communication
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009
Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.by Chris Mooney and Sheril KirshenbaumBasic Books2009
In this book, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum set out to alert us to a problem, and they gesture in the direction of a solution to that problem. Despite the subtitle of the book, their target is not really scientific illiteracy -- they are not arguing that producing generations of Americans who can do better on tests of general scientific knowledge will fully address the problem that worries them. Rather, the issue they want to tackle is the American public's broad…
jstemwedel | July 11, 2009At his lounge, the Lab Lemming poses an excellent hypothetical question about manuscript review:
Suppose you are reviewing a paper. Also assume, that like most papers these days, that it has multiple authors, each of whom applies his expertise to the problem at hand. And finally, assume that you are an expert in some, but not all of the fields used to solve the particular problem being reported in this paper.
What do you do if one of the key points in the paper that is not your area of expertise seems fishy. For example, if the paper is on your field area, what if some of the lab results…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2009Over at Cosmic Variance, Julianne Dalcanton describes a strategy for scientific communication that raises some interesting ethical issues:
Suppose you (and perhaps a competing team) had an incredibly exciting discovery that you wrote up and submitted to Nature.
Now suppose that you (and the competing team) simultaneously posted your (competing) papers to the ArXiv preprint server (which essentially all astronomers and physicists visit daily). But, suppose you then wrote in the comments "Submitted to Nature. Under press embargo".
In other words, you wrote the equivalent of "Well, we've…
jstemwedel | June 10, 2009Almost a month ago, I told you about a pair of new case studies released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides which examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. In that post, I also proposed that we read and discuss these case studies as a sort of ethics book club.
Next Monday, June 15, we'll be kicking off our discussion of the first case study, "Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site" (PDF).
The case study is on the long side (54…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2009The New York Times has an article about a physician-scientist caught in scientific misconduct. The particular physician-scientist, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, was an Army surgeon working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is now (for the time being anyway) a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since the wrongdoing of which Kuklo was accused happened while he was at Walter Reed, the Army investigated.
That investigation "substantiated all the accusations against the physician."
The Kuklo case has lots of ethical issues we've seen before. The New York Times article…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009There's an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune on the "Oprah effect". The upshot is that products or people who Oprah deigns to grace with airtime tend to find enormous public acceptance.
While this is well and good if the product is a novel or the person is a television chef, it's less clear that the Oprah effect is benign in the case of people without medical expertise offering medical advice.
From the article:
In May, Winfrey, whose contract for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" expires in 2011, struck a deal with actress, author and Chicago native Jenny McCarthy, who emerged as an autism…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009In a recent post, Candid Engineer raised some interesting questions about data and ethics:
When I was a graduate student, I studied the effects of many different chemicals on a particular cell type. I usually had anywhere from n=4 to n=9. I would look at the data set as a whole, and throw out the outlying points. For example, if I had 4 data points with the values 4.3, 4.2, 4.4, and 5.5, I would throw out the 5.5.
Now that I am older, wiser, and more inclined to believe that I am fully capable of acquiring reproducible data, I am more reluctant to throw away the outlying data points. Unless…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009There's a new feature article by Liza Gross [1] up at PLoS Biology. Titled "A Broken Trust: Lessons from the Vaccine-Autism Wars," the article does a nice job illuminating how the themes of trust and accountability play out in interactions between researchers, physicians, patients, parents, journalists, and others in the public discourse about autism and vaccines. Ultimately, the events Gross examines -- and the ways the various participants react to those events -- underline the questions: Who can we trust for good information? and To whom are we accountable for our actions and our…
jstemwedel | May 26, 2009Following up on an excellent post she wrote earlier this month, Jessica Palmer at Bioephemera brings us an update on the lawsuit against Jared Diamond and The New Yorker. You may recall that this lawsuit alleges that a story written by Diamond and published in The New Yorker defamed its subject (and Diamond's source) New Guinean driver Daniel Wemp, as well as Henep Isum, another man featured in the story but never interviewed by Diamond nor contacted by fact-checkers from The New Yorker. As described in the earlier post at Bioephemera:
Diamond's main source, a New Guinean driver named…
jstemwedel | May 20, 2009At White Coat Underground, PalMD explores the question of what kind of responsibilities might fall on celebrities, especially those who use their soapboxes in a way that exceeds the tether of their expertise. The particular celebrities under examination are Jenny McCarthy, who has used her celebrity to spread her views on the proper treatment and prevention of autism, and Oprah Winfrey, who has used her media empire to give McCarthy a soapbox with more reach.
Pal writes:
Jenny claims an expertise based on her personal experience. Whether one views themselves as an expert is largely…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2009Earlier this week, I found out about a pair of new case studies being released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides. These cases examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of microbicides antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. Here are some details:
Between August 2004 and February 2005 the HIV prevention world was rocked by the suspension and cancellation of PrEP effectiveness trials in Cambodia and Cameroon. To the considerable surprise of researchers, advocates, and donors, the trials became embroiled in…
jstemwedel | May 7, 2009At White Coat Underground, PalMD considers an article from the Journal of Medical Ethics. The article (L. Johnson, R. B. Stricker, "Attorney General forces Infectious Diseases Society of America to redo Lyme guidelines due to flawed development process," Journal of Medical Ethics 2009; 35: 283-288. doi:10.1136/jme.2008.026526) is behind a paywall, but Pal was kind enough to send me a copy.
Pal writes:
I have a strong interest in medical ethics, although I'm not an ethicist myself. Still, I'm generally familiar with the jargon and the writing styles. This piece reads like no ethics article I…
jstemwedel | May 6, 2009In the wake of some recent deaths in Edmonton of teenagers who took Ecstasy, DrugMonkey gets irritated with a doctor who made some proclamation to the press:
I'm particularly exercised over an article which quotes Charles Grob, M.D. (UCLA page):
Charles Grob believes there is a strong chance that a deadly batch of adulterated pills is making the rounds in and around Edmonton, though health officials and law-enforcement groups have issued no such public warning.
Dr. Grob, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, was the first U. S. researcher to conduct human tests of methylenedioxymethamphetamine…
evolvingthoughts | May 4, 2009The host ISP of Electronic Frontiers Australia has been served a take-down notice for linking to an R-rated "blackbanned" site, itself not in Australia, in a page that was a political comment on the merits (or demerits, rather) of mandatory internet filtering in Australia. I put the entire text of their notice below the fold. This is exactly what we were told would never happen by the minister. It is exactly what everybody who ever thought for ten minutes on the subject knew would happen.
EFA gets link removal notice
Posted by Colin Jacobs | Censorship, Mandatory ISP Filtering | Tuesday 5…
jstemwedel | May 3, 2009John Lynch and Dr. Isis have already posted on the revelation that Elsevier published something, Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, that looked and sounded like it was a medical journal but that turned out to have been fancy advertising for pharmaceuticals company Merck.
The Scientist has the details:
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 reprinted or summarized articles--most of which presented data favorable to Merck products--that appeared to act solely as…
jstemwedel | May 1, 2009It occurs to me that there might be an interesting parallel to the conundrum we discussed about whether it's better to engage with a scientist giving off a shady vibe or to back away with all due haste. It's not a perfect parallel, but there are some similar issues at work.
Should scientists and physicians engage with the Huffington Post?
If you follow the ScienceBlogs frontpage, you will have gathered by now that the view in these parts is that HuffPo's science-fu is not strong. Folks like PalMD and Mike the Mad Biologist and Orac have detailed some of the ways the "health and wellness"…
bioephemera | May 1, 2009I was recently reading A Scientist's Guide to Talking With the Media, a useful and clearheaded book by Richard Hayes and Daniel Grossman of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Emphasizing the importance of science outreach, Hayes and Grossman praise the pop-sci luminaries who followed in the footsteps of Carl Sagan:
With his intriguing investigations into the activities of everyday life, Fisher joins a distinguished fraternity of public scientists that includes Barry Commoner, Jared Diamond, Sylvia Earle, Paul Erlich, and E.O. Wilson. These are some of the most famous of the hundreds of…
jstemwedel | April 25, 2009Yesterday I worked my way through the hundred's of comments on PZ's I am Pro-Test post. One theme that kept cropping up was that a great deal of animal testing is unnecessary, and that informed and attentive consumers should be able to kill the demand for it.
I thought, therefore, that it would be worth returning to a question I talked about a while ago, in a single paragraph of a fairly lengthy DVD review:
"Why do animal tests continue when cruelty-free products are available?"
In the U.S., federal law requires that cosmetics and pharmaceutical drugs be tested in animals for safety and…
jstemwedel | April 24, 2009After considering the many different roadblocks that seems to appear when people try to discuss research with animals (as we did in parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 of this series), it might be tempting to throw up your hands and say, "Well, I guess there's no point in doing that, then!"
Resist this temptation!
As we noted in part 7, there are good reasons that we (by which I mean scientists and the public) ought to be engaging in dialogue about issues like research with animals. Avoiding dialogue altogether would mean cutting off the flow of information about what actually happens in animal…
jstemwedel | April 23, 2009Remember earlier this week when we were discussing some of the positions people might hold with respect to the use of animals in research?
These included animal rights positions, which held that animals have inherent rights not to have their bodies transgressed (or that, by virtue of their capacity to suffer, they have rights not to be used in ways that might lead to their suffering), and animal welfare positions, which hold that animal suffering matters -- that it is something to be avoided or minimized -- but do not ground the ethical importance of animal suffering in animals' status as…