The conservative “tea party” movement appeals almost exclusively to supporters of the Republican Party, bolstering the view that the tea party divides the GOP even as it has energized its base.

That conclusion, backed by numbers from a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, also suggests that the tea party may have little room for growth. Most Americans — including large majorities of those who don’t already count themselves as supporters — say they’re not interested in learning more about the movement. A sizable share of those not already sympathetic to the tea party also say that the more they hear, the less they like the movement.

Overall, the tea party remains divisive, with 27 percent of those polled saying they’re supportive but about as many, 24 percent, opposed. Supporters overwhelmingly identify themselves as Republicans or GOP-leaning independents; opponents are even more heavily Democratic. The new movement is also relatively small, with 8 percent of supporters claiming to be “active participants” — about 2 percent of the total population.

(Emphasis added by me.)

These numbers are somewhat similar to last month’s New York Times-CBS News poll, which found that 18% of Americans support the Tea Party movement. Despite the Times doing as much as it could to hype these results, I pointed out that this wasn’t very meaningful, since that poll found that 78% of these “supporters” had never attended a Tea Party rally or meeting or donated money to the Tea Party cause. So, doing a little math, we find that about 4% of people could be labeled as active Tea Partiers based on that poll (compared with 2% in the current Washington Post poll).

The difference in both of these numbers (27% vs. 18% for supporters, 4% vs. 2% for active participants) could be due to a real drop in support for and participation in the Tea Party movement, or just a difference between the two polls. My point in bringing it up is that The Washington Post’s analysis actually makes sense.

On the side, it is also of note that there’s some good news in the poll for the Democratic Party:

The percentage of people who say the Democratic Party represents their personal values and is in tune with the problems of people like themselves hasn’t changed since November. The percentage siding with the GOP, however, has dropped by almost precisely the numbers now siding with the tea party.

Some 14 percent of Americans say the tea party is most in sync with their values, nearly matching the 15 percentage-point drop-off for the GOP over the past five months.

For more, check out a graphic on the poll results here and the full poll results here.

When I first saw that headline and read the email news alert that the Times sent out, I did agree that these appeared to be interesting and surprising findings. And, as I read the article, my interest–and then skepticism–continued to grow. According to the article, these “Tea Party supporters” are “wealthier and more well-educated than the general public”, and they make up “18 percent of Americans”. Hmmm… interesting. Also, they “do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president”, and are “more likely than the general public to have returned their census forms.” Well, that’s quite a surprise.

The article goes on and on, but one thing should become clear: these “Tea Party supporters” sound almost indistinguishable from your run-of-the-mill establishment fiscal-conservative Republican. How could this be?

Well, if you look at the actual the survey results and methods, you’ll see that these “Tea Party supporters” are just people who answered affirmatively to the question “Do you consider yourself to be a supporter of the Tea Party movement, or not?” In fact, 78% (!!!) of these “supporters” have never attended a Tea Party rally or meeting or donated money to the Tea Party cause.

It’s no wonder that these “Tea Party supporters” sound nothing like the Tea Party activists we’ve grown so familiar with… because they’re not! Now, I’ll grant that the Times’ analysis never explicitly equates these two. But, especially by making statements like “Speculation and anecdotal evidence have often taken the place of concrete data about who supports the Tea Party movement, and the poll offers some surprising findings”, they’re really insinuating a lot.

In the end, these results are pretty uninteresting, since this poll just describes a large bloc of the Republican Party that has been in existence for a long time. (For a much more reasonable analysis of the poll, check out CBS’s take.)

For a more relevant picture of what the Tea Party movement actually looks like, just take this recent sampling from the Times’ own pages:

• With No Jobs, Plenty of Time for Tea Party
• The Rage Is Not About Health Care
• Whose Country Is It?
• Accusations Fly Between Parties Over Threats and Vandalism
• House of Anger
• An Absence of Class
• Two Rallies
• Unlikely Activist Who Got to the Tea Party Early
• The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged
• Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right

Let’s not mince words here: the Tea Party movement has been fueled by misinformation, bigotry, and irrational violent anger at the government. If this new poll shows us anything, it’s just to what a large degree the Republican establishment has accepted and embraced this radical fringe.

Tom Holder of Speaking of Research:

On a beautiful sunny day in Los Angeles, Pro-Test for Science organizers arrived at the junction of Le Conte and Westwood, on the edge of the UCLA campus, with armfuls of placards in support of animal research. Within ten minutes every placard had found a new owner as hundreds of scientists, students and members of the public showed up to support the cause. Those gathering chatted together, sharing their reasons for attending the rally.

The mood was one of excitement and passion. Those participating exchanged ideas for public outreach in the future – sharing the best of ways of explaining to the public the clear connection between animal research and medical benefits. The rally continued to snake along Westwood and up towards Wilson Plaza.

Alison Hewitt of UCLA Newsroom:

Organizers staged the rally with the goal defending the right of researchers to pursue their work free from harassment by extremists and to providing the public with a better understanding of animal research.

Carrying neon poster-board signs bearing slogans like “Animal research = medical advances” and “Science, not violence,” demonstrators rallied at the southern edge of UCLA before marching to the center of campus for speeches. Some passing students found themselves greeted by marching friends who cajoled them to follow along.

“Join the fight!” one demonstrator called to a friend, who rushed to join the pack.

…

“We’re trying to defend and advocate for science itself,” Jentsch said. “A small but vocal and violent minority of people have decided that they want to seek an end to animal research, including its contributions to medical research. If we continue what we’re doing here today, people will understand what’s at risk, and that effort will fail.”

Erika Check Hayden of The Great Beyond:

A rally in defense of scientists who use animals in research drew between 300-400 supporters to the campus of the University of California Los Angeles today.

The rally, organized by the group Pro-Test for Science, was a follow-up to a similar rally at UCLA last year. Speakers at today’s rally included organizer and neuroscientist David Jentsch, who formed Pro-Test after his car was firebombed by animal rights activists last year; Kevin Quinn, a branch chief at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health; Michael Steinmetz, a program officer at the U.S. National Eye Institute; and UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Scott Waugh.

Jentsch said that one animal rights activist protested the rally.

…

As a result, Jentsch said, animal rights groups have stepped down their attacks on UCLA researchers.

“These groups never expected that anybody on the scientific side would challenge them openly when they came to campus and marched around, so when they come to campus and we’re there, it’s quite remarkable – it has a chilling effect on their behavior,” Jentsch said.

You can check out the original paper by Danovaro et al. (and two accompanying commentary articles) at BMC Biology:

Danovaro, R., Dell’Anno, A., Pusceddu, A., Gambi, C., Heiner, I., & Kristensen, R. (2010). The first metazoa living in permanently anoxic conditions BMC Biology, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-30

Levin, L. (2010). Anaerobic Metazoans: No longer an oxymoron BMC Biology, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-31

Mentel, M., & Martin, W. (2010). Anaerobic animals from an ancient, anoxic ecological niche BMC Biology, 8 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-8-32

(Hat tip to DrugMonkey.)

As I sweated through the day, I got to thinking: where are all of those oh-so-clever political cartoonists and global-warming-denying Republican politicians who just a couple of months ago were incessantly using February’s record-breaking snows to “mock” the idea of global warming?

(Bueller…? Bueller…? Bueller…?)

The fact is that this is largely an irrelevant*** question (well, irrelevant in terms of science; politically, we should seriously be questioning the integrity and competence of these people). As anyone with a grade-school education should be able to tell you, climate and weather are two distinct concepts. Weather deals with events on the timescale of hours and days, whereas climate concerns averages on the scale of years. Although day-to-day weather can be erratic and somewhat unpredictable, the average global temperature has been increasing at a fairly steady rate for many years now (i.e. global warming), and this change has accelerated recently. There is very strong evidence that this warming is due to the actions of humankind.

Although the behavior we saw back in February was just political theater on behalf of opportunistic Republicans, one might be somewhat surprised to learn that some of those we might–superficially–expect to be experts on our changing climate, meteorologists, are particularly skeptical about global warming. This is something I have observed personally, and Leslie Kaufman of The New York Times recently had an interesting article about this phenomenon–and why this shouldn’t be taken as strong evidence against global warming:

…

But it has also created tensions between two groups that might be expected to agree on the issue: climate scientists and meteorologists, especially those who serve as television weather forecasters.

…

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology. A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The split between climate scientists and meteorologists is gaining attention in political and academic circles because polls show that public skepticism about global warming is increasing, and weather forecasters — especially those on television — dominate communications channels to the public. A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate.

…

The reasons behind the divergence in views are complex. The American Meteorological Society, which confers its coveted seal of approval on qualified weather forecasters, has affirmed the conclusion of the United Nations’ climate panel that warming is occurring and that human activities are very likely the cause. In a statement sent to Congress in 2009, the meteorological society warned that the buildup of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to “major negative consequences.”

Yet, climate scientists use very different scientific methods from the meteorologists. Heidi Cullen, a climatologist who straddled the two worlds when she worked at the Weather Channel, noted that meteorologists used models that were intensely sensitive to small changes in the atmosphere but had little accuracy more than seven days out. Dr. Cullen said meteorologists are often dubious about the work of climate scientists, who use complex models to estimate the effects of climate trends decades in the future.

But the cynicism, said Dr. Cullen, who now works for Climate Central, a nonprofit group that works to bring the science of climate change to the public, is in her opinion unwarranted.

“They are not trying to predict the weather for 2050, just generally say that it will be hotter,” Dr. Cullen said of climatologists. “And just like I can predict August will be warmer than January, I can predict that.”

…

Resentment may also play a role in the divide. Climatologists are almost always affiliated with universities or research institutions where a doctoral degree is required. Most meteorologists, however, can get jobs as weather forecasters with a college degree.

Thomas Lin has an additional blog post at The New York Times’ Dot Earth blog chronicling why this climatologist/meteorologist divide is so dangerous: the outsized influence over public opinion that TV weathermen wield from their very visible platforms.

Interestingly, I also received a surprisingly timely press release today on this very topic from the Union of Concerned Scientists–regarding tonight’s episode of The Colbert Report:

UCS Climate Scientist, Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel will go head to head with a skeptical meteorologist during “couples counseling” tonight on the Colbert Report. It should be funny and informative. We hope you tune in, tonight, April 6 on Comedy Central at 11:30 p.m. EDT.

Both sciences are indeed “married” through their focus on the atmosphere, but they differ when it comes to identifying short-term trends, such as storms, versus long-term trends, such as human-induced climate change. Brenda will set the record straight: Global warming is real and its consequences are becoming increasingly apparent as sea levels rise, glaciers melt, and extreme weather events become more prevalent.

I imagine it will be entertaining as usual!

***In addition to the political caveat above, one could also make the case that the recent weather may not be totally irrelevant scientifically to discussions of global warming, as increases in global temperature are expected to also increase the frequency of extreme weather events (as noted with less measured language in the press release). However, no single weather event can be attributed directly to global warming with absolute certainty, so this is a point that should only be made cautiously.

The next rally is scheduled to start at 11:30 am, on Thursday, April 8th. It will convene on the UCLA campus, at the corner of Westwood Blvd and Le Conte Ave. You can read the full text of the Pro-Test press release on the event below:

In 2009, Pro-Test for Science held an historic rally on the UCLA campus; bringing over 700 people onto the streets in support of the scientists and researchers who carry out lifesaving medical research using laboratory animals. Such research continues to advance scientific knowledge and plays a vital role in the development of innovative treatments for human disease. However, animal rights extremists have continued to escalate their threats against researchers and their families.

On Thursday April 8^th Pro-Test for Science will respond by rallying students, scientists and members of the public to support the cause of medical science. We call on the community to stand together against the recent tide of animal rights activism which has worked to misrepresent research and coerce those that carry it out.

David Jentsch, founder of Pro-Test for Science, said:

“The scientific community has joined together to push back against those who seek to stall advances in biomedicine. Never before has it been more important to continue these efforts so that humane biomedical research can continue unhindered by the misguided threats of a minority who oppose it.“

This rally, on the UCLA campus seeks to:

• Communicate a better understanding of animal research to the public, its importance to medical progress, and what we all stand to lose if such work were to stop
• Celebrate the successes of animal research in the development of treatments for disease, new diagnostic procedures/instruments, and surgical techniques.
• Defend the rights of researchers to pursue their work free from harassment and intimidation.

The rally will begin on Thursday April 8th at 11:30 AM, on the north-east corner of Westwood Blvd. and Le Conte Ave., which will be followed by a march to Wilson Plaza, where speakers include UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Scott Waugh and Dr. Kevin Quinn from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Pro-Test UCLA co-founder David Jentsch recently had an article in UCLA Today explaining why the Pro-Test cause is so important. Here’s a bit about the intimidation that he has personally faced:

Just over one year ago, someone stole into my front yard at 4 a.m. and placed a sophisticated incendiary device under my car; the explosion occurred fewer than 10 feet from where members of my household were sleeping. Before the flash of the initial detonation was even over, my car was engulfed in flames, and the fire had begun to spread into the surrounding brush–placing hundreds of West LA homes at potential risk; I watched the sun rise from the front room of a home that had become the site of a domestic terrorism investigation.

By now, many people in our community are aware of the reasons that this happened. I–like hundreds of other faculty, students and staff at UCLA–am a scientist who studies the biology and behavior of mice, rats or monkeys in my quest to better understand how the brain works. Because of this, I have been targeted by animal rights activists who likely followed me home from campus, stalked me and my loved ones in the dead of night, and then bombed my car.

Given that intimidation by animal rights extremists continues to disrupt the lives and work of scientists at UCLA and elsewhere, if you’re in the LA area and can make it this Thursday, I’d encourage you to go and show your support for science.

Harassment drove UCLA neurobiologist Dario Ringach out of primate research in 2006. This was not just angry phone calls and email messages. We’re talking about people in masks banging on the windows of his house in the night, scaring his kids. Without support on this front from other scientists or from UCLA, Dario abandoned research that he believed to be important so that he could keep his family safe.

…

And [more recently--this year], Dario participated in the dialogue at UCLA that was aimed at getting people with different views on animal research to engage with each other peacefully and productively. On a panel that included a strong defender of animal rights, Dario explained the role he thinks animal research plays in answering scientific questions that matter to us — to the public as well as scientists.

…

For just daring to stand up and share his view, Dario was targeted for more home demonstrations. And now, activists threaten to bring the demonstrations to his children’s schools, to “educate fellow students what their classmate’s father does for a living”.

To summarize, Dario Ringach gave up the his own research program to save his family from the viscous harassment of animal extremists. But, after going out of his way to engage in a dialogue with these people, he has all of a sudden become a target again. Now, I’ve said before that based on my experience with the animal rights movement, there’s little to be gained from opening up a dialogue with these extremists. And, the totally asinine reaction by them to Ringach’s conciliatory efforts just further bears that point out. Still, what Ringach and the others on that panel did was noble, and I support Janet in calling these clowns out.

Update: Orac has a post up at Respectful Insolence that provides additional background and details about this whole ordeal, and it’s worth a look. His post also reminds me that I forgot to mention that Janet herself was made a target of animal extremists after the panel–despite her only connection to animal research being as a very moderate voice offering contemplative and balanced discussions on the topic from time to time.

Update 2: Also, check out the post at Speaking of Research for a rundown on what people are saying about this across the web.

For more, check out Scicurious’ announcement and the earlier unveiling of the posts included in this year’s anthology. You can see my contribution here.

A new study was recently published in Nature (the same journal that published the original two competing papers), based this time on solid state NMR. This study, by lead author Sarah Cady in Mei Hong’s lab, finds evidence for both binding sites, but argues that the pore (Stouffer/DeGrado model) is the higher affinity site. This subject involves a legitimate scientific controversy, and has clearly been in need of a third party to help resolve it. Unfortunately, the DeGrado group was also involved with this one, so it’s not quite the impartial judgment that this subject needed. Regardless, the new study does offer additional evidence to support the Stouffer/DeGrado model, although I don’t think it’s quite the final word.

I’m an NMR scientist, but I use solution state NMR specifically. However, solid state NMR is a whole other animal–in some ways, at least–so I can’t write in great detail about the methods used in the new paper (and that would make for a very opaque and rather boring blog post anyway!). Therefore, I will just provide a few comments about the paper and what I think its ramifications are for this controversy.

Cady et al. make the case that adamantane drugs bind within the M2 pore and that the site on the outside of the paper is largely irrelevant. Certainly the new paper provides compelling evidence in favor of the Stouffer/DeGrado model, but the fact that the other binding site was observed is also significant. The site inside the pore of the M2 protein has higher affinity, but the affinity is only “at least 40-fold greater”, according to the paper. Although this is a clear difference, in biological terms this isn’t so enormous. They also note that in order to observe the membrane binding site, the drug must make up a large proportion of the total membrane fraction. But, that’s not necessarily an argument against the membrane binding site, since in vivo the drug would also naturally partition into the membrane.

Overall, the Cady et al. paper appears to be technically solid to me, although I don’t have the expertise to evaluate the methods rigorously. Certainly, they demonstrate that the drug binds with high affinity within the M2 protein pore, and they can measure distances between atoms in the protein and the drug with great precision. However, when the authors write that they have solved the structure of the drug binding site, it’s important to emphasize that they have only solved the structure of the binding site at high resolution, and not the rest of the M2 protein. Because the M2 protein consists of four separate subunits, a very important part of solving such a structure is measuring distances between these different subunits. Cady et al. have only measured four distances between subunits (really 1 distance that occurs four times in the structure, since the four subunits are identical). They also have 60 (15×4) orientational measurements, plus some additional distance measurements within the same subunit (and it is my understanding that all of these measurements are from their earlier studies).

What I thought was somewhat misleading about this study, though, was that the authors write “For comparison, the previous [Schnell/Chou] solution NMR M2 structure ensemble was constrained by 12 interhelical NOEs and 18 amide residual dipolar couplings for the TM region.” I call this misleading, because if they were going to count these the same way they counted their own measurements, these would be 48 (12×4) distance measurements between subunits and 72 (18×4) orientational measurements. These are just the measurements within the transmembrane portion, and the Schnell/Chou structure has additional measurements outside of this region, since they used a longer construct (plus hundreds of additional measurements within the same subunit). (I’ll give Cady et al. that it can be much more painstaking to make these measurements by solid state NMR, so this is certainly an impressive structure that was probably very difficult to achieve, but it’s important that we make all of these comparisons on the same terms.)

One aspect of the new study that I think is particularly good, though, is that these authors used lipid bilayers, as opposed to the detergent micelles used in the Schnell/Chou study. Basically, this means that in this study the protein is in an environment that is more similar to its natural environment. However, as in the Stouffer/DeGrado study, Cady et al. used a short protein construct–as mentioned above–only consisting of the transmembrane segments of the M2 protein. The Schnell/Chou study, on the other hand, used a longer construct that is probably more biologically relevant. The transmembrane portion of the M2 protein is clearly the most important and relevant part, but the other portions may also affect the structure and function of the protein.

So, what does all of this mean in the end? Well, I think it’s too early to say. Personally, I’m starting to believe that both sites may have some biological relevance, and that could explain how both sides of the controversy have been able to amass such a significant amount of data in favor of their respective sides. Another factor here that I haven’t mentioned yet in this post is that these studies have used two different–although very similar–drugs: rimantadine in the Schnell/Chou study and adamantane in the others. I would be surprised if this turns out to be an important distinction, but it’s something that should be explored further nonetheless.

Therefore, while the new study provides compelling new evidence in favor of adamantane drugs inhibiting M2 by binding within the pore, in my mind this still isn’t a closed case.

Cady, S., Schmidt-Rohr, K., Wang, J., Soto, C., DeGrado, W., & Hong, M. (2010). Structure of the amantadine binding site of influenza M2 proton channels in lipid bilayers Nature, 463 (7281), 689-692 DOI: 10.1038/nature08722

Hat tip to Revere of Effect Measure.