Pharma

Well, it’s done. Today, the Senate passed the 21st Century Cures Act, a bill designed to weaken the FDA and empower pharmaceutical companies, sending it to President Obama’s desk. There’s no way Obama won’t sign it, as it contains provisions funding his Precision Medicine Initiative, and he supported it all along. For all its flaws, I knew the bill’s passage was inevitable since after the election, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated that the bill was a priority. I knew it even more when the Senate linked the bill to the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative spearheaded by Vice…

There's an oft-quoted saying that's become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that's been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn't. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call "alternative medicine" that's been proven to work? Medicine. Of course, being the kind of guy that I am, I have to make it a bit more complicated than that while driving home in essence the same message. In my hands, the way this argument goes is that the whole concept of "alternative"…

from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog. Brain and Mind Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning. As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…

Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores â that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight â sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who â disclosure department â is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paper published last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and…

Hits of the week: Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism? Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…

Above: Kasparov after his first meeting with Deep Blue, in 1997, when he crushed DP. Later it wouldn't go so well. In a splendid article in the NY Review of books, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. When I hit this paragraph late in the article, it struck me that you could write much the same thing about pharma. From The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books: Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism…

Neuroskeptic ponders the growing evidence that antidepressants significantly best placebo only in the more (or most) depressed patients. His take is that: antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of depression that they were originally used for, after all, because the first antidepressants arrived in 1953, and modern antidepressants like Prozac target the same neurotransmitter systems. Yet in recent years "clinical depression" has become a much broader term. Many peopleattribute this to marketing on…

via Wall Street Journal Health Blog: For a while now, the FDA and other regulators have been looking at safety risks associated with a few drugs patients sometimes take before getting MRI scans. While it's common for new risks to crop up with established drugs, the Times of London this weekend highlighted an interesting twist in this case: GE has filed a libel suit in Britain against a Danish radiologist who gave a talk about the risks associated with Omniscan, a GE drug that's one of the medicines regulators have been looking at. The doctor, Henrik Thomsen, gave a presentation to about 30…

1. Maybe it was just the headline ... but the runaway winner was "No pity party, no macho man." Psychologist Dave Grossman on surviving killing. Actually I think it was the remarkable photo, which looks like a painting. Check it out. 2. I'm not vulnerable, just especially plastic. Risk genes, environment, and evolution, in the Atlantic. The blog post about the article that led to the book. 3. Senator Asks Pentagon To Review Antidepressants 4. Gorgeous thing of the day: Sky's-eye view of the Maldives & other islands 5. The Weird History of Vaccine Adjuvants, even though it was from Oct 1…

In a disturbing post at ScienceInsider, Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink explain why the swine flu vaccine is running so late. Or at least they try to explain why it's so late. For while all the suppliers are running into problems, we're not allowed to know what they are. The delays are substantial and critical. They leave us naked as the flu spreads through the country. The flu has now killed 1000 people, over 100 of them children. Even as this happens, the delivery dates keep moving back and the delivery amounts keep shrinking. As recently as a month ago, the CDC was telling us that we'd…

Notables from the last 24: Over at Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity. The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior. May be something to that, Razib says â but it would be nice "get in on the game of normal human…

At Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity. The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior. May be something to that, Razib says -- but it would be nice "get in on the game of normal human variation in religious orientation (as…

My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines. The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country. If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…

OK. Animals first, then everybody else. (Other) Animals Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids Jellyfish numbers rise  My son and I saw this last year when we were at the EuroScience conference (highly recomennded) in Barcelona (ditto). The beaches had warnings of whole rafts of these. Determined to get wet in the Med, I dipped my toes. Forget Apple, Here's the Real Snow Leopard Everybody else Top soldiers denounce torture. Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency Covered heavily, but maybe you missed it. Alison Bass, whose book "Side Effects" just…

I regret I can't treat at more, um, length, the following weighty matters: Size Matters; So Do Lies   Nate Silver finds that Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, speaking of the 9/12 tea party rally in DC, " did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long." Dr. Nobody Again Questions JAMA Disclosure Policies in which Philip Dawdy and Jonathan Leo, a dangerous combination, butt heads with JAMA Self-Destruct Button, Activiated! Baucus and Conrad decide maybe Joe Wilson had a point after all. Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Puts Focus on Genetics, Deep Inhaling (…

Frederic Curtiss, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy, told Reuters Health that data attached to documents by Word has allowed him to discover undisclosed contributors. In one case, for instance, a revised manuscript arrived at his office with four named authors, but when he examined the metadata, he discovered an additional author was making substantial contributions. When documents are saved in Word, the software attaches additional information, called metadata, which identifies the creator of the document. During the editing process, changes made by additional…

Oh lordy, this is not good: The Times reports that up to 11% of the articles in leading med journals were writtne at least partly by ghostwriters.  Via Gary Schwitzer at http://blog.lib.umn.edu/schwitz/healthnews/2009/09/who-you-gonna-c.html Posted via email from David's posterous

Yes, this is my second post on Derek Lowe of my last three. No, I am not his publicist. But Derek has another nice post on how drug company scientists could do a better job on educating the public on the drug discovery process: I do a lot of talking around here about how the general public doesn't really have a good idea of what goes on inside a drug company. But a conversation with a colleague has put me to thinking that this might be largely our own fault. One of Dr. Lowe's talents is the ability to put a lot of ideas into very concise posts. So take two minutes to read about the 90%…

Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations: To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science. Science -- the search…

Scientific American has a good story by Edmund S. Higgins suggesting that might be the case. As the story notes, the evidence for such a toll is still preliminary. But the story's opening, which tells of a parent seemingly overeager to medicate a child who didn't need it, gives an idea of why the question is more important than we might like.: At the time of this visit, the boy was off the medication, and I conducted a series of cognitive and behavioral tests on him. He performed wonderfully. I also noticed that off the medication he was friendly and playful. On a previous casual encounter,…