Abel Pharmboy is the nom de plume of an academic researcher and educator who took his PhD in Pharmacology and Therapeutics and BS in Toxicology. He writes on natural product drugs and dietary supplements, academic career development, medical journalism and, occasionally, making and listening to music and, with the help of his colleague, Erleichda, wine appreciation.
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It's Sunday morning on the US East Coast and I really need to put the computer down to get out for a hike in the crisp, autumn air. Sunday morning is a great time to catch up on long-form writing but I won't be the one providing it for you.
Instead, I encourage you to take 15 minutes this morning to read an "old" (2005) article in Fortune magazine entitled, The Law of Unintended Consequences, by Clifton Leaf in Fortune magazine.
This article details the impact of a 1980 amendment to US patent and trademark law put forth by Senator Bob Dole and the senior Senator Bayh, Birch. The Bayh-Dole Act transferred the inventorship of discoveries from federally-funded research to the universities, institutes, or small businesses where the work was done (good overview here). Prior to 1980, the US government held the title to any discoveries made, say, with NIH funding and the vast majority of that technology languished unlicensed.
This is the reason, for example, why the co-discoverers of the anticancer drug, Taxol, never benefited financially from the work: because the discovery was made around 1970 and its mechanism of action was identified in 1977.
At the recent U2 Academic Conference, I had the opportunity to be at the local premiere of It Might Get Loud, a much-more-than documentary of the electric guitar as told through the careers of Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page, U2's The Edge, and Jack White of The White Stripes and Raconteurs. For the record, I thought that White was going to be totally out of his league - while I wouldn't call him a "legend" as billed by the producers, I left being incredibly impressed with his background and breadth of abilities.
Related to the movie trailer below, I had an exchange with Toaster Sunshine, a musician and scientist who writes the blog, Mad Scientist, Jr. (Tagline: "Sticking stuff that wasn't made to be stuck to stuff to stuff that wasn't made to have stuff stuck to it.") The trailer opens and closes with Jack White constructing a primitive electric guitar with a weathered wood plank, a bottle, and some wires and such - Toaster knew exactly what it was and told me how to do it myself.
However, as a microcosm of our respective lives (Toaster is still in the lab and I am primarily at my computer), Toaster actually made the instrument yesterday.
For the hackerspace, I send out a lot of emails. Most of them get ignored, but some of them stick. One of the ones that got a reply was a request to tour a museum collection of rare and antique musical instruments that the university's music school owns. In one of the conversations we had with the outreach director of the collection, we decided that co-hosting an educational event that melds technology and music into a workshop for kids and their parents. This is what is referred to as a Make and Take, participants register, pay a fee for parts, come and get taught how to make stuff, and then get to take it home with them afterwards.
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 Servicereports:
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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.
