Bioethics
rskloot | October 29, 2009
Lots of excitement and news about my book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (aka HeLa),
which hits stores February 2nd (after ten years in the works). It just got a starred review in Publishers Weekly and in Booklist, and was chosen as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers title for Spring 2010. Culture Dish is very excited about all of this. But the big news for this post is that I'm organizing a three-month-long book tour that will have me speaking nationwide at
universities, scientific organizations, bookstores, book groups, high schools, and
more. If you'd like me to speak…
j7uy5 | October 26, 2009In 2007, the American Psychological Association commissioned their Task
Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation.
The background is this: early in the history of mental health treatment
efforts, homosexuality was considered to be an illness.
Therefore, it was thought to be appropriate for therapists to try to
change the sexual orientation of persons who are homosexual.
This attitude never was universal; it is said that even Sigmund Freud
was skeptical of it. Even so, it was not until 1962 that efforts
began to remove homosexuality from the
title="Diagnostic and…
j7uy5 | October 11, 2009The topic of neural enhancement has created controversy. This
came to wide attention in late 2007, upon the publication of various
articles in Nature, as noted by
href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/12/cognitive_enhancers_in_academi.php">Shelley
Batts,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/12/the_ethics_of_performance_enha.php">Janet
Stemwedel,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/04/steroids_for_the_brain_nature.php">David
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/12/survey_the_slippery_slope_of_c.php">Dobbs,
href="http://…
rskloot | October 3, 2009
Lots of excitement here at Culture Dish: The final cover for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has arrived (see left). And ... <drum roll> ... the the book's first pre-publication review has hit the press: In the issue coming out this Monday, Publishers Weekly gives The Immortal Life a starred review, calling it, "a remarkable debut ... a rich, resonant tale of modern science, the wonders it can perform and how easily it can exploit society's most vulnerable people." (wOOt!) Full review here and here:
"Science journalist Skloot makes a remarkable debut with
this multilayered story…
oracknows | August 12, 2009I hadn't planned on writing about this topic again. Really, I hadn't. The reason is mainly that politics is usually not my bag. I've said it time and time again: political bloggers are a dime a dozen, and I have no reason to suspect that my pontifications and bloviations on politics would be any more valuable or worthy of your attention than anyone else's pontifications and bloviations on politics. Besides, I've made quite the little niche for myself in the blogosphere writing about skepticism, critical thinking, and science in medicine, in particular how unscientific or pseudoscientific…
oracknows | August 11, 2009...leave it to the Investor's Business Daily to kick it up a notch to thermonuclear as an anonymous editorialist tries to criticize President Obama's health plan by invoking the dreaded British NHS:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
I realize that many of you saw this quote over at Ed Brayton's blog, but the searing stupidity of the above statement just stands out so much that I had to add my little snark too. Can…
oracknows | August 6, 2009There is no doubt that the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical schools in this country represents a profound threat to science-based medicine. By mixing mysticism, non-science, and pseudoscience along with science-based medicine, medical schools are in essence endorsing quackery and elevating it to the same level as science-based and science-tested modalities. Worse, they're running the risk of training a generation of medical students accepting of this "integrating" woo with science, who can't recognize highly implausible treatments or recognize obvious quackery. By letting…
oracknows | July 2, 2009Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease drops, leaving no reservoir of infectious agent to facilitate disease spread. The end result is that the unvaccinated are also protected, which is important for children who can't be vaccinated because they are either too young, have a medical…
oracknows | May 28, 2009Today is a very good day indeed.
I say that because Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy with Hodgkin's lymphoma who ran away with his mother to avoid having to undergo chemotherapy ordered by a judge, who had found that his parents were engaging in medical neglect in not getting him effective treatment, and returned on Monday, will begin his course of chemotherapy today. I'm very happy to hear that Daniel and his parents have decided to stop fighting:
After Daniel and his mother returned to Minnesota this week, both his parents told a judge they will let Daniel undergo chemotherapy because…
oracknows | May 23, 2009About a year ago in Wisconsin, an 11-year-old girl named Madeleine Neumann died of diabetic ketoacidosis thanks of the irrational religious beliefs of her parents, who prayed for her but did not take her to a physician even as Madeleine became weaker and more ill, her deterioration leading to a most unpleasant death. Highly unusual in such cases, the DA actually prosecuted the parents for second-degree reckless homicide. Given the unjustifiably privileged position irrational religious justifications for doing horrible things have in our society, I was even more shocked that this case went to…
rskloot | May 17, 2009Speaking of the debate over patents interfering with medical care, there's a story in today's New York Times that mentions the drug Iplex, which has shown promise for treating Lou Gehrig's disease -- a deadly and thus far untreatable degenerative disease (also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).
From the article:
Iplex ... is believed to protect the motor neurons whose
death leads to paralysis in A.L.S. Some patients had persuaded their
doctors to prescribe the drug when the F.D.A. approved it in late 2006
for children with growth deficiencies. "I started on Tuesday," Debbie Gattoni…
rskloot | May 15, 2009
Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups filed suit against Myriad Genetics -- the company that holds the patent on the breast cancer gene. They're hoping to get the breast cancer gene patent revoked, but more than that, they're aiming to stop gene patenting all together.
Today, in my new column in Slate's Double X Magazine, I go into the story of the breast cancer gene and the impact the ACLU claims it's had on science and patient care (a hint: it's not good). I also look at the suit itself, the cases that have come before this one, and what they say…
oracknows | May 11, 2009Remember about a week ago, when I lamented how scientific publisher Elsevier had created a fake journal for Merck that reprinted content from other Elsevier journals favorable to Merck products in a format that looked every bit like a peer-reviewed journal but without any disclaimers to let the unwary know that it wasn't a peer-reviewed journal?
Whoops, Elsevier did it again. Six times:
Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did…
oracknows | May 4, 2009It's times like these when I'm happy that I haven't published in too many Elsevier Journals during the course of my career. I say that because on Thursday, it was revealed that pharmaceutical company Merck, Sharp & Dohme paid Elsevier to produce a fake medical journal that, to any superficial examination, looked like a real medical journal but was in reality nothing more than advertising for Merck. As reported by The Scientist:
Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of a publication that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only…
razib | April 9, 2009The GSS has a variable, GENEGOO2, with an N ~ 2,500, that asks:
Some people say that genetic testing may cause trouble. Others think it is a wonderful medical advance. Based on what you know, do you think genetic testing will do more harm than good or more good than harm?
Below the fold are charts which show attitudes based on politics, highest degree attained, vocab score, attitude toward Bible, sex, religion, income, socioeconomic index and race.
Low income at the left:
Low socioeconomic index at the left:
oracknows | April 1, 2009Enough.
I don't know about you, but as a surgeon and a biomedical researcher, I'm fed up with animal rights terrorists who threaten biomedical research with their misinformation about animal research, their terroristic attacks on scientists who engage in such research, and listening to the despicable self-righteous idiot who is a disgrace to surgeons everywhere, Dr. Jerry Vlasak, spouting off about how assassinating researchers who use animals as part of their research would be justified.
And apparently I'm not alone. Scientists at UCLA, which, along with UC Santa Cruz, is at ground zero for…
oracknows | March 29, 2009Last week, there was a bit of a scandal of sorts over an editorial published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which I blogged about in a rather long post. The short version is that a flawed study that tested using Lexapro that neglected to report a rather important comparison that would have changed the conclusion to finding no difference between cognitive therapy and Lexapro in relieving the symptoms of depression after a stroke resulted in a complaint by Dr. Jonathan Leo of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, TN. Dr. Leo wrote a letter pointing inquiring…
oracknows | March 24, 2009About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…
oracknows | March 20, 2009Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play.
You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…