culture of science
ddobbs | December 2, 2008via Daily Dish, with yet more at The World's Fair
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ddobbs | November 28, 2008
Jerome Kagan, a highly prominent developmental psychologist, weighs in the Dana Foundation's Cerebrum on the roots of the skyrocketing rates of diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder, autism, and ADHD. "[it] is important ... to ask," he writes
whether this troubling [increase] reflects a true rise in mental illness or is the result of changes in the definition of childhood psychiatric disorders. The latter explanation is likely because the concept of psychopathology is ambiguous, and physicians have considerable latitude when they classify a child as mentally ill. Because a diagnosis of…
ddobbs | November 26, 2008
Lisa Bero
Critics of the FDA drug-trial process have often complained that the drug companies are free to publish only the trials that are flattering to their cause (that is, only those that show effects above placebo and relatively low side-effects). As explained in Wired Science, UC San Francisco health policy expert and Cochrane Collaboration co-director Lisa Bero has been picking this process apart:
The difference between what drug companies tell the government and doctors suggests that they're cooking the books, which could mislead doctors making prescriptions.
Of 33 new drugs…
ddobbs | November 25, 2008More wheels coming off the bus.
Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com:
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: November 24, 2008
When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were "solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study."
But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to…
ddobbs | November 24, 2008
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa
As the Times reported Friday, Senator Charles Grassley's pharma-money sweep has taken down another huge player in psychiatry: Grassley revealed that Fred Goodwin, a former NIH director who has long hosted the award-winning NPR radio show "The Infinite Mind," which frequently examined controversies about psychopharmacology, had taken in over $1.3 million consulting and speaking fees from Big Pharma between 2000 and 2007 and failed to report that income to the show's listeners and, apparently, to its producers. (For rundowns on this, see Furious Seasons,…
ddobbs | November 24, 2008
Computerized reconstruction, via BBC
from Nature's The Great Beyond:
Copernicus corpse confirmed - November 21, 2008
A skull from Frombork cathedral in Poland has been identified as that of revolutionary astronomer Copernicus.
Marie Allen, of Uppsala University, says DNA from the skull is a match for DNA from hairs found in books owned by Copernicus, whose book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium started the movement to viewing the sun -- rather than the Earth -- as the centre of the solar system.
"The two strands of hair found in the book have the same genome sequence as the tooth from…
ddobbs | November 21, 2008
This one hits close to home, as I live in Vermont. As Daniel Carlat notes, Vermont is one of the few states to actually require drug companies to disclose drug-company payments to MDs, but the state allowed exception for payments related to 'trade secrets.' The companies apparently made the most of this.
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog: How Drug Companies Hid Millions in Physician Payments in Vermont:
Vermont is one of a handful of states that requires drug companies to disclose their payments to physicians. But the law contains a loophole as big as the Ritz%u2014companies are allowed to…
ddobbs | November 7, 2008
For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.)
I can't make it, much to my chagrin, but having met LeDoux -- who is highly enjoyable company and has done Nobel-Prize-level work defining fear's neuralogical pathways -- I know this will be a highly fascinating, fun, and funny evening.
at the NY Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
(250 Greenwich St @ Barclay), 40th…
ddobbs | November 4, 2008From "Bye-bye blackboard ... from Einstein and others," an exhibit at the Museum of the HIstory of Science in Oxford.
‘I wrote the music on this blackboard while I was giving a lecture about Bach’s Goldberg Variations at the Holywell Music Room on 22nd March this year, before performing them. I was trying to make a connection between Bach’s super-sensitivity to the contemporary styles around him – very very acute in this piece – and today’s musicians. There’s a lot of information in the Goldbergs – structure, harmony, a ladder of canons – and coded information we can only guess at – myths…
ddobbs | October 18, 2008The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff.
The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor level. Impressive enough in itself:
Even more riveting, however, is the second video, which can't be embedded but which can be seen on YouTube. It mixes from-the-ground footage with aerial shots taken with infrared cameras to show how a team of five chimps -- a driver, three blockers, and an…
ddobbs | October 17, 2008Somebody bought Einstein's watch. Does this thing run fast, or slow?
You have to love a guy who plays violin and sails.
photo courtesy Antiquorum
ddobbs | September 9, 2008The evidentiary landscape regarding antidepressant efficacy seems to grow ever more slippery. Now comes a study, drawn to my attention by the busy-eyed Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons, that finds that the beneficial effects of placebo treatment of depression last longer than generally thought.
As the study's authors note, "The assumption that the placebo response in depression does not endure is widely held and often stated in writing." In particular, many seem to assume that placebo effects fade while effects of actual medications persist -- another argument for antidepressants.
The point…
ddobbs | September 8, 2008
Hi Readers.
Wanted to clue you in to a couple web pleasures. One is Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky, in which Shirky talks about how society's "cognitive surplus" -- the time and brain power contained in the free time created by the Industrial Revolution and the 40-hour work week -- has moved from building cultural infrastructure (libraries, democracies, museums) in the 19th century to TV in the post-War 20th century and the Internet (at least for many people) in the 21st century.
The benefit of this last move, Shirky argues, is that the Internet can…
ddobbs | September 5, 2008You want mail, write about cell phones and DNA.
Earlier today, when I posted a heads-up to a Science story about questions raised about data-tampering in what Science called "The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers" showing strong links between cell phone use and DNA mutations, I noted I was surprised at the lack of press coverage about this, given how heavily most papers on the subject are reported. Two hours later I got a note from Louis Slesin, who blogs on such issues at Microwave News, asserting that the Science story oversimplified the situation. Slesin pointed me to his Sept 3…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008
Surgeon, attributed to Jan Sanders van Hemessen, c. 1550. Museo del Prado, Madrid
Over at Biophemera, a ScienceBlog I've somehow overlooked to date, biologist and artist Jessica Palmer ponders a question raised by a number of Renaissance paintings depicting surgeons removing "stones of madness" from patients's skulls: Did surgeons (or quacks) sham these operations?
It's a juicy and provocative consideration, well worth a look both for the article and the several paintings shown there.
Hemessen, Huys, and Bruegel all depict the same procedure: the removal of stones from the heads of…
ddobbs | May 26, 2008A couple weeks ago Slate ran a piece asking "Are doctors shilling for drug companies on public radio?", which I took brief note of in a previous post. Now I've written up a longer reaction (actually a reaction to the reaction to the Slate story) for Columbia Journalism Review's "Observatory" blog, which covers science journalism. The gist:
If journalists ... want the information they present to the public to be taken as credible, they need to err on the side of transparency, presenting not only the voices but also the relevant financial interests of the experts they feature. Failing to do so…
ddobbs | May 9, 2008In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.
As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are…
ddobbs | May 7, 2008From Well, Tara Parker-Hope's health blog at the NY Times:
More than half of the task force members who will oversee the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s most important diagnostic handbook have ties to the drug industry, reports a consumer watchdog group.
The Web site for Integrity in Science, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, highlights the link between the drug industry and the all-important psychiatric manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The handbook is the most-used guide for diagnosing mental disorders…
ddobbs | April 9, 2008We've seen our brain on drugs. Here's the dope on brainy people on drugs.
Survey results of 1400 scientists (or Nature readers, anyway) on use of neuroenhancers
Figure from Nature, "Poll results: look who's doping"
With baseball's steroid scandals seemingly behind us now -- or at least considered less newsworthy -- the press has recently turned some of its steroidal attention to neuroenhancement among major league academics. The journal Nature has taken the lead here, publishing a commentary in early March by two Cambridge University researchers who "reported," as a nicely turned New York…
ddobbs | March 21, 2008Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to miss:
In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate Salon, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things -- even when we're dead wrong about them. His book on the subject, which I read in advance copy a while back, is fascinating fun reading. The most startling (and disorienting) finding he describes is that, from a neurocognitive point of view, our feeling of certainty about things we're wrong about is pretty much indistinguishable from our…