The Scientific Activist

Donate Seed Magazine to a High School of Your Choice

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 13:55:50 -0500

Seed just announced that it's making available discounted subscriptions to Seed for donation to high schools. If you're interested, click here, and you can donate a year-long subscription for $14.95 (discounted from $19.95). Surely, exposing students to more interesting, diverse, and engaging science writing can do no harm--and hopefully it will pique some students' interest.

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Slowing the Pace of Change: Bush Appointees Fast-Tracked into Career Government Jobs

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:15:19 -0500

Clearly, I owe my readers some true post-election analysis--something that has been slowed down by the insanely busy schedule I've been keeping in the lab and the totally overwhelming implications of the fantastic and historic recent election of Barack Obama. In the meantime, though, I'd like to point out a particularly insidious aspect of the Bush legacy that has so far gone underreported, although it has been publicized by AAAS president James McCarthy and was recently reported in The Washington Post:

The president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply criticized recent cases of Bush administration political appointees gaining permanent federal jobs with responsibility for making or administering scientific policies, saying the result would be "to leave wreckage behind."

"It's ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure," said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "You'd just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments."

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Vote!

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:44:02 -0500

If you haven't already, do it now. We have a chance today to move our country in a new much needed direction. One vote could be the difference between waking up tomorrow to a bright new future or another four/eight years of regret.

Go to voteforchange.com to find your polling location and to access detailed state-specific voter information.

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Seed Announces Matching Funds for 2008 ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose Challenge

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:55:57 -0500

Seed just announced that it will be matching up to $15,000 in donations to this year's ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose Challenge. This is great news, and if you haven't donated already this is a great reason to do it now. There's only one week left!

You can donate to my challenge here.

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Another Reason to Consider Open Access

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 17:07:53 -0500

Jim Hu gives us another reason for scientists to consider publishing in open access journals:

Sometimes I'd like to view your papers while I'm off campus and at a study section. Of course, if you're one of my grants, I have already accessed your paper from home. But if I can't access the paper from the NSF building in Arlington, or from a hotel where an NIH panel is meeting, I can't use information from it to argue against some other panelists misinterpretation of what you did.

Publishers who are reluctant to go full open access might consider providing a means for NSF and NIH reviewers to get free access.

To be fair, universities generally offer some kind of off-campus access to electronic journals for their faculty and students. However, these systems often require some sort of premeditation (i.e. signing up to use them while you're still on campus), can be prone to technological hiccups, and/or can be cumbersome to use. In a fast-paced environment, being able to access the full text of a publication with just a few mouse clicks can be very advantageous, so Hu makes a point worth considering.

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You Can Put $150,000 Worth of Clothes and Makeup on a Horribly Unqualified VP Candidate, but....

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:03:01 -0500

Today we learned that the Republican Party spent an almost unfathomable $150,000 in the month of September alone on clothes and makeup for Sarah "Joe Sixpack" Palin. This is a breathtaking figure, and the irony is certainly delicious. However, I can't escape the feeling that something here is still missing.

Now, if only I could find some sort of aphorism to really get at the heart of this situation....

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DonorsChoose Update: Let's Step it Up!

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:15:57 -0500

We're now two weeks into our 2008 ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose Challenge, which means that the challenge is almost halfway over. So, if you haven't donated yet, please do! Either click on my widget to the left or on this link. The pace of donations has been a little slow this year, which is a shame considering that there are so many worthy proposals in need of funding. Let's step it up!

In case you needed a little bit of extra motivation, though, Seed just announced that it's offering prizes to donors. To maximize your chances of winning, donate as soon as possible, because prize drawings start this Friday! Janet has the details:

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Obama and McCain Highlight Health Care Plans in NEJM

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:10:22 -0500

I was excited when I saw that The New England Journal of Medicine had today published summaries by Obama and McCain of their health care plans, expecting something quite detailed to appeal to a highly critical expert audience. However, their summaries were still as general and vague as ever. Regardless, these new write-ups are still a nice resource for people interested in the two candidates' plans. You can read Obama's plan here, McCain's here, or see a pdf of both side-by-side here.

On many aspects, both plans--at least as they're presented here--are quite similar. Both stress preventative medicine, modernizing our infrastructure, etc., etc. However, two major differences are apparent. The first is a difference in basic philosophy. Although he doesn't explicitely say it in his NEJM piece, we know that Barack Obama believes that health care in the US is a right, and that comes through in his writing. McCain, however, believes that health care is a "responsibility" (whatever the hell that means), and he includes loaded language throughout his write-up about "government waste" and related conservative talking points.

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Barack Obama: Health Care Is a Right

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:15:14 -0500

When I think back to the presidential debate last night, one moment stands out in my mind more than any other. And, no, it wasn't McCain calling Obama "that one". It was the discussion following Tom Brokaw's question "Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?"

Health care came up several times throughout the debate, but here I thought the answers were most telling. This is in spite of the fact that I took issue with the way the question was phrased. Specifically, I felt that the third choice ("responsibility") was unnecessary and just gave the candidates an easy cop out. Guess which one McCain chose:

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2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: GFP

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:12:06 -0500

Earlier today, the Nobel committee announced that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien "for the discovery and development of the green fluorescent protein, GFP." There's much to be said for how useful a tool GFP has been in cellular biology, but Alex Palazzo has already covered it at The Daily Transcript, so go check out his post for more.

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2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: HIV and HPV

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:10:10 -0500

The winners of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine have been announced, and the prize has been awarded for early discoveries that have subsequently led to vaccines or treatments of two widespread virus-caused diseases. Half of the prize was awarded to Harald zur Hausen "for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer" and one-fourth each was awarded to Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier "for their discovery of human immunodeficiency virus." For more, check out the official press release or the more detailed description of the prize-winning discoveries from the Nobel Committee.

This is an interesting subject for a Nobel Prize, since a huge number of scientists have contributed to the basic and applied research on HIV and HPV, leading to several significant clinical successes. The committee could have taken this in a few different directions, but they decided in both cases to give the award to just the scientists who made the initial discoveries: the initial descriptions of HIV and the identification of HPV as the predominant cause of cervical cancer. Thanks to the discoveries of Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier (and an enormous quantity of research by a wide range of scientists that followed them), patients infected with HIV can be treated with a wide array of antiretroviral drugs that can greatly extend their lifespan and improve their quality of life. In the developed world, at least, AIDS is no longer the rapid death sentence it once was in the 1980s. Likewise, thanks to Hausen and the work that followed on his footsteps, we now have two effective vaccines for HPV--which are effectively vaccines for cervical cancer.

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Economists Overwhelmingly Agree that Obama Is Stronger on the Economy

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:22:53 -0500

Recent polls have shown that voters trust Obama over McCain in addressing the economy by a margin of about 10-15%. But, what do the experts think?

The Economist conducted its own poll of economists (appropriately), and found that they agreed that Obama is the stronger candidate when it comes to the economy--but by a much wider margin. Eighty percent respondents agreed that Obama has a better grasp of economics (versus 8% for McCain), and 81% believed that Obama would pick the better economic team (versus 14% for McCain). On a scale of 1-5, respondents gave Obama's economic plan a 3.3 and McCain's a 2.1.

McCain couldn't even catch a break from Republicans. Although these self-identified Republican economists gave McCain the benefit of the doubt on their assessment of his economic plan and his prospects for picking a better economic team, 46% said that Obama appears to have a better grasp of economics (versus 23% for McCain). This graphic from The Economist gives you an idea of just how stark the results of this survey were:

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The Doctors Aren't the Only Ones at Fault

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 07:10:45 -0500

Yesterday, The New York Times reported on the latest prominent medical doctor to be outed for not reporting the vast sums of money he was receiving from drug companies:

One of the nation's most influential psychiatrists earned more than $2.8 million in consulting arrangements with drug makers from 2000 to 2007, failed to report at least $1.2 million of that income to his university and violated federal research rules, according to documents provided to Congressional investigators.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff of Emory University, is the most prominent figure to date in a series of disclosures that is shaking the world of academic medicine and seems likely to force broad changes in the relationships between doctors and drug makers.

Apparently Nemeroff has been at this game for quite a while, and this isn't the first time he's been caught:

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We Need You to Help Fund Science Classrooms! ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose Challenge 2008

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:00:32 -0500

For the month of October--and for the third year in a row--ScienceBlogs will be teaming up with the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge to raise money for worthy classroom projects. This year, they've added a nifty blog widget, which I've posted at the top of my left sidebar. So, if you're in a generous mood, you can donate directly from my widget, or you can visit my challenge here. DonorsChoose is a website where potential donors can browse through project proposals written by teachers from all across the US, and this year I've personally picked out ten projects that I would like to see funded. Most of my picks involve biology or molecular biology, but there's quite an assortment. You can view the ScienceBlogs leaderboard here, and the leaderboard for all of the categories of participating blogs here. As in previous years, Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science is coordinating this drive, and you can see her blog entry about it here.

In 2006 my challenge raised $495, and then in 2007 we raised $2,500. As I write this, I have just over $5,000 of unfunded proposals in my challenge. Since some of these projects will also be in other challenges, that's the maximum value we need to raise. I'm optimistic that we can do it, because I know that you ScienceBlogs readers are a generous bunch. In 2006, ScienceBlogs overall raised over $26,000 (including $10,000 is matching funds from Seed). As impressive as that was, in 2007 we managed to raise a whopping $69,000 (including $15,000 from Seed). You've set the bar pretty high, but--total collapse of the American financial system not withstanding--I have a pretty good feeling that we can top that this year.

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Video from the ScienceBlogs One Millionth Comment Party in London

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 03:30:06 -0500

On Saturday, 20 September, Mo Costandi (Neurophilosophy), Selvakumar Ganesan (The Scientific Indian), Kara Contreary (Pure Pedantry), and I hosted a gathering at the Calthorpe Arms in London to join others in celebrating ScienceBlogs' one millionth reader comment. In addition to footing the bill for the drinks, ScienceBlogs also sent each party a nifty little Flip video recorder. As you can see, we didn't get too crazy with it, but we did manage to capture about half an hour of conversation, and I've divided it up into three separate videos:

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