Science Policy
scientificactivist | April 2, 2009Via Chris Mooney, who has long been a major proponent of bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA)--particularly in his seminal work The Republican War on Science--comes a link to a petition that you can sign to show your support for the OTA. Do it!
scientificactivist | April 2, 2009You see, this is why you want to fill your administration with smart, qualified, thoughtful, and innovative people--especially in the sciences. From The Times
A major investment in fighting tropical infections and chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes in poor countries would transform international perceptions of the US, according to Harold Varmus, who co-chairs the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
In an exclusive interview with The Times, Dr Varmus said that American diplomacy had undervalued the role of medicine and science in fostering friendly…
scientificactivist | April 1, 2009In discussions lamenting modern day political interference in science and the less-than-prominent role science plays in formulating policy, bringing back the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) is commonly offered as a key facet of any comprehensive solution. And, this is for good reason, as Gerald L. Epstein explains in a new article at Science Progress:
Over its history, OTA informed members of Congress and their staffs and helped shape legislation. But its reports played a far wider role. Since they explained complicated technical concepts to a non-technical audience, they…
ddobbs | March 24, 2009Skip this post if you don't want to read a writer responding point by point to a self-indulgent, insubstantial attack by a major academic.
I should say right off that I've long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered about the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of the neurochemical model of depression. My regard for this work made his critique of attack on my article about PTSD, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," all the more disappointing.
I'm not disappointed because…
ddobbs | March 18, 2009It didn't take long for my Scientific American story on PTSD to draw the sort of fire I expected. A doctor blogging as "egalwan" at Follow Me Here writes
[Dobbs] is critical of a culture which "seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD." To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up.
Doctor or not, he's seeing politics where my…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009"How We Decide" author Jonah Lehrer, fresh from a book tour of the UK, offers what he calls a "spluttering answer" (it's really quite lucid) to a question he says he's getting a lot these days: What decision-making errors were involved in our current financial meltdown??
The short version of his answer -- well worth reading in its entirety -- is that we (and big investment outfits particularlyl) succumbed to an abhorrence of uncertainty.
We hate not knowing, and this often leads us to neglect relevant information that might undermine the certainty of our conclusions. I think some of the…
sciencewoman | March 9, 2009President Obama's picks for science advisor (John Holdren) and NOAA administrator (Jane Lubchenco) are being blocked from receiving confirmation because of the anonymous holds of one or more Senators. Mike Dunford at The Questionable Authority has been following the story for at least a week and writes today that:
As I've already said - possibly to the point of inducing tedium - the scientific community needs to keep pressure on the Senate. There are so many other things going on in Washington right now that this issue is not going to get much more attention from the traditional media than it…
scientificactivist | March 9, 2009Today was a great day for science in the Executive Branch. Firstly, President Barack Obama (finally!) lifted George W. Bush's August 2001 restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research in an executive order entitled "Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells":
The purpose of this order is to remove these limitations on scientific inquiry, to expand NIH support for the exploration of human stem cell research, and in so doing to enhance the contribution of America's scientists to important new discoveries and new therapies for the…
ddobbs | March 9, 2009"Primates on Facebook" -- "Even online, the neocortex is the limit" to how many people we can really have as friends.
People who use more textual shortcuts (lk whn they txt in skl) when texting have higher reading skills. The coverage seems to assume this is causal, but it's almost surely just an association -- people with good reading skills more quickly come up with or absorb textual shortcuts.
Does "pay for performance" work in learning? For a bit, then not. "A number of the kids who received tokens didn't even return to reading at all," Dr. Marinak said. From the Times.
Babies can…
ddobbs | March 6, 2009FromMind Hacks:
We've reported before on brain imaging research that shows brain activity in those in a 'persistent vegetative state'. What I didn't know until today was that one subject in this research, Kate, has since woken up. This YouTube video tells Kate's story:
Sometimes firm ground proves to be slippery.
ddobbs | March 5, 2009
Is this working?
Jefrey Mervis brings the word from Science ($):
U.S. students using educational software do no better learning primary school math and first-year algebra than their counterparts who follow a traditional curriculum. That's the conclusion of a new federally funded study that is loaded with caveats about what it means for students, educators, and the companies that make the software.
The $14.5 million study, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey, was designed to find out whether students are…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009Philip Dawdy takes a interesting look at a new study of the safety of placebo arms in clinical trials of antidepressants in teens. My own quick scan of the study [which Dawdy makes available as pdf download] suggests it's full of great nuggets.
Its take-home: Placebo treatments produced remission rates of 48%, while the rate for active treatment was 59%. And, quite interestingly, the study concludes:
Patients who responded to placebo generally retained their response. Those who did not respond to placebo subsequently responded to active treatment at the same rates as those initiallyl…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009I noted earlier that Harold Varmus, Obama's key science advisor, was on the Daily Show, but after viewing again the clip of his short appearance I thought it should get its own little show here. Varmus is everything you'd want as a public face to science -- immensely accomplished but amiable and everyday as could be. It's a nice little clip and just short of 7 minutes.
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Harold Varmus
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
ddobbs | March 4, 2009I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices.
The…
ddobbs | March 1, 2009Ezra Klein gives the short whodat on Kathleen Sebelius, the Kansas governor who will be Obama's health and human services secretary.
Sebelius's tenure as insurance commissioner in Kansas seems to have been both successful and fairly quiet: She is not defined by the battles and struggles of that period. She was not at the center of any tremendously controversial initiatives. Rather, she seems to have been a politically skillful and administratively competent commissioner. In 2001, Governing magazine named her one of the top public officials in the country and gave a nice summary of her…
ddobbs | February 20, 2009A roundup of wonderful stuff I won't get to. Then again, many of these need no help:
"Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m. Bring wine and caviar only.". Woman emails party invitations while asleep. Hat tip: BoingBoing
Obviously, the drug and medical device industry is not looking forward to independent research that compares expensive new drugs or procedures to older and less expensive treatments. Alison Bass on objections to (and spirited attacks on) the stimulus bill's funding of comparative effectiveness studies -- a subject I hope to write more about soon…
ddobbs | February 10, 2009Marcia Angell makes it plain:
The fact that drug companies pay prescribers to be "educated" underscores the true nature of the transaction. Students generally pay teachers, not the reverse. The real intent is to influence prescribing habits, through selection of the information provided and through the warm feelings induced by bribery. Prescribers join in the pretence that drug companies provide education because it is lucrative to do so. Even free samples are meant to hook doctors and patients on the newest, most expensive drugs, when older drugs -- or no drug at all -- might be better for…
ddobbs | February 9, 2009Check this very scary projection of what current trends in health-care spending will mean for our economy: a growing weight that will account for half of GDP by 2082:
Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director, shows that slide in his standard talk on what's wrong with our budget. It shows why, as Ezra Klein puts it,
an odd bedfellows coalition of centrist economists ranging from Dean Baker to Henry Aaron to Paul Krugman to, well, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman have been forcefully arguing that there is no such thing as an "entitlement crisis." Social Security is safe. The crisis is in Medicare.…
ddobbs | January 27, 2009
Pharma giant Pfizer got bigger on Monday, purchasing Wyeth Pharamceuticals for $65 billion in one of the few big business moves to get funding lately. This comes after several years of aggressive cost-cutting and huge layoffs at Pfizer, and was announced as the company released an annual report revealing a $2.3 billion settlement for offl-label marketing.
At least one Pfizer employee feels that Wyeth employees should be warned.
I feel sorry for the good people of Wyeth. You didn't ask to be gobbled up by this monster. As for myself, I was just to lazy/stupid/complacent to leave. I got…