autism
oracknows | April 30, 2014Bat Signal time!
Here's a quickie that I can't resist publicizing. Antivaccinationists appear to be planning on crashing the CDC's Twitter party for National Infant Immunization Week, which will take place at 1 PM EDT today. Here's our "friend" Ginger Taylor promoting the hashtag #CDCvax to her Twitter followers:
Learn About National Infant Immunization Week at the #CDCvax Twitter Party on Wed, Apr 30 @ 1pm. #CDCvax http://t.co/3ZBN1uYKxt
— Ginger Taylor (@GingerTaylor) April 30, 2014
The intent is clear. Ginger wants to flood the Twitter chat with antivaccine nonsense and conspiracy…
oracknows | April 22, 2014I sense a new disturbance in the antivaccine force.
I hadn't planned on blogging about the antivaccine movement again, but I felt that I needed to do a follow up to yesterday's (hopefully) amusing little takedown of the antivaccine stylings of new member of that group personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect and arrogance of ignorance, namely The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR). There was a point in there that I had noticed (and even briefly commented on) that requires more of an expansion, particularly since it would allow me to comment on a post that I saw last week and never got around…
oracknows | April 21, 2014There is a perception that strikes me as common enough to be considered "common wisdom" that antivaccine views are much more common on the "left" of the political spectrum than they are on the "right." I've discussed on multiple occasions how this perceived common wisdom is almost certainly wrong, or at least so incomplete as to be, for all intents and purposes, wrong. Frequently, the accusation that the left is antivaccine, usually coupled with the stereotype of the crunchy, affluent, liberal elite living on the coasts being antivaccine, is often thrown back by conservatives stung by…
oracknows | April 18, 2014For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don't feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to blog about but didn't get around to. And what better topic to blog about on Good Friday than the exact opposite of what this Easter season is supposed to be about, namely the behavior of antivaccinationists? I realize it's an easy target, but, hey, I'm tired. Besides, it amuses me, and, as I've said so many…
oracknows | April 13, 2014Never look a blogging gift horse in the mouth, I always say. Well, sort of. It just figures that I could only do two posts that weren't about vaccines before circling back around to the topic of the antivaccine movement. For that, I have Jenny McCarthy to thank. McCarthy, as anyone who pays attention to the antivaccine movement knows, is the most famous antivaccine activist in the United States, if not the world. She's a woman who's used her celebrity to promote the notion that vaccines cause autism, so much so that she willingly lent her name to a notorious antivaccine group (Generation…
oracknows | April 8, 2014As I hang out at the San Diego Convention Center, I can't resist one last note on the Chili's debacle that I wrote about yesterday.Remember how Wendy Fournier, president of the National Autism Association (NAA), the antivaccine group posing as an autism advocacy group, whined when Chili's backed out of its deal to donate 10% of its proceeds from yesterday's sales to the NAA that she isn't antivaccine? I'll refresh your memory, so that you don't have to click on the link above:
Wendy Fournier, president of NAA, said, “It was obvious that the comments [Chili's was] getting were a fight about…
oracknows | April 7, 2014Here I am, sitting on the balcony of my hotel room in sunny San Diego, as I get ready to head over to the 2014 meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). The sun is rising over the mountains, and the only sound I hear is that of running water in the swimming pool below (well, that and traffic around the convention center, the odd siren, and the noise of air conditioner fans), and I need to produce something quick for the blog. Realizing that last week, I described myself as having fallen into a "rut," not because I thought my posts were substandard but rather because I…
milhayser | April 6, 2014Perovskite solar cells can not only emit light, they can also emit up to 70% of absorbed sunlight as lasers.
Critical signaling molecules can be used to convert stem cells to neural progenitor cells, increasing the yield of healthy motor neurons and decreasing the time required to grow them.
Mexican blind cavefish are so close to their sighted kin that they are considered the same species, but they use pressure waves (from opening and closing their mouths) to navigate in the dark.
Electrostatic assembly allows luminescent elements (like Europium) to be embedded in nanodiamonds; these glowing…
oracknows | March 31, 2014As hard as it is to believe, I've actually "known" pediatrician to the antivaccine stars (such as Jenny McCarthy), "Dr. Jay" Gordon, for nearly nine years now. It began back in 2005 when I first noticed him writing blogs full of antivaccine nonsense at the then-new group blog, The Huffington Post, where I noted antivaccine rhetoric running rampant, complete with amazing examples of what I like to call the "pharma shill" gambit. Since then, he's periodically come to my attention, be it for nonsense equating vaccine manufacturers to tobacco companies, falling headlong for the bogus "toxins"…
milhayser | March 31, 2014Scientists use a 'gene gun' to insert a gene from a flowering plant called rockcress into the cells of wheat seeds. The genetically modified wheat became more resistant to a fungus called take-all, which in real life can cause "a 40-60% reduction in wheat yields."
T-cells from six HIV+ patients were removed from their bodies, treated with a zinc-finger nuclease designed to snip a gene out of the cell's DNA, and put back in the patients. Removal of the gene mimics a naturally occurring mutation which confers resistance to the HIV virus. But only 25% of the treated cells showed evidence of…
oracknows | March 30, 2014As I just mentioned a week ago, there used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn't bad. Sometimes the stories were actually informative and useful. However, in variably there would be a flurry of truly aggravating stories in which the reporter, either through laziness, lack of ideas, or the desire to add some spice and…
oracknows | March 25, 2014After the last couple of days of depressing posts about the utter failure of the FDA to do its job protecting cancer patients from the likes of Stanislaw burzynski, it's time to move on. Unfortunately, the first thing that caught my eye as I sat down to blog last night not only fried my irony meter as though a radioactive flame had been aimed at it by Godzilla itself but it also stomped that sucker flat as though Godzilla had jumped up and down on it. It came from one of the only places where the bloggers are so utterly without a sense of self-awareness that they could achieve such a feat. No…
milhayser | March 23, 2014For the first time, researchers have transformed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into specialized bladder cells. Meanwhile the development of iPSCs from normal cells has been shown to depend on two proteins necessary for the induction of a glycolytic state. In order to make iPSCs, researchers have previously needed to collect significant amounts of skin, bone marrow, or blood from a donor, but researchers have demonstrated a new method that requires only a single drop of blood. In the future, you may be able to prick your finger, send a drop of blood to the lab, and have them grow a…
milhayser | March 21, 2014Do environmental factors such as toxins contribute to autism? On Respectful Insolence, Orac looks at a new study which found a correlation between birth defects and the eventual development of autism. Orac says this correlation has already been demonstrated, along with "autism and exposure to teratogens, specifically at least maternal rubella infection, thalidomide, valproic acid, and misoprostol." But could other chemicals be influencing higher rates of birth defects and autism in certain areas? Many people believe that autism-inducing toxins are found in vaccines. But autism's correlation…
oracknows | March 18, 2014As hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when I (sort of) gave "Dr. Bob" Sears the benefit of the doubt. You remember Dr. Bob, don't you? Son of the famous pediatrician Dr. William Sears, who was best known for his "Sears Parenting Library" and is a not infrequent guest on TV, where he goes by the name of "Dr. Bill." Like his father, Bob Sears, likes to do the "Dr. First Name" thing and calls himself "Dr. Bob." (What is it with pediatricians and this annoying affectation?)
Along with his wife Martha Sears, RN, Dr. Bill is known as a major proponent of "attachment parenting."…
oracknows | March 14, 2014Time to get back to business after yesterday's festivities.
One of the items of Gospel Truth among the "autism biomed" movement, which consists of people who fervently believe that autism is caused by some sort of external "toxin," infection, or vaccines and that subjecting children to various forms of quackery designed either to "detoxify" or reverse whatever physiological derangement believed to be at the root of autism will "recover" these children from autism. Of course, there are a lot of antivaccine believers in the autism biomed movement, and arguably the vast majority of "autism…
oracknows | March 7, 2014Oh, dear.
I didn't think I'd be writing about that wretched hive of Dunning-Kruger scum and quackery, the most inaptly named website and blog of all time, The Thinking Moms' Revolution (TMR), after having written about it just earlier this week. When last we visited this klatsch of smugly arrogant moms, one of them was bragging about how, if your pediatrician "fires" you because you won't do the responsible thing and vaccinate your children, you should be proud because it means that you've arrived as a "Thinker." And, yes, they do capitalize the word "Thinker" and its variants, such as "…
oracknows | March 5, 2014I don't know if I could be a pediatrician right now.
True, I probably don't have the personality to be a pediatrician, at least not a primary care pediatrician on the front lines. After all, if I did, I probably wouldn't have become a surgeon, much less a hyperspecialized cancer surgeon. One reason (among many, of course) is that I don't have the patience to deal with non-vaccinating parents, particularly parents with massive cases of Dunning-Kruger disease. The same goes for being a pediatric nurse practitioner or nurse, who are also on the front lines in dealing with the antivaccine…
oracknows | March 3, 2014
Last week, one of my favorite comedians and filmmakers of all time passed away unexpectedly. I'm referring, of course, to Harold Ramis, whose work ranged from movies like National Lampoon's Animal House (the first R-rated movie I ever saw, actually), to gems like Ghostbusters and and Groundhog Day. In fact, in retrospect, when I posted about Brian Hooker and the antivaccine movement trying to resurrect the hoary corpse of the conspiracy theory that the CDC is some how "covering up" data that would prove that the antivaccine cranks were right all along about mercury in vaccines as a cause…
oracknows | February 25, 2014I'm home.
Oh, wait. No. Well, I'm back.
Yes, the grant has been submitted, and I'm ready to get back to my hobby of science, skepticism, and, when necessary, laying down some Insolence, both Respectful and not-so-Respectful. And, it figures, too. While I was distracted with meatspace concerns, such as trying to keep my lab from running out of money, a task that's a lot more difficult today than it was ten years ago, the quacks and cranks have been out to play. True, they probably would have been out to play regardless of whether I was available to do what I do best. It just feels as though…