Dude, Where’s My War on Science?
An Attack on EPA’s Policy Process Fails Peer Review
Conservatives try to expose what they claim is a case of science suppression by the Obama administration—and in the process demonstrate how little they know about science in the first place.
A Climate of Transparency
The private sector can support a responsible approach to mitigating the potential effects of climate change by sharing what it knows.
Igniting Agricultural Innovation
Agricultural innovations through modern biotechnology have delivered significant economic, environmental, health and consumer benefits in recent years, but the full potential is even greater.
Your Genes Aren’t Covered for That
Policy must protect not just genetic information itself, but also access to care that is critical for prevention, early detection, and treatment—and to the support systems that help individuals care for themselves and their families when serious illness strikes.
A Glorious Mess
The Waxman-Markey bill's progress to a first historic vote hasn't been pretty—but it has been progress.
Personal Profiling
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That's the idea, but there's a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant. An interview with Sandra Soo-Jin Lee on direct-to-consumer genomics and social networking.
Drowning in Drought
Better management and conservation efforts are needed to stave off a worsening water crisis as climate change and growing consumption compound the west’s water woes.
Cool Head in a Hot Seat
Climate change knits energy and water policy together—a fact western states discover as reservoirs drop and rivers dwindle. The newly confirmed head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Michael Connor, steps into a job that no longer focuses on building dams, but now centers on river restoration and climate change adaptation.
Baked America
Do you prefer your country rare, or well done? Thanks to the Obama administration’s new report on climate impacts, we get to choose. The latest report from the Global Change Research Program tells us a lot about climate science, but it also tells us a lot about a government that is finally managing science for the benefit of its citizens.
The Color of Our Genes
Advances in genomics may yield profound medical, scientific, and social advances. But if we are not careful, commercial and forensic applications may resuscitate harmful ideas about race.
Farm Feelings and Farm Evidence
When it comes to factory farming, policies require transparent reasoning. We need not be shy about expressing our ethical predilections in the realm of caring for animals but we should be cautious in presuming that those predilections are supported by science.
Nerd Busters
GQ's new "Rock Stars of Science" campaign should give not just disease sufferers, but America's scientists, hope.
The Sunny Side of an Underwater Mortgage
From a biological standpoint, socially cooperative behaviors could be an end in themselves, as far as your unconscious brain is concerned. But financial systems and policies ignoring the often-unconscious human social instincts do so at their peril.
Can Agricultural Biotechnology Help the Poor?
Biotechnology can help the poor, but whether it will depends on people of good will taking the time to understand and consider the arguments in some detail.
Genetic Engineering Comes Up Short
Crops yields must improve to feed a hungry planet amid global warming, but that will require more ecology-based farming and less biotechnology.
Neuroscience Goes to War
With more attention to the empirical applications of modern neuroscience, we can better understand the connections between predictors of success and individual variability in training and learning. Equivalence may not be the key to preparing the modern soldier.
Dozing Atop the Flood Walls
The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season begins this week—but forecasts of a tamer year should make us raise our guard, not lower it.
Global Ailing
Research begun in the 1990s is relevant now more than ever, and what we know about the relationship between health and climate will be crucial as communities adapt to a warming world.
You Have a Friend Request from The White House
It’s not the campaign anymore. Some of the best tools for getting the President’s message out require special consideration on WhiteHouse.gov. Swire explains the laws that constrain and the rules that advance new media for the government.
What Works and What Doesn’t
It’s the very simple health care concept with the very fancy name. Jonathan Moreno and Ruth Faden Discuss comparative effectiveness research, which examines the benefits of different procedures used to treat the same illness, allowing health care providers to make the best decisions about options for patients.
No Monopoly on Expertise
Last week, the Obama administration unveiled its Open Government Initiative, a set of online tools and a process of public engagement for making its operations more transparent. In this podcast, we talk about the project with deputy chief technology officer for open government Beth Noveck.
Great Scott
It's about time everyone is celebrating Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education—she is, after all, perhaps the leading day-to-day defender of science in America.
Can We Bank on Objectivity?
Managing financial conflicts of interest is a complicated policy matter, as researchers and their institutions often receive both public and private funding to support research that leads to new treatments. But research also indicates these conflicts are widespread and ingrained. How far should we go in addressing the issue?
Cure Cancer? Not Without a Course Correction
The “war on cancer” devotes too much in search of new cures and too little to understanding the results of existing oncology therapies.
Science-less in Seattle
Tom Paulson, formerly of the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, now a freelance writer, carpenter, and building contractor, epitomizes the story of the science writer in our time.
Speaking Truth From Power
Ensuring scientific integrity in government is a marvelous goal—but achieving it will hardly be simple, even under this administration.
Arizona’s Entrepreneurial Song
Arizona State University over the past six years has engaged in a significant institutional transformation. One of the results is the SkySong Innovation Center, a nucleus for a community of entrepreneurs dedicated to innovation and learning.
Saving Scientific Integrity
The past eight years were a bad time for scientific integrity in government research. Grifo, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, says we must protect government researchers, make science-based policymaking more transparent, and monitor potential abuses.
What My 91-Year-Old Mother Wants for Mother’s Day
Smart government can and must deliver a reasoned, evidence-based health plan for all. Compassion demands it. Is that so much to ask for this holiday?
Throwing the Baby Out With the Amniotic Fluid
One important distinction that is not made often or clearly enough by either ethicists or lawyers is that between decisions to procreate and decisions not to procreate. Witness, for instance, the reaction to Nadya OctoMom™ Suleman.
The Baby Business and Public Policy
Drawing lessons from other countries’ regulatory successes could help temper the commercial pressures in the U.S. assisted reproduction sector, without in any way diminishing reproductive rights.
Needed: Professional Research Technicians
Scientists need professional research technicians the way doctors need professional nurses, but grant-based research programs rarely provide for these key positions.
Manufacturing Innovation
The Manufacturing Extension Partnership program’s evolving strategies to spur competitiveness and innovation among small- and medium-sized businesses adjusts to new challenges.
When Drugs Aren’t the Answer
Public health measures that reduce the potential for spreading disease through groups of people present a strong defense in the face of an outbreak. We should have been talking about them earlier.
Planetary Smoking Is Dangerous
Recently revealed documents just add to the evidence that sowing doubt about global warming seems to have been in part a political strategy.
Flu Farms?
Controlling infections once they reach the human population is crucial, but the origin of many pathogens may lie in factory farming operations, where potent diseases develop.
Time for a More Open Approach?
“Open innovation” challenges the assumptions made by university technology transfer offices about maximizing the value of their intellectual property.
Reprogramming Cells With Protein Power
Using specially engineered proteins instead of DNA to coax mice cells back into an embryonic state is promising, but doesn’t resolve many potential problems. For regenerative medicine research in humans, embryonic stem cells remain the gold standard.
-
Dirty Water: Mapping Projected Climate Change Impacts in the United States and Abroad
The recent United States Global Change Research Program report warned U.S. citizens of more frequent heat waves, greater disease risks, and damage to the marine life in this country, but we should not forget about the consequences abroad. Depending on emissions scenarios, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the average global surface temperature will rise between 2.0 and 11.5 °F by the end of the century while the USGCRP expects the average U.S. temperature to increase by 4 to 11ºF by 2100. The United States and other countries face similar climate change consequences. For example, more frequent and intense downpours that cause flooding and water contamination are expected to become a major concern in Northeastern U.S. cities and Pacific Islands, as well as in the Middle East and the former Soviet Bloc. Read more » -
Money and Methods in Cancer Research
The National Cancer Institute funds a lot of important research aimed at treating cancer, but some experts would characterize very little of it as transformative work. Gina Kolata’s article in the Sunday New York Times describes a system geared towards incrementalism rather than high-risk, high-return science.But a dearth of transformative work isn’t the only thing missing from the biomedical system in the United States. As Merrill Goozner reported here on Science Progress, there’s a lack of data-driven clinical trials that compare what works with what doesn’t.
Of course, the question of how to develop better cancer treatment’s isn’t either-or. We need both more transformative research and more evidence-based medicine. But as funding for the National Institutes of Health increases, a re-think of the grant review process will be necessary to get resources to promising but untried ideas and to the younger generation of scientists.
-
Report Details How Climate Change Will Spark Heat Waves, Increase the Spread of Disease, and Erode Coastal Economies
According to the recent report from the United States Global Change Research Program, rising greenhouse gas emissions will damage human health and welfare in regions across the country. Among the many changes climate change will bring are more frequent heat waves, greater risks for the spread of disease, and damage to the marine life and fisheries that are the backbone of many coastal economies. The Union of Concerned Scientists offers several climate change factsheets summarizing impacts presented in the report by region, and here we plot some key predicted effects on the Human Toll of Climate Change Map.Heat Waves
Heat waves will become more frequent and intense in both the lower and higher emissions scenarios described by the USGCRP report. In fact, by the end of the century, the average U.S. temperature will increase by between 4 and 11ºF, depending on emissions. Heat waves similar to the 1995 Chicago heat wave that claimed over 700 lives are estimated to occur every other year in Chicago by 2100 in a lower emissions scenario and as many as three times a year in a higher emissions scenario. As a result, annual heat-related deaths in Chicago are expected to increase from about 175 deaths in 1980 to over 400 by 2090 in a lower emission scenario. In the higher emissions scenario, heat-related deaths are projected to reach 1,200. By the 2090s, annual heat-related deaths in Los Angeles may increase by two to seven times the baseline of 165 deaths observed in the 1990s. The report also predicts that the Southeast will suffer more heat-related illness and death in summer months.
Declines in Human Health
Climate change threatens public health. Insects that carry diseases, such as ticks and mosquitoes, will survive winters and produce larger populations, the report warns. In addition to insect vector diseases like West Nile virus, water-borne diseases will become more prevalent as pathogens thrive in warmer Midwestern climates. More frequent heavy downpours that overwhelm drainage systems are expected to increase the risk of water-borne disease in the Northeast. The report also forecasts more shellfish-borne disease outbreaks in the Southeast since coastal water temperatures will rise significantly in both emissions scenarios.
Costs for Coastal Economies
Fisheries that contribute to the economies of coastal regions will be jeopardized if emissions are not reduced. The report predicts smaller harvests of marine species in Alaska due to changes in ice edge extent and location. As a result, commercial fisheries are expected to be farther from existing fishing ports, requiring relocation or greater investment in transportation time and fuel costs. The current overfishing problem in Hawaii and other U.S. islands in the Pacific Ocean is expected to intensify because of an accelerated decline in live corals that sustain fisheries. Fish populations in the continental United States will also suffer from climate change. Since rising water temperatures influence the time and location of spawning, the growth and survival of North Atlantic cod and wild trout will decline, the report projects. Salmon populations in the Northwest are predicted to fall below their already historically low population levels as winter rain replaces snow, clearing streambeds of incubating eggs and damaging spawning nests. A forecasted decline in dissolved oxygen in aquatic habitats will also damage ecosystem diversity in the Southeast.
-
FDA Looks to Open Up the Medicine Cabinet
The Food and Drug Administration Transparency Task Force held the first of its two public meetings for public recommendations on how to increase transparency in decision making yesterday. At the meeting, Kristi Zonno, Director of Genetics and Health Policy at the advocacy group Genetic Alliance called for FDA to create a public registry of “genetic, genomic, and pharmacogenomics testing available to the U.S. market,” as well as make warning letters to pharmaceutical companies public in real time.A public registry would give patients, their doctors, and their parents access to information essential to making informed decisions about genetic testing, Zonno said. It should include the name of the laboratory performing tests, the name of the test developer, and facts about the test’s ability to enhance existing care. Read more »
-
NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).Lead author Kenneth Manton at Duke University and colleagues looked at four four significant causes of death over the period from 1950 to 2004: cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. They estimate that investments in NIH funding helped avoid more than 35 million deaths over that period, and that for the first three ailments, death rates started dropping more rapidly about ten years after a significant increase in research investment.
NIH funding supports public health, they conclude, as well as workforce competitiveness:
Evaluation of the level of investment in research suggests that a significantly greater, and more prolonged, investment in NIH, and indeed all, federal research would provide a greater stimulus to U.S. economic growth.
Jocelyn Kaiser at ScienceInsider grabbed the study’s closing recommendation for her headline yesterday: “Need More U.S. Workers? Quadruple the NIH Budget.” Or as Manton et al. put it: “To compensate for the slower future growth of the U.S. labor force (e.g., from 1.2% per annum in 1996 to 2006 to 0.3% after 2017) on economic growth, the size of NIH expenditures relative to GDP should quadruple to about 1% ( $120 Billion) and be done sufficiently rapidly (10 years) to compensate for the slowing growth of the U.S. labor force.” Proponents of merely doubling the budget over ten years now have that proposal to consider.
Heidi Ledford, reporting for Nature, notes that the study was of course funded by a grant from the NIH. But she also spoke with Cary Gross at Yale’s School of Medicine, who points out that evidence that biomedical research improves public health and economic growth is important, but the conclusion should not allow observers to lose sight of the importance of basic research: “The opposite of that argument is that if scientific research does not directly relate to health, then it’s not important.”
The beauty of the NIH is that it supports both critical basic research and applied work on the interventions that help U.S. citizens live healthier lives.
-
Progressive Science Values
Maybe you remember this cartoon. It won the Union of Concerned Scientists 2007 Science Idol competition for editorial cartoons about scientific integrity. At the time, the Bush administration was actively diluting, distorting, downplaying, or denying scientific research on global climate change and its impacts on human health and welfare. But in an essay published last week in the journal Democracy, Marcy Darnovsky, of the Center for Genetics and Society, points out that the image of “good-guy scientists” simply extracting “truth from nature” is an oversimplification that ignores the influence of values in science.
Certainly, the real-life analogs to the government worker shoveling soil to cover up the “TRUTH” were a problem. As Francesca Grifo explained in a recent SP podcast, some policy decisions are made based entirely on scientific evidence, and some are not. But “rather than be courageous and come out and talk about which parts were policy and which parts were science,” she explained, describing the previous administration’s actions, “we saw changes in the science to cover up an often unpopular policy decision.”
Yet government interference is hardly the only force that can influence the objectivity of scientific research. What about the commercial support of science that creates conflicts of interest or the industry tactics that obscures information about environmental health? Read more »
-
Climate Change Will Not Be Kind to American Water and Agriculture
The latest report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program is a comprehensive overview of climate change science, but it is also a clear warning about how global warming will make life harder for millions of Americans. The agricultural sector and water resources are two of the interlocking sectors singled out by the report, and both face significant disruption.
Rising temperatures “will interact with many social and environmental stresses” the report says. In fact, temperature increases already inflict water challenges on the United States, especially in the West and Southwest regions. More frequent droughts, floods, and water quality problems limit the country’s water supply and distress the agriculture sector. The report predicts that “large reductions in spring precipitation” in the Southwest will increase competition for water supplies since the region is at the forefront of the nation’s population growth. In addition, Sarah Bates describes in her column this week how “climate change knits energy and water policy together” as western rivers and reservoirs diminish and various power generation methods consume considerable amounts of water. Read more »
-
Less Philosophy, More Policy: Obama Disbands Council on Bioethics and Will Create New One
Last week, the White House sent letters to the members of the President’s Council on Bioethics informing them that their services were no longer needed. According to a report today from Nicholas Wade in The New York Times, a spokesperson said that the mandate of a new council would be to offer “practical policy options,” in contrast to the work of the current council, which SP advisory board member Alta Charo told Wade “seemed more like a public debating society.”There have been six bioethics advisory panels since 1974, and President George W. Bush convened the current council in November of 2001, a few months after announcing limitations on federal support for embryonic stem cell research. (For more context, see our “Timeline: A Brief History of Stem Cell Research.”)
Shortly after President Obama rescinded those restrictions, 10 of the 18 members of the existing council (whose charter would have expired in September), issued a statement criticizing the new policy. They claimed the new policy mischaracterized the Bush rules, which it did not; they claimed the old policy was advancing research within ethical norms, despite the fact it slowed research; and argued that the new policy did not address reproductive cloning, despite the fact NIH was tasked with tackling that question as it drafted guidelines. (More on that statement here.)
Another administration source indicates that the President is reviewing options for a new council with a revised, policy-focused mandate, but there is currently no public word on a timeframe.
-
The Digital Textbook Case
Abel Real attributes his transformation from likely high school dropout to nursing student at East Carolina University to classroom technology. Real, a self-proclaimed success story from poverty-stricken Greenville, North Carolina, shared his experience with a school laptop program that introduced him to the power of technology before the House Committee on Education Labor yesterday at a hearing on “The Future of Learning: How Technology is Transforming Public Schools.”When Real was 13, both his parents were incarcerated and his two older brothers had already dropped out of high school. By sophomore year, Real was so distracted by his torn family that he was sure he would repeat his brothers’ mistakes. However, when a health care teacher introduced him to technology and his school gave him a laptop, his life began to turn around. Even when “home life was a mess,” Real could instant message his classmates and teachers after school to work on projects and ask questions through his computer, he said. The laptop program was a “portal to a new life,” in his words.
He used the laptop to access information ranging from virtual university tours to career options to how to tie a necktie. Before his school system incorporated technology into classrooms, the average college attendance rate was 26 percent, but when Real graduated in 2008, 94 percent of his class moved on to college. “Technology is not a luxury in society; it is a necessity,” he said. Read more »
