culture of science
ddobbs | March 12, 2008The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for depression make you feel (or think of yourself as) depressed? That's the question behind another part of the drug debate, regarding whether the drug industry encourages us to medicalize ordinary experience.
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008A quick heads-up: Nature weighs in on the flap over the Kirsch SSRI study that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. I've given a lot of attention to the placebo issue. Nature stresses another point: That the Kirsch study underscores the need for clinical trial data to be public. At present it is not, as the drug companies have persuaded the FDA that releasing all trial data might reveal trade secrets. Nature argues -- as have many -- that what's being hidden is not proprietary trade secrets but information vital to public health:
No more scavenger hunts
The recent media…
ddobbs | March 3, 2008
Now here's a match-up: the fine-grained, highly particularized, unpredictable, and insatiably curious mind of Nicholson Baker and the many-grained field of knowledge expressed in Wikipedia. In a great reading pleasure, Baker reviews John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or…
ddobbs | February 29, 2008The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it.
This blog search should help as well.
Some of the more notable responses since yesterday:
Science weighs in. The Times…
ddobbs | February 28, 2008The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here:
1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of stories about things in the U.S., this story got much more attention in the British press than it did here in the U.S. (The authors were from the UK, but the paper was published in a U.S.-based journal, and antidepressant use is a huge issue in the U.S.)
2) The responses -- some by bloggers, writers,…
ddobbs | January 25, 2008A bit o' squabble has broken out about hopeful monsters. As paleontologist evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne notes in a guest post at The Loom, Carl Zimmer's blog, hopeful monsters are the products of ... well, there's the problem: They were either the product of sudden large evolutionary forces, as suggested in a recent NY Times blog by Olivia Judson or, in Coyne's view, the product of overactive imaginations and underactive skepticism and fact-tending among biologists like Judson.
Both Judson's and Coyne's pieces are good fun reads. I find Coyne's more convincing, and there's no buying…
ddobbs | January 16, 2008The public will soon start getting quicker access to research results it sponsors. From BioMed Central Blog : NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory:
NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory
Many open access advocates will already have heard that NIH's Public Access Policy, until now voluntary, is set to become mandatory following President Bush's approval on Dec 26th 2007 of the latest NIH appropriations bill, which includes the following wording:
"The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted…
ddobbs | January 15, 2008A new journal from the Nature Publishing Group (publishers of Nature, Nature Neuroscience, and other favorites of mine) has just started a journal about climate change, and to my delight they feature a story about climate change and Atlantic cod, an old love of mine from my time on the Gulf of Maine.
Atlantic cod, Gadus callarius Linneaus, by Goode, from the magnificent Bigelow and Schroeder, Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, 1953, the best field guide I've ever read, now online.
Cod aren't doing terribly well, because of overfishing and decimation of inshore spawning stocks, though some pockets…
ddobbs | January 1, 2008A backlash is brewing against the mirror neuron theory, or at least its overextension. (Fair disclosure: I was part of the alleged problem.) I picked this up distinctly at the Society of Neuroscience meeting last November. I've seen it in the literature since. Last week, I convinced Greg Hickok, a cogsci/language researcher at UC Irvine, to make his case in Scientific American's Mind Matters for checking mirror-neuron-theory overreach. An excerpt is below, and you can check out the whole thing at Mirror Neurons -- Rock Stars or Backup Singers?
Sorry, couldn't resist the photo.
Hickok, I…
ddobbs | December 29, 2007Last month, when all the "Best Books of 2007" lists came out, several regulars on a science writers list-serve I'm on expressed chagrin that most of the most prominent lists held few science books. Even defining "science book" broadly, the New York Times Review Notable Books list contained just one science book (How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman) The Amazon Best 100 lists held somewhere between none and five, depending on how you defined science book. (For more on that, see my sieve of their list at bottom.) John Dupius, who keeps the blog Confessions of a Science Librarian, took to task…
ddobbs | December 27, 2007
The best things I read this year, in no particular order:
"Falling Man: A Novel" (Don DeLillo)
"Tree of Smoke: A Novel" (Denis Johnson) This is almost cheating, as I'm still in the midst of reading it. But it'd have to dive a long way in the last few pages to not stay on the list. I'll be brave and leave it in. [Update: I fond this disappointing in the end; the last quarter did not sustain the apparent brilliance of the first half.
"The Goshawk (New York Review Books Classics)" (T. H. White). Before he wrote the incomparable <em>The Once and Future King</em>, T.H. White…
ddobbs | May 3, 2007This makes me think of the old line about fading actors or writers when death brings them renewed attention: "Good career move." My post about leaving Seed's Scienceblogs and the conflict between blogging and more serious work got picked up and pondered by Andrew Sullivan at his Atlantic blogging home, as well as some other blogspots. Apparently this strikes a chord -- dissonant, and apparently in a minor key. It also shot my page-hits up to near-record highs; the only time I got more hits was when I wrote about sex. We won't explore here the possible links between writing about sex and…
ddobbs | May 1, 2007
A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore.
With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home on Seed's Scienceblogs and return to my own, quieter venue You can find my blog at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I expect to post a few times a month. But in light of how little I've posted here lately, Seed and I have amiably agreed that I should surrender this space here, as my sparse approach…
ddobbs | April 17, 2007From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one.
As the PLOS Biology review notes,
Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21…
ddobbs | February 19, 2007Maybe it sounded good at the editorial meeting: Have Christopher Hitchens, supposedly funny, clearly chauvinistic, write about Why Women Aren't Funny. And so we gots, in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens -- who seems ever more a boorish drunk rather than a quick-witted friend of the vine; an intellectual bully who refuses to admit (regarding his support of the Iraq War) that he Got It Wrong; a one-time thoughtful leftist who finds himself stuck in the same dunce corner with the determinedly unthoughtful George W. Bush -- trying to legitimize a mix of half-baked 'conventional wisdom'…
ddobbs | February 1, 2007
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. Three researchers (Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally, UC San Francisoc psychiatrist Charles Marmar, and psychologist William Schlenger, of Abt Associates) with a long history of work in PTSD among Vietnam vets grapple with the implications of a recent study that seemed to revise sharply downward long-standing…
ddobbs | January 8, 2007
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of hawkish arguments. The article explains why leaders (and the rest of us presumably) often fall for arguments that advocate "forceful action" when something more thoughtful is called for.
This is not a cutesy essay by some trendy thinker; it's is a careful piece of work by Princeton economist…
ddobbs | December 22, 2006Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raised some juicy issues about bringing a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (okay, Media 1.4) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.
(My long recent silence on this blog, for instance, while due mainly to being far too busy, rose also from my ambivalence about what makes a worthwhile blog post (more on that some other time) and a slight unease with…
ddobbs | December 21, 2006
from Furious Seasons
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In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part. The eminently readable Furious Seasons, written by a reporter who like tens of millions of Americans is, as the author puts it, "a long-time psych patient," follows psych and psych-med issues with great energy and insight; its Zyprexa Chronicles are…
ddobbs | October 23, 2006Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism by Janet Stemwedel, James Hrynyshyn and Jonah Lehrer.
I won't go here into why lousy science journalism happens. But the bird flu issue illustrates another problem in science (and other) journalism, which is the lack of coverage sometimes given to important stories. The publishing industry, particularly the newsier part, generally values…