I’m now looking for a new permanent home for my blog. For now, I have moved Culture Dish onto my website, where I’ll be posting until further notice.  You can follow me there via RSS feed, and of course, you can also follow me on Twitter and Facebook.

UPDATE: The Guardian has just posted this letter sent to all ScienceBlogs bloggers today by  Adam Bly, head of Seed Media Group and ScienceBlogs.

Update 2: See the Knight Journalism Tracker’s response to Adam Bly’s email linked above. 
 
Update 3: ScienceBloggers have just received a note from Adam Bly saying that in response to all of this, ScienceBlogs has begun making changes to the Pepsi blog, including adding a statement about conflict of interest and funding, adding a banner labeling it as “Advertorial.”

Update 4:  Adam Bly just announced via email that the PepsiCo blog has now been canceled.  

The gist: In an
attempt to reverse the effects of a disorder called congenital adrenal
hyperplasia (CAH), an endocrine disease that can result in ambiguous
genitalia and “increased rates of tomboyism and
lesbianism,” pediatric endocrinologist Maria New has been giving dexamethasone to pregnant women to see if it will reverse the disorder (the drug isn’t approved for pre-natal use, but it’s used to treat the disorder itself, which results from a steroid deficiency). Time
magazine recently reported that there are questions about
whether the drug causes birth defects, whether it’s being used with proper informed consent, and whether such
off-label experimental drug use should require IRB oversight (as many experts argue that it should, though it doesn’t presently). Now Dreger and her colleagues are looking at another aspect of this research, namely, how the scientists involved are portraying homosexuality, what qualifies as “normal” when it comes to masculine vs.
feminine traits, and where exactly this research is going:

Most clinicians who use prenatal dexamethasone for CAH seek
to
prevent the development of ambiguous genitalia. But the New York-based
group of clinical researchers … suggest that prenatal dexamethasone
can also be used in this population to prevent the “abnormality” of
homosexuality, as well as the
“abnormal” interest these girls tend to have in traditionally masculine
careers and hobbies.

I’ve been a wee bit busy writing and talking about another big bioethics story (i.e. the one in my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), so I haven’t dug into this one, but my gut reaction is that the
headline of the press release strikes me as sensational and misleading: The researchers
are looking at this drug’s impact on various aspects of a disorder — they haven’t engineered an experiment in which they’re giving this drug to pregnant women in an attempt to prevent homosexuality. (Unfortunately, sensational headline like this lead to other freaked-out headlines like, “Awful Doc Drugs Pregnant Women to Make Their Babies More Girly.”)  Dreger and her colleagues are concerned that this research is headed in that direction because the scientists involved have said that their studies may apply to
homosexuality in general. Dreger is also disturbed by how this research approaches the idea of biologically “normal” female behavior:
 

In another paper called “What Causes Low Rates of Child-Bearing in Congenital Adrenal
Hyperplasia?” [New's colleague] writes that “CAH women as a group have a
lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the
traditional child-care/housewife role. As children, they show an
unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls,
and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or
fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of
experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be
relatively low in all age groups.” … [the paper] suggests that treatments with
prenatal dexamethasone might cause these girls’ behavior to be closer
to the expectation of heterosexual norms … [another paper goes] further,
constructing low interest in babies and men – and even interest in what
they consider to be men’s occupations and games – as “abnormal,” and
potentially preventable with prenatal dex …

Hot button issue? Indeed. Dreger has written a detailed post over at Psychology Today that starts with the provocative question, “What’s wrong with taking a steroid, while you’re pregnant, to try to
increase the odds that your female fetus will someday grow up to be a
straight woman who gives you grandchildren, and not a lesbian daughter
more interested in puppies?” And of course, there’s more on this in the full Hastings Center piece, which you can read online here.

(Photo credit here)

The combination of Oprah, Alan Ball, and HBO is nothing
short of a dream team for me. I’ve always been a huge fan of everyone involved, and I think HBO is the perfect home for this movie. Several
people have asked why I went with HBO instead of a big screen major
motion picture version, and there are several reasons. HBO makes some of the best and smartest movies
out there these days, particularly when it comes to complex true stories that
mix science, ethics, and real human stories. Check out You Don’t Know Jack, the recent HBO film starring Al Pacino as Jack Kevorkian,
and Temple Grandin starring Claire Danes, to name just a few of the most recent examples.  It was very important to me that the
film find a home that would do justice to the family’s story, the
science, and the scientists — I have no doubt HBO, Oprah, and Ball will do
just that.  And the Lacks family and I will be involved along the way:  We’ll be consulting on the film. As Ball said in a recent interview
about the HeLa movie, “This is going to be a journey that we’ll all remember for the rest of
our lives.” I’m very excited for it.

Photo captions: Pictured above left: Oprah. 
Pictured above right: Alan Ball.

“I was a kid who’d failed freshman year at the regular public high
school because she never showed up. I’d transferred to an alternative
school that offered dream studies instead of biology, so I was taking
Defler’s class for high-school credit, which meant that I was sitting
in a college lecture hall at sixteen with words like mitosis and kinase inhibitors flying around. I was completely lost.”

People say, WHAT?! You failed high school?!


I posted about this as part of a guest blogging stint at Powells recently: It’s true. My freshman
year, I got less than a 1.0 grade point average because I was busy
wandering the aisles reading books at Powells, and hanging out with friends in
coffee shops and Forest Park. But mostly I was busy pretending to be a student at Metropolitan Learning Center
(aka: MLC).  All of my friends went
to MLC, and I fit in better there than at my own school – MLC didn’t give
grades, students got to design courses for themselves, teachers went by their
first names, we sat on the floor instead of lined up in desks, and we read
books like Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of
the United States instead of a traditional history books. The only
problem was, I didn’t get credit for classes at MLC freshman year, because I
wasn’t enrolled there.

After failing my first year, I officially transferred to MLC
and started designing a curriculum for myself. Since I knew without a
doubt that I was going to be a veterinarian when I grew up (so much for certainty),
I arranged to take some pre-vet courses at the local community college
for high school credit, to help make up for the credits I’d missed my
first year. So really, the whole reason I learned about Henrietta and the
HeLa cells in the first place was that I’d flunked my first year of
high school and was lucky enough to find an alternative school that
gave me the freedom to follow my curiosity wherever it took me.

I thought I’d start the FAQs with one of the most commonly asked questions: How did you learn about Henrietta and the HeLa cells, and why did they grab you the way they did? Here is the answer, which I also posted about over on Powells.com’s book blog this last week as part of a little guest blogging stint:

I first learned about Henrietta Lacks in the late 80s, when I was 16 and sitting in a basic biology class at Portland Community College
(PCC). My teacher, Donald Defler, mentioned HeLa cells, saying they
were one of the most important tools in medicine, then almost as an
aside, he said, “They came from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, and she
was black.” That was the moment I became obsessed with Henrietta. I
went up to Defler after class and started asking questions about
whether her family knew about the cells (they didn’t) and what her race
had to do with them being alive, but he stopped me, saying no one knew
anything else about Henrietta, just her name and her race.

Defler, being the good biology teacher he was, suggested I do some
research to see if I could find any information about Henrietta Lacks.
“Write up a little summary of what you find and I’ll give you some
extra credit,” he told me. Several months ago, when I got the
pre-publication proofs of my book, I called Defler and (much to his
surprise) told him about how that moment in his biology class more than
20 years ago had started me on a path that ended with The Immortal Life. I sent him an advance copy and said, Here’s my extra credit summary, Mr. Defler…it’s a few decades late, but I
have a good excuse: the information was really hard to find …

The scene of me learning about Henrietta Lacks for the first time in
my PCC classroom is in the prologue of the book (which you can read
online here). But what’s not in the prologue is the backstory behind why Henrietta’s story grabbed me.

The year I learned about Henrietta Lacks was the same year
my father got sick with a mysterious illness no one was able to
diagnose. He’d gone from being my very active and athletic dad to being
a man who had problems thinking, and he spent all of his time lying in
our living room because he couldn’t walk. It turned out that a virus
had caused brain damage, and he eventually enrolled in an experimental
drug study (he’s since written several books
about his experience living with brain damage). Since my father was too
sick to operate a car, I drove him to and from the hospital several
times a week and sat with him while he got treatments. I spent much of
my 16th year sitting in a hospital watching my father and other
patients be used as research subjects. In the midst
of that, when Defler mentioned that Henrietta’s cells had been growing
in labs decades after her death, the first questions I asked were, Did she have any kids? How did they feel about her cells being used in research? I think I asked those questions in part because I was wrestling with the emotions associated with watching my father’s
experience as a research subject.