November 20, 2009
Category: Academia • Advertising • Cancer • Pharmaceutical Law • Quackery
In September we posted "M.D. Anderson name misused in Evolv nutraceutical water advertising," detailing the not-exactly-truthful claim by a multilevel marketing company that their bottled water product was "tested" by one of North America's premier teaching and research hospitals.
A flurry of search engine hits to this post raised my attention to the fact that the The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has now initiated legal action against the makers of Evolv. Cameron Langford at Courthouse News Service reports:
Two companies are pushing bottled tap water with false claims that it's endorsed by the MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of Texas says in Federal Court. The UT says HealtH20 Products and Evolvehealth sell the bogus water it as "Evolv," claiming it is infused with an "Archaea Active formula." [. . .]
[. . .] "Specifically, defendants are misleading consumers and cancer patients into believing that UT's MD Anderson conducted extensive testing of the main formula in the Evolv product, known as 'Archaea Active," the UT says.
"Defendants' misuse of the MD Anderson marks creates, at a minimum, a likelihood that cancer patients and consumers will falsely believe that defendants' products is sponsored or endorsed by UT's MD Anderson, when in fact, MD Anderson does not endorse or recommend the use of the defendants' product."
Natural products researchers, including yours truly, are used to supplement companies misrepresenting our published papers in their advertising literature. There's not much we can do as individuals when our work is cited on a webpage.
However, there's a much more serious issue going on in this case: according to the official complaint filed against the companies by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System (PDF here from Courthouse News) M.D. Anderson and The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center are registered US trademarks.
Read on »
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 1:02 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History • Infectious diseases • Medicine • Pharmacology • The Awesome Power of Natural Products • The Garden State
Denise Gellene in the New York Times is reporting this morning that Scottish physician, Sir John Crofton, passed away on 3 November at age 97.
Crofton is best known for implementing a combination drug regimen to treat tuberculosis, the insidious lung infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which decimated the US early last century and still kills 2 million a year worldwide. The concept of using drug combinations to increase individual drug potency and slow the emergence of resistance is now a mainstay of therapeutic approaches for cancer, HIV, and other infectious diseases.
Gellene reports that Crofton first investigated streptomycin for TB shortly after the drug's discovery and isolation at Rutgers by Selman Waksman and his then-graduate student, Albert Schatz. Waksman was sole winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, with the oversight of Schatz ranked by Scientific American among the top 10 Nobel snubs.
Crofton's original 1950 letter to the British Medical Journal on use of intermittent doses of streptomycin can be seen in this PDF.
Incidentally, the revered German physician, Robert Koch, was awarded the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of M. tuberculosis. His medical microbiology criteria, known as Koch's Postulates, became the rubric for establishing causation of an infectious agent.
Read on »
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 7:40 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2009
Category: Health Care • Public Health
No matter how early I wake up, it's always five hours later in the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the thought that I'm already behind (I won't even get into the feeling I have when I think of our Australian readers).
So when I start the day reading my Twitter stream, it's usually populated by midday news from England. I follow the NHS - National Health Service - "one of the largest publicly funded health services in the world," and their superb health information site, NHS Choices.
This morning I saw this tweet about the launch of their new sexual health site:
@NHSChoices Our new sexual health hub includes advice on contraception, good sex guides, sex & young people, STIs and much more http://bit.ly/3wtJwL
Beyond the simple fact that the NHS exists because the UK has held since 1948 that every person deserves a basic level of state-supported health care, could you imagine what it would take for such a site to be sponsored by a US health agency? Supported with tax dollars? Can you imagine the wrangling of politicians, the religious right, and all manner of people ranting about government-sanctioned sex - and information for the young people???
So at the risk of being deemed a socialist, let me applaud the NHS for what is a truly terrific and straight-talking resource. What I've seen of the rest of the site is pretty fantastic as well.
You don't have to be British to get a lot of great take-home information for yourself and for your kids.
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 7:02 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 17, 2009
Category: Florida • K-12 education • Science education
Brandon Haught is Director of Florida Citizens for Science Communications and has been a tireless advocate for science education across this large and educationally diverse state. His blog, an activity of the larger Florida Citizens for Science organization, carries this mission:
This blog is used to keep track of the good, bad and ugly science news in our state and beyond. We tend to focus on educational issues. When a science class makes the news for doing something interesting or positive, I try to make sure a post goes up here about it. When a Florida scientist gets out into the community to promote education, I try to highlight it. Yes, we will certainly post all about the antics of those trying to promote an anti-science viewpoint, but we are just as much about praising the good things that happen in our state.
As I've said before, the only way to get scientists to value getting out of the lab and into the community is for us to value those who do.
Read on »
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 8:02 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 16, 2009
Category: Stuff I don't know about • Why Things Are
Before you tell me to go do this, I did - and I still don't have a good answer.
I was reminded of this issue when I learned that a couple of friends were off this weekend to the snowy Rocky Mountain West attending the 2009 Carnivore Conference: Carnivore Conservation in a Changing World sponsored by Defenders of Wildlife at the Grand Hyatt Denver. Some of these folks are graduate students and freelance writers who are on tight budgets.
The most recent article I found on this issue was by Barbara E. Hernandez at BNET. She asked the same question as I, made some observations, and asked rhetorically why high-end hotels don't seize on such a low-cost, good-will amenity instead of aggravating us all with yet another charge.
I suspect that the answer is, "because they can."
I suspect that marketing studies show that people who can afford to stay at expensive hotels (or, more likely, who are doing so on a business's dime) don't really care about another $9.95-$12.95/day Wi-Fi charge whereas someone staying in a $40/night hotel isn't going to pay another 25% for internet when they can go down the street and get it for free at another budget hotel.
So, why do we tolerate it when we go to a big scientific conference?
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 7:29 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 15, 2009
Category: Academia • Bioethics • Blogging community • Cancer • The Working Scientist
On Friday, I wrote a post about the 20th anniversary of my PhD dissertation defense and my reverence for Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cervical cancer gave rise to the first immortalized human cell line and the primary system for my work. I also alluded to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the upcoming book by Rebecca Skloot that is already garnering extensive pre-release praise.
I was, as readers have come to expect, quite a bit sentimental and reflective, with a call that we all do our part to somehow acknowledge those patients whose tissues make it possible for us scientists to do our work.
If I anticipated any response, it was perhaps a few congratulations on the anniversary. However, I didn't expect my singling out of HeLa cells to draw any contention. Regular reader and colleague, Jonathan wrote:
Really? Seems a bit extreme to me. Even if IRBs allowed for naming of donors, it would have been completely infeasible to describe each of the CABG patients whose leftover saphenous vein, IMA and radial arteries were used for my primary cell cultures.
HeLa cells have an interesting story, but what about all the other immortalized cell lines that we use in the lab? How about all those primary cell cultures? It seems odd selecting one person to put on a pedestal.
Widely-engaged commenter becca noted that this wasn't just an interesting story, but rather a fable with a moral. Another commenter got a bit passive-aggressive challenging Jonathan on whether my suggestion was "extreme" or just that he couldn't be bothered with acknowledging those who made his work possible.
Jonathan then responded:
Over the course of three years, I think I used between 40 and 50 different primary cultures. Ignoring for a second the *enormous* ethical issue with naming the anonymized patients who donated these bits of tissue (the sort of thing an IRB would shut down a lab for in the UK) it would have doubled the size of my thesis. All sentimentality aside, I was doing pharmacology, not social science.
I also find it a double standard. Why should HeLa cells receive this distinction but not whoever was behind the A549 cell line? Or the BEAS-2B? Or any of the hESCs? You try doing the same with one of the hESC donors and see where that gets you? Given the way the NIH ethics rules have been written, you'd probably be blacklisted from receiving grant funding in the future.
Who were those rules (and the other IRB rules anonymizing patients) written by? Heartless men in white coats or the bioethics community? Have you ever met people who work in bioethics/ELSI? I have, they're not the heartless white coat types.
I've had the pleasure of meeting Jonathan so I feel that perhaps he misunderstood my point and was getting a bit defensive at the commenters. So, here was my response which, as often happens, is long enough to be its own blog post:
Read on »
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 11:47 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 13, 2009
Category: Academia • Florida • History • Personal • The American South
Twenty years ago this morning, I had to defend a body of work that contained this paragraph on page 24:
HeLa cells are a human cervical carcinoma cell line having a doubling time of 24 hr and were obtained from Dr. Bert Flanegan, Dept. of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Florida. HeLa cells were maintained as subconfluent monolayer cultures in minimal essential media (alpha modification; GIBCO) with 10% fetal bovine serum (GIBCO) at 37° under a humidified atmosphere containing 5% CO2. Cells were maintained in logarithmic growth by subculturing every other day using 0.05% trypsin/0.02% EDTA and reseeded at a density of 5 X 105 in a 75cm2 tissue culture flask.
And with that, nothing more was said about the cellular system that led to the awarding of my PhD.
I am embarrassed by the omission of any reference to the 31-year-old black woman from rural Virginia, Ms. Henrietta Lacks, whose aggressive cervical cancer allowed Dr. George Gey at Johns Hopkins to isolate and propagate the first, immortalized human cancer cell line.
I also find it telling that my advisor and my committee made no requests of me to better document the cells I used - no citation of the original paper by Gey's group or even the American Type Culture Collection source of the cells for Dr. Flanegan's lab downstairs.
Each Spring, we now hold memorial services on medical school campuses around the world to honor cadavers and their families who make first-year medical school anatomy dissection laboratories possible.
While cell culture gifts are much more detached, and usually anonymized, I've often thought that we basic scientists should take similar steps to honor those who have made our work possible.
This is one of the reasons that I am such an enthusiastic supporter of the upcoming book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and why her 2006 New York Times Magazine cover story on human cells and tissues led me to seek her out to learn more about the origins of HeLa.
When I first started telling Rebecca how HeLa cells had spawned my doctoral work, I went through my CV and re-read some of the older papers where I had used the cell line. Much of my dissertation work on DNA topoisomerase IIα appeared in a 1991 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. But I forgot that I also used HeLa cells as a source of human genomic DNA for the first paper from my first independent laboratory (in Molecular Pharmacology in 1995), co-authored with my first PhD student and first technician.
I note the journal names specifically because JBC was co-founded in 1905 by my 'nymsake, John Jacob Abel, and Mol Pharm is a journal of the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET), the organization established in late 1908 by a group led by Abel.
So while I have already acknowledged with "Abel" the history of my discipline, I find it only appropriate today to reflect on the life and legacy of the woman whose suffering gave rise to an unknowing gift, one that has touched the lives of thousands of scientists like me.
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 10:02 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 12, 2009
Category: Academia • Blogging community • Career development
I was just going through my unread Twitter stream from yesterday and found a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled, "A Scientist's Guide to Academic Etiquette," with a tagline about scientists lacking in social skills.
Recognizing the truth in that statement, I fired up the post to the very pleasant surprise of learning that the author is none other than the Grande Dame of the science blogging community, Female Science Professor.
Female Science Professor is the pseudonym of a professor in the physical sciences at a large research university who blogs under that moniker and writes monthly for our Catalyst column. Her blog is http://science-professor.blogspot.com.
An aside: I really like the term moniker instead of the pejorative pseudonym or the pompous nom de plume or, worse, nom de blog.
Oh, wait - what's that in my profile? Nom de plume?
So, one might think that FSP's first point would be not to be a pompous ass. Well, not exactly, although several points cover that ground.
Here's a little background:
In the years that I have been blogging, I have written about some of the situations in which we academics are impolite to each other, and offered suggestions for how we might get along better. I started numbering the examples, at first with randomly assigned, absurdly high numbers, as if they were items in a long nonexistent document called "FSP's Guide to Academic Etiquette." Eventually I collected all of those scenarios together and gave them real numbers. I hereby share my existing list, with the addition of some new items.
A cursory glance shows that this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the things one might want or need to know to navigate the academic world. Furthermore, some of these tips are more useful than others, some are more serious than others, and more than a few focus on the extremes of academic behavior. All of them are based on actual experiences.
A couple of my favorites:
24. For advisers: Don't assume that a student or postdoc lacks ambition just because they don't want to be a professor at a big research university.
10. For students and postdocs: If you are paid a salary, you should do the work.
21. For people introducing a speaker: Before the talk, ask speakers if they have a preference about what is said during their introduction. Some people won't, but some may have preferences about what to mention (dates, places, awards, crimes).
Read on »
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 5:02 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 11, 2009
Category: Politics • Race in Science and Society
A bit off-topic of the blog but a science building on campus is hosting a discussion with Guadeloupe-born footballer, Lilian Thuram. He was considered to be one of the best players in Europe; his best-known accomplishment of his 15-year career playing defender with Monaco, Parma FC, Juventus, FC Barcelona and the French national team, is contributing to France winning the 1998 World Cup.
However, Thuram was forced into retirement in 2008 following a diagnosis of cardiac hypertrophy (ventricular, I assume, and pathological, not typical "athlete's heart"). The same condition claimed Thuram's brother while playing.
Thuram is here not to talk about soccer but rather racism. The auditorium is more packed than I have ever seen for a scientific talk.
Following his retirement, he established the Lilian Thuram Foundation to use education of young people as a strategy for combating racism in Europe. In politics, Thuram made headlines during the 2007 French elections by calling out the institutionalized racism of Nicolas Sarkozy.
"Sarkozy's rhetoric isn't quasi-racist, it is racist," Thuram said in an interview with Spain's El Mundo newspaper.
"He wants to create a ministry of immigration and national identity and that's dangerous ... When you start to divide people and see one group here, Muslims there, the blacks over there, you teach people to see others as different."
Sarkozy has defended his plans for a ministry to protect France's traditional values, saying France had a "gigantic problem" with integration.
"What is being integrated? My mother is French, my father is French. Why do I have to be 'integrated'? Because I am black. You'd never ask if a white man was integrated," Thuram was quoted as saying.
"France doesn't have a problem with immigration, it has a problem with citizenship. Some French people don't think other Frenchmen are French. If I stop playing football tomorrow and I go back to France, people won't see me as a Frenchman, they'll see me as an immigrant," he said.
Thuram is using a translator but it's great to see some of the students asking him questions in French.
Someone asks the obvious question: He doesn't have to do this; he could just enjoy retirement. But what exactly does he think young people could do:
Study how injustices happen, pay attention to history and use it to teach/learn personal responsibility to make changes no matter your station in life. You don't have to be a famous footballer to stand up against racism in your classroom and community.
Previously, Thuram had been under the impression that advances against racism in the US was due to increasing the teaching of African American history in our schools as part of a mandatory curriculum. Since visiting the last few days, he now realizes this is not the case.
Interesting point was made that when first generation of blacks came to France, they made little demands of government; it is only now that the next generation grows up in France that he feels there is at least some resistance even as those in power may institutionalize racism. If I understood the translator correctly, he notes that this may be what is happening in the US with Lations.
One student who is French and black feels that racism gets worse every time she goes back. Thuram says that his perception is that the pushback and demands of blacks (and Muslims) are drawing out racist behavior into the public.
Posted by Abel Pharmboy at 5:51 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
