant in most years, and "bad" flu years are always H3N2-dominant. Why do I say a new strain was emerging? Well, here is some of the data:
In this chart, which shows flu cases throughout last season (2006-7), the blue bars indicate H1N1 cases and the red bars show H3N2. (Yellow bars are untyped, so we don't know what those are.) Notice that through the middle of the season, which was in mid- to late-February, H1 was dominant. But in the later part of the season, from March on, H3 became dominant, and by late March almost all the cases were H3N2. Clearly, H3N2 was taking over again.The WHO's own report on this data admits that a new strain was emerging. So why did they choose an OLD strain - from 2005, no less! - for this year's vaccine? Here is what their report says: "An increasing proportion of isolates was distinguishable both antigenically and genetically from the vaccine strains; however, antigenic analysis did not reveal the emergence of a sufficiently well characterized antigenically variant group." In other words, the new isolates were clearly different from the vaccine strain (A/Wisconsin/67/2005), but they weren't sure which of the new isolates was going to be the new one. They also reported that "the lack of egg isolates precluded the selection of a new vaccine candidate"; in other words, they weren't sure if they could grow the new isolates in eggs, which is how we make vaccines here in the U.S. (Using eggs is an outdated system that must be changed, but I'll have to save that topic for another blog.)
So the bottom line is that: (a) they knew that a new strain was emerging, (b) they weren't sure if we could grow it in eggs, and (c) they weren't sure which of the new isolates was the best choice for the vaccine. So they decided to put the old strain in the vaccine, even though they knew it was ineffective. In fact, their own data show that it was only effective in about 34-58% of cases last season - a number that is likely to be much lower this year.
Part of the problem is that the panel that chooses the flu vaccine strains continues to rely heavily on traditional serotyping methods rather than the newer, more precise genotyping methods available through influenza genome sequencing. A related problem is that the CDC doesn't release its influenza genome data, as I and others have pointed out in the past. (See our letter to Nature on this topic from March 30, 2006 - despite numerous calls to release data immediately, the CDC and WHO still sit on their flu data, often holding it for years.)
Why doesn't the CDC release flu genome data immediately? Part of the problem, though they won't admit it, is that they don't want to be second-guessed by "outsiders" on what strain to put into the vaccine next year. The data used to make this decision should have been available last winter, but the CDC only shares it with three other WHO collaborating centers (more info here). Of course they are trying to do the right thing - to choose the right vaccine strain - but they shouldn't be afraid of hearing the advice and opinions of other scientists who might disagree with them.
Still, get your flu shot. Maybe we'll get lucky and we'll have another H1N1 flu season. I hope so.
Lousiana elects a new governor: why does "conservative" mean "creationist"?
As a computational scientist and an evolutionary geneticist - and a professor - it pains me to see how many conservative politicians in the U.S. seem to believe in the anti-scientific Creationist view of life. This is currently promoted under the thin disguise of "intelligent design," but that isn't fooling anyone. Creationists (and intelligent design-ists) believe that the world and everything on it was created by a divine being some 6000 years ago. They simply ignore the enormous body of scientific evidence showing that species evolve through the process of natural selection, which has been going on for several billion years.
But today's topic is the election in Louisiana of a new governor, a conservative Republican named Bobby Jindal. Most of the news stories (for example, the NY Times) have focused on the fact that Mr. Jindal is the first-ever Indian American elected as governor of any state. The stories have also mentioned that the "social conservative" believes in teaching intelligent design instead of evolution in our public schools.
Stop right there. Does everyone in the conservative (Republican) movement in the U.S. believe the world was just created - poof! - by a magic puff of smoke just a few thousand years ago? Does becoming conservative mean that you cannot understand simple scientific evidence - even overwhelming evidence? Evolution is probably the most well-supported scientific theory in all of biology, with 150 years of accumulating evidence backing it up. It has changed over the years - a fact that some creationists use misleading to make it appear that evolution is on shaky ground - but the changes have deepened and strengthened the theory, not weakened it.
The genome sequencing work I've been involved in over the past dozen years has provided some of the strongest evidence yet about how species evolved and are continuing to evolve. The molecular evidence for evolution is just spectacular.
So I'm dismayed that Mr. Jindal promotes a view that will undermine science teaching in our schools. He isn't the only national figure that believes this (George W. Bush has also supported the teaching of creationism - it's hard to know if he is sincere or just pandering, though), but we need to start calling people out when they make ignorant statements.
So I'm asking for those of you who call yourselves "conservative" to start speaking out on behalf of evolution - and science in general. If you're a conservative (and I'm not, if that isn't obvious already), you should be embarrassed to be associated with the ignorant, anti-scientific drivel that "intelligent design" supporters spew out. Let me ask it another way: does "conservative" mean "anti-education" or even "anti-knowledge"? I hope not.
But today's topic is the election in Louisiana of a new governor, a conservative Republican named Bobby Jindal. Most of the news stories (for example, the NY Times) have focused on the fact that Mr. Jindal is the first-ever Indian American elected as governor of any state. The stories have also mentioned that the "social conservative" believes in teaching intelligent design instead of evolution in our public schools.
Stop right there. Does everyone in the conservative (Republican) movement in the U.S. believe the world was just created - poof! - by a magic puff of smoke just a few thousand years ago? Does becoming conservative mean that you cannot understand simple scientific evidence - even overwhelming evidence? Evolution is probably the most well-supported scientific theory in all of biology, with 150 years of accumulating evidence backing it up. It has changed over the years - a fact that some creationists use misleading to make it appear that evolution is on shaky ground - but the changes have deepened and strengthened the theory, not weakened it.
The genome sequencing work I've been involved in over the past dozen years has provided some of the strongest evidence yet about how species evolved and are continuing to evolve. The molecular evidence for evolution is just spectacular.
So I'm dismayed that Mr. Jindal promotes a view that will undermine science teaching in our schools. He isn't the only national figure that believes this (George W. Bush has also supported the teaching of creationism - it's hard to know if he is sincere or just pandering, though), but we need to start calling people out when they make ignorant statements.
So I'm asking for those of you who call yourselves "conservative" to start speaking out on behalf of evolution - and science in general. If you're a conservative (and I'm not, if that isn't obvious already), you should be embarrassed to be associated with the ignorant, anti-scientific drivel that "intelligent design" supporters spew out. Let me ask it another way: does "conservative" mean "anti-education" or even "anti-knowledge"? I hope not.
Oh great, more "alternative medicine" funding from NIH
Just before the Nobel Prizes were announced this week, NIH posted a delightful press release on its website announcing three new Centers of Excellence in Research on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Great! I'm so excited to hear that NIH is pouring more money down this oh-so-promising black hole of negative results and poorly conducted studies!
Now, I can just hear the CAM-fans protesting: "why are you opposed to doing studies of our methods? Are you afraid that studies will prove some of them work?" (This isn't a straw man argument, by the way - I've been asked precisely this question.) Well no, of course I'm not afraid that studies will prove that [acupuncture - homeopathy - naturopathy - Ayurveda - chiropractic - voodoo] will work. There are so many problems (with this CAM announcement) that I don't know where to begin, but one major problem is that studies have already been done, and all the results are negative. As CAM's acting director, Ruth Kirshstein, writes in her request for over $121 million for next year's CAM budget, NCCAM has supported research at more than 260 institutions over the past 7 years. Have any positive results emerged? No. Why throw good money after bad? We shouldn't.
Some of my blogosphere colleagues have already put forward some excellent arguments for why NCCAM's funding should be eliminated - see the recent post by Steven Novella, who argues:
While I was celebrating this announcement from NIH, I couldn't help myself (I was so excited!!!) from looking at what their existing "Centers of Excellence" devote themselves to. You can find a list here, and it includes one for acupuncture (see my previous post on that topic), energy medicine (what the heck is that? I'll blog on it another time), and "mindfulness-based stress reduction" in HIV.
That last one is really rather appalling: they will investigate using meditation techniques as a way to "slow disease progression and delay the need for antiretroviral treatment." So they're going to tell HIV-positive patients to delay taking proven therapies and try meditation instead? How many patients need to die before they admit this isn't a good idea.
So you see, we have so much to celebrate this week. Three new NCCAM centers and a request for another $121 million in NCCAM funds next year. I'm so happy.
Now, I can just hear the CAM-fans protesting: "why are you opposed to doing studies of our methods? Are you afraid that studies will prove some of them work?" (This isn't a straw man argument, by the way - I've been asked precisely this question.) Well no, of course I'm not afraid that studies will prove that [acupuncture - homeopathy - naturopathy - Ayurveda - chiropractic - voodoo] will work. There are so many problems (with this CAM announcement) that I don't know where to begin, but one major problem is that studies have already been done, and all the results are negative. As CAM's acting director, Ruth Kirshstein, writes in her request for over $121 million for next year's CAM budget, NCCAM has supported research at more than 260 institutions over the past 7 years. Have any positive results emerged? No. Why throw good money after bad? We shouldn't.
Some of my blogosphere colleagues have already put forward some excellent arguments for why NCCAM's funding should be eliminated - see the recent post by Steven Novella, who argues:
Why can’t studies of CAM modalities be funded through the regular NIH? Because the NIH has standards, and what passes for research in the CAM world is often so laughably pathetic that it could never mean the NIH standard and get funded. NCCAM was created to provide a much lower standard for CAM research. In other words – waste money on studies that are not worth funding when judged by the usual criteria.I couldn't have expressed it better. If this work is any good, it will get funded through the regular NIH mechanisms. Also see the comments of ScienceZoo, who points out that none of the three new CAM Centers are likely to find effective therapies for what they claim to be studying.
While I was celebrating this announcement from NIH, I couldn't help myself (I was so excited!!!) from looking at what their existing "Centers of Excellence" devote themselves to. You can find a list here, and it includes one for acupuncture (see my previous post on that topic), energy medicine (what the heck is that? I'll blog on it another time), and "mindfulness-based stress reduction" in HIV.
That last one is really rather appalling: they will investigate using meditation techniques as a way to "slow disease progression and delay the need for antiretroviral treatment." So they're going to tell HIV-positive patients to delay taking proven therapies and try meditation instead? How many patients need to die before they admit this isn't a good idea.
So you see, we have so much to celebrate this week. Three new NCCAM centers and a request for another $121 million in NCCAM funds next year. I'm so happy.
Fake acupuncture works as well as "real" acupuncture
I haven't looked at acupuncture in this space yet, but a recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine provides some entertainment - and food for thought. The authors, Brinkhaus et al., compared the treatment of lower back pain with "real" acupuncture to two alternatives: "sham" acupuncture, in which needles are placed in random locations and inserted only superficially (not as deep), and no acupuncture at all.
The study found that both sets of patients with acupuncture reported reduced lower back pain as compared to the "no treatment" group; however, there was no difference between the real and sham treatment groups. In other words, if you thought you were getting acupuncture, you reported less pain. The authors here look at this as a victory, of sorts (and they clearly believe in acupuncture themselves - raising questions of bias in the study). It's also worth noting that one of the authors has a clear financial interest in a positive outcome - he receives fees for teaching acupuncture to professional societies; and several of the authors work at centers for complementary medicine.
I'm not surprised that the sham treatment worked as well as the "real" acupuncture. However, I don't believe that either treatment really works. As with many studies of pseudoscience, the condition (here, lower back pain) is subjective and very difficult to measure. The placebo effect is obviously at work: the patients know they had a treatment, which was a painful one, and they want to believe it was worth it. A better study would have included controls who received another treatment - massage for example - rather than nothing.
Worse yet, this study is riddled with other methodological problems. First, the physicians weren't "blinded" to the treatments. In other words, the physicians knew that they were giving real vs. sham acupuncture, introducing another source of bias. A questionnaire given to patients revealed that at least some of them figured out that they had had sham treatment.
Acupuncture has been studied countless times before (sometimes with funding from our friends at NCCAM), and the best studies show, unsurprisingly to me, that it just doesn't work. (Not surprising because there is no known physiological mechanism that would allow it to work. It's just magical thinking.) Now, although meta-analyses are highly problematic themselves, the best meta-analyses are usually the Cochrane studies, so I'll mention here that there was a Cochrane study of precisely this: "The effectiveness of acupuncture in the management of acute and chronic low back pain." You can read the abstract here. They found, after reviewing many other studies, that "there was no evidence showing acupuncture to be more effective than no treatment"; in other words, it just doesn't work.
I was interested to see that Brinkhaus et al. mentioned the Cochrane study above, but dismissed it and said that more recent studies supported their opinion that acupuncture (sham or real) is better than no treatment at all. They cited a more recent (2005) Cochrane study as one of these. But ironically (or should I say "blindly" on the part of Brinkhaus et al.?) this new study did not find evidence that acupuncture works at all. The newer Cochrane study found that almost all the studies were of low quality, and that "the data do not allow firm conclusions about the effectiveness of acupuncture for acute low-back pain." But that didn't stop Brinkhaus et al. from asserting that there is an effect. As long as they study hard-to-measure phenomena like pain, with poorly designed experiments, they'll continue to be able to find weak effects and then claim that "more research is needed."
So, if you want to enrich your local alternative healer, by all means let him stick you full of needles. But if you want to feel better, there are much more pleasant choices that won't cost you a thing.
The study found that both sets of patients with acupuncture reported reduced lower back pain as compared to the "no treatment" group; however, there was no difference between the real and sham treatment groups. In other words, if you thought you were getting acupuncture, you reported less pain. The authors here look at this as a victory, of sorts (and they clearly believe in acupuncture themselves - raising questions of bias in the study). It's also worth noting that one of the authors has a clear financial interest in a positive outcome - he receives fees for teaching acupuncture to professional societies; and several of the authors work at centers for complementary medicine.
I'm not surprised that the sham treatment worked as well as the "real" acupuncture. However, I don't believe that either treatment really works. As with many studies of pseudoscience, the condition (here, lower back pain) is subjective and very difficult to measure. The placebo effect is obviously at work: the patients know they had a treatment, which was a painful one, and they want to believe it was worth it. A better study would have included controls who received another treatment - massage for example - rather than nothing.
Worse yet, this study is riddled with other methodological problems. First, the physicians weren't "blinded" to the treatments. In other words, the physicians knew that they were giving real vs. sham acupuncture, introducing another source of bias. A questionnaire given to patients revealed that at least some of them figured out that they had had sham treatment.
Acupuncture has been studied countless times before (sometimes with funding from our friends at NCCAM), and the best studies show, unsurprisingly to me, that it just doesn't work. (Not surprising because there is no known physiological mechanism that would allow it to work. It's just magical thinking.) Now, although meta-analyses are highly problematic themselves, the best meta-analyses are usually the Cochrane studies, so I'll mention here that there was a Cochrane study of precisely this: "The effectiveness of acupuncture in the management of acute and chronic low back pain." You can read the abstract here. They found, after reviewing many other studies, that "there was no evidence showing acupuncture to be more effective than no treatment"; in other words, it just doesn't work.
I was interested to see that Brinkhaus et al. mentioned the Cochrane study above, but dismissed it and said that more recent studies supported their opinion that acupuncture (sham or real) is better than no treatment at all. They cited a more recent (2005) Cochrane study as one of these. But ironically (or should I say "blindly" on the part of Brinkhaus et al.?) this new study did not find evidence that acupuncture works at all. The newer Cochrane study found that almost all the studies were of low quality, and that "the data do not allow firm conclusions about the effectiveness of acupuncture for acute low-back pain." But that didn't stop Brinkhaus et al. from asserting that there is an effect. As long as they study hard-to-measure phenomena like pain, with poorly designed experiments, they'll continue to be able to find weak effects and then claim that "more research is needed."
So, if you want to enrich your local alternative healer, by all means let him stick you full of needles. But if you want to feel better, there are much more pleasant choices that won't cost you a thing.
NIH and Ayurveda, part 2
Another in my continuing series on some astonishingly stupid research funded by NCCAM, the NIH center for sham medicine (oops, I meant "alternative" medicine). This post looks at grant R21AT001969, to Cathryn Booth-Laforce at the University of Washington in Seattle, titled "Ayurvedic Center for Collaborative Research."
If you thought I'd picked out a couple of oddities in my previous posts on the pseudoscience funded by NCCAM, I'm afraid - sadly - that you're mistaken. There are plenty more examples, of which this project is just one. This project will spend thousands of your hard-earned tax dollars to set up a center for collaboration between the PI's university and a place called The Ayurvedic Trust in India, supposedly to conduct research projects. However, this nice-sounding goal ignores the fact that Ayurvedic is little more than a set of ancient superstitions, founded on ignorance and magical thinking, with no scientific merit to any of them. I recommend the article on Ayurvedic mumbo-jumbo at quackwatch.com for those who are interested.
If you thought I'd picked out a couple of oddities in my previous posts on the pseudoscience funded by NCCAM, I'm afraid - sadly - that you're mistaken. There are plenty more examples, of which this project is just one. This project will spend thousands of your hard-earned tax dollars to set up a center for collaboration between the PI's university and a place called The Ayurvedic Trust in India, supposedly to conduct research projects. However, this nice-sounding goal ignores the fact that Ayurvedic is little more than a set of ancient superstitions, founded on ignorance and magical thinking, with no scientific merit to any of them. I recommend the article on Ayurvedic mumbo-jumbo at quackwatch.com for those who are interested.
A quick primer: in Ayurveda, all of the body's functions, including health, sickness, and so on, are regulated by three "doshas", which are really quite meaningless from a scientific point of view. For example, the dosha called vata "governs all bodily functions concerning movement" and accumulates during cold, dry, windy weather. Is there any basis for this? No. What's worse is that Ayurveda "medicines" (I have to put that word in quotes here) contain well-known toxins such as mercury, arsenic, and lead. In fact, a scientific study in the Journal of the America Medical Association (Saper et al., JAMA (2004)292:2868-2873) found:
Ayurveda isn't medicine, and it isn't "complementary" to medicine either. NIH shouldn't fund it, no matter who the PI is. Research dollars are too precious to waste, and NCCAM should be shut down.
One of 5 Ayurvedic HMPs [herbal medicine products] produced in South Asia and available in Boston South Asian grocery stores contains potentially harmful levels of lead, mercury, and/or arsenic. Users of Ayurvedic medicine may be at risk for heavy metal toxicity, and testing of Ayurvedic HMPs for toxic heavy metals should be mandatory.What is a bit unusual about this grant is that the PI, Dr. Booth-LaForce, is a professor of nursing at a highly regarded university. Her bio reveals the source of her interest in Ayurveda: "she is studying yoga and Ayurveda-based meditation as possible therapies for menopausal symptoms." Well, I'm not exactly sure what Ayurveda-based meditation is, but I'm pretty certain it isn't science.
Ayurveda isn't medicine, and it isn't "complementary" to medicine either. NIH shouldn't fund it, no matter who the PI is. Research dollars are too precious to waste, and NCCAM should be shut down.
PLoS Biology, vanity publisher?
I'm a big fan of open access, and I'm rooting for PLoS Biology to succceed in their goal to publish papers that have the same quality and impact as Nature and Science. Today, though, I find myself both surprised and disappointed, as PLoS Biology shows that its hunger for publicity threatens to turn it into a vanity publisher.
You see, in an article appearing tomorrow morning (4 Sept 2007), PLoS Biology is publishing a paper by Craig Venter and colleagues about....(pause)... Craig Venter's genome! So when I get enough money to sequence my genome, will PLoS Biology publish that too? Is this the Donald Trump-izing of science?
But wait, you might object - maybe there's some science in the paper. Well, first you might want to recall that the original human genome paper published by Celera, in early 2001, was predominantly based on Venter's DNA, as he later admitted in a letter to Science. (Disclosure: I worked with Craig and was a co-author on the 2001 paper, and I fully stand behind it.) So most of the science was published over six years ago.
Still, I have the paper here and I've read it, and I can re-assure you that there isn't anything new, unless you are interested in how many differences there are between Craig Venter's genome and the reference human genome (the one in Genbank, which is very nearly complete). If anything, it's kind of a weirdly voyeuristic read, in which you an learn details of Craig's family history (English ancestry, three siblings, etc.), and you can see a full-page picture of his karyotype. Then there's a lengthy description of how they compared the genomes and found all the differences, but I confess I couldn't go on beyond page 10. In what I read, there wasn't much new science, certainly not of the caliber I've come to expect in PLoS Biology.
PLoS Biology will probably get plenty of attention for this paper. In politics there's a saying: any publicity is good publicity. In science, though, we think otherwise. PLoS: why'd you have to do this? I guess I shouldn't have expected so much of you.
You see, in an article appearing tomorrow morning (4 Sept 2007), PLoS Biology is publishing a paper by Craig Venter and colleagues about....(pause)... Craig Venter's genome! So when I get enough money to sequence my genome, will PLoS Biology publish that too? Is this the Donald Trump-izing of science?
But wait, you might object - maybe there's some science in the paper. Well, first you might want to recall that the original human genome paper published by Celera, in early 2001, was predominantly based on Venter's DNA, as he later admitted in a letter to Science. (Disclosure: I worked with Craig and was a co-author on the 2001 paper, and I fully stand behind it.) So most of the science was published over six years ago.
Still, I have the paper here and I've read it, and I can re-assure you that there isn't anything new, unless you are interested in how many differences there are between Craig Venter's genome and the reference human genome (the one in Genbank, which is very nearly complete). If anything, it's kind of a weirdly voyeuristic read, in which you an learn details of Craig's family history (English ancestry, three siblings, etc.), and you can see a full-page picture of his karyotype. Then there's a lengthy description of how they compared the genomes and found all the differences, but I confess I couldn't go on beyond page 10. In what I read, there wasn't much new science, certainly not of the caliber I've come to expect in PLoS Biology.
PLoS Biology will probably get plenty of attention for this paper. In politics there's a saying: any publicity is good publicity. In science, though, we think otherwise. PLoS: why'd you have to do this? I guess I shouldn't have expected so much of you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)