The Next Hurrah

Slow, steady, sustainable

by emptypockets

A little over a year ago, I wrote a piece here called "So what's wrong with doubling the NSF budget anyway?," where I argued that plans to double the National Science Foundation's budget through Bush's American Competitiveness Initiative made for bad policy. I gave three reasons: first, I thought it was political posturing with no action behind it; second, I thought it was a "pro-science" front used to cover up lack of funding for NIH; and third, I said that Clinton's NIH budget doubling had shown that rapid, unsustainable funding bursts create boom-and-bust cycles that, in the long run, hurt science, and that sound policy calls for slow, steady, sustainable growth. That last item bears repeating and, fortunately, a column on Science magazine's web site last week makes the point again for me:

Between 1998 and 2003, the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) rose from $13 billion to more than $27 billion in a plan known as "the doubling." Now that the tsunami of cash has receded, many life scientists--especially those in the early phase of their careers--have found conditions no better, and in some ways worse, than before the process began. [...]

The NIH doubling did do a lot of good, providing billions of dollars for basic and clinical research and establishing a new, much higher baseline for funding. Still, "both the way Congress has expanded the NIH budget and the way NIH has made use of its new funds offer important cautionary lessons," writes Yuval Levin, a former associate director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, in an article in The New Atlantis. He writes that the infusion of money was "far too rapid, and not adequately tied to structural reforms that might enable NIH to best make use of its growing resources." Fifteen percent hikes for each of 5 years "built expectations and momentum that set the agency up for disappointment when the doubling was done," he writes.

The Science column links to a study by Paula Stephan, an economist at Georgia State University (PDF of PowerPoint slides) that puts some numbers on exactly how the doubling affected young scientists. I'll post some of the key charts below, but the bottom line is essentially what I'd noticed as I watch post-docs go out looking for jobs and young faculty starting up their labs. The NIH budget doubled for five years, then was cut or held flat for five years. The first phase created a lot of new lab space that was filled by scientists who now can't get grant money to fund their young labs. We're left with a decade's worth of graduate students and post-docs who see academic science as an unstable career path.

The solution? Congress should put aside politically symbolic budget doublings and pass legislation that commits to a couple of decades of slow, steady, sustainable increases in NIH funding at levels slightly higher than inflation.

Science literacy in science reporting

by emptypockets

Update: Please see the extremely cogent rebuttal of this post by the author of the NYT article I discuss

Now and then, I like to pick on the New York Times for illiteracy in science reporting. My point isn't to say that the New York Times is the worst offender -- it's not (the London Times is). My point is that since the public has assumed its right to make determinations on science policy, then the public needs to be held to a literacy standard at least as rigorous as what's expected of high school students. Newspaper reporting is a reasonably good place to start applying that standard.

Unfortunately, a feature in last Sunday's NYT magazine flunks out by its third paragraph:

Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA’s double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper’s two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers — 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm — are torn loose during this parting. When that strand joins another from the other parent to eventually form an embryo, the segment of the DNA missing those 25 genes can’t do its work.

This article may be well-researched overall, but this paragraph is a high school bio disaster. If we're expecting the public to make decisions about the future of science funding and the legality of certain kinds of research, including stem cell research, then reporters and editors need to assert a higher standard. The reporter and editor here apparently got confused about two very basic concepts in biology: the mechanism of DNA replication, and the structure of a gene.

2007 Shaping Up To Be Another Hot One

By Mimikatz

Everyone is focused on the hot topics in DC, but look at this graphic from Climate Progress.  So far 2007 is shaping up to be as hot as 1998, so far the hottest on record.  The temperature in Siberia is 5 degrees C above normal, but I'm looking at some of the other big red dots on that map--the ones in California, Nevada and Arizona.  The article notes that

On May 29, 50% of the western U.S. was in moderate-to-exceptional drought, 83% in the Southeast, and 34% for the contiguous U.S. 

Perhaps this is related to the story in the morning paper about rapid declines in populations of 20 common birds, such as Meadowlarks and Evening grosbeaks, species whose numbers are now half what they were 40 years ago.

Even more ominously, the Climate Progress article notes that During the past century, global surface temperatures have increased at a rate near 0.11°F (0.06°C) per decade, but the rate of increase has been three times larger since 1976, or 0.32°F (0.18°C) per decade, with some of the largest temperature increases occurring in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

These figures are not from Al Gore or some enviro group, but the National Climatic Data Center.

Time truly is running out to mitigate the damage.  We have lost so much as a result of profit-based and faith-based politics from the Republican Party and its corporate masters and fundamentalist base.  Last year over 100 people died from heat-related causes in California in July.  Here it is already 83 degrees indoors in the shade at 10:30 am, in an area supposedly cooled by the winds off San Francisco Bay.

Those who will live to see even hotter temperatures in another 20-30 years, if not well before, will not look kindly on  the generation who fiddled while the world began to burn, enjoying the last of the good life.

Here's hoping the Dems can find the will to balance future health and well-being with the needs of energy-producing and auto-producing regions today.  This is the first big test of what looks like a very hot summer.

Huckabee says evolution is not an issue

by emptypockets

Republican presidential candidate Governor Mike Huckabee said this weekend that it is irrelevant to his campaign that he thinks the theory of evolution is wrong. Huckabee, along with Senator Sam Brownback and Representative Tom Tancredo, asserted their disbelief in evolution last Thursday at the first Republican debate. Nevertheless, Huckabee says, his disbelief in evolution has no bearing on his qualifications to be president:

"I believe that the Creation has a creator. I believe there is a God. And I believe God put this whole creative process in motion. How he did it and the time frame in which he did it, I honestly don't know. Nor do I think it's relevant to being president of the United States," Huckabee said.

What's remarkable is not that Huckabee is wrong about evolution, but that he may also be wrong about whether -- for once -- it matters.

Do You Believe In Evolution?

by DemFromCT

There are few areas of the culture wars that get rational people more upset than the idea that Intelligent Design is legitimate science (it isn't; see Kansas evolution hearings). But one of the least commented on aspects of the recent Republican debate is this:

On one level the debate can be seen as a polite discussion of political theory among the members of a small group of intellectuals. But the argument also exposes tensions within the Republicans’ "big tent," as could be seen Thursday night when the party’s 10 candidates for president were asked during their first debate whether they believed in evolution. Three — Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas; and Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado — indicated they did not.

Three of ten Republican candidates for President of the United States in 2007 do not believe in evolution.

The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote in Time magazine that to teach intelligent design "as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of a religious authority." George F. Will wrote that Kansas school board officials who favored intelligent design were "the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people."

Well, they are most certainly right about that. It is to the disgrace of conservatism that this is seen as an equal and legitimate point of view to debate. I'm not suggesting they stifle debate... I'm hoping it continues load and clear.

What both sides do agree on is that conservatives who have shied away from these debates should speak up. Mr. Arnhart said that having been so badly burned by social Darwinism, many conservatives today did not want "to get involved in these moral and political debates, and I think that’s evasive."

Yet getting involved is more important than ever, after "the disaster" of "President Bush’s compassionate conservatism," he said, because the only hope for Republicans is a "fusion of libertarianism and traditionalism, and Darwinian nature supports that conservative fusion."

Arnhart and Derbyshire were on the non-wingnut side of this discussion. For the sake of our children and our country, I hope they do well in these debates; for the sake of exposing the modern Republican party (and the religious right) as being in the thrall of anti-rational zealots, I hope they keep having them.

President Bush on Breast Cancer

by emptypockets

Last week, President Bush signed into law a reauthorization of the National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program, an admirable health program that helps pay for breast cancer screenings for low-income women. He took the opportunity to say a few words about his own contributions to the field of cancer research:

I appreciate working with the United States Congress to fund breast and cervical cancer research and prevention. The span of my administration, we have spent, along with Congress, $6.7 billion. My budget for 2008 includes another billion dollars for research and prevention activities. We'll continue to work to ensure that every American woman has access to the screenings she needs to detect the cancers in time to treat them.

President Bush didn't mention, for some reason, that one of the ways he has "continue[d] to work" to help Americans overcome cancer was by being the first president since Nixon to cut funding for the NIH. Even the National Cancer Insititute, one of the best-funded of the institutes that comprise NIH, had its budget increased only 1.5% in FY2005 (the most recent year for which I find numbers), while inflation raises the cost of doing science around 4% annually. The money going into R01 grants, the core funding units distributed to US labs by NCI, actually dropped 2% from 2004 to 2005. As noted in the April Public Policy Briefing from the American Society for Cell Biology (pdf), one of the top breast cancer researchers in the US, Joan Brugge of Harvard, recently testified to Congress, "Four years of flat funding have had a devastating impact on the trajectory of cancer research." So, thanks for your hard work, President Bush.

He also didn't mention, of course, his decision to veto -- not once but twice -- bills that would allow the NIH to fund stem cell research. The cells that give rise to a breast cancer (or any other cancer) are in many ways like out-of-control stem cells: like a stem cell, they can divide indefinitely and "self-renew," meaning each daughter cell has the full developmental capacity of the mother cell, but unlike stem cells their growth has become unregulated. (There are also some ideas that some breast cancers arise directly from the normal population of stem cells, not differentiated cells, in the breast.) Understanding those basic mechanisms of self-renewal and how these special cells, with such enormous capacity to produce more cells, are usually held in check by developmental regulators, is absolutely fundamental to learning how cancers start and how to treat them. Unfortunately, most of that research has been frozen in time since 2001. Thanks again, President Bush.

President Bush did talk about his mother-in-law, Jenna Welch, who survived breast cancer. He said, "As a result of her mom's battle with cancer, Laura has devoted a lot of time and energy to raising awareness about breast cancer through efforts like the pink ribbon campaign. She managed to get me to wear pink. (Laughter.)" Thanks for wearing your awareness ribbon, President Bush, even if you are afraid it will make you look like a homosexual (ha, ha). It's good to know you are aware of the existence of breast cancer.

He didn't mention what Mrs. Bush or her mother Mrs. Welch thought of his interest in trying to link breast cancer risk to whether a woman has had an abortion, a notion outside the medical mainstream and for which major studies have found no support. President Bush has been using federal funds to pay for national "pregnancy centers," which were not paid by the government before 2001, and which incorrectly counsel women considering abortion that they will put themselves at high risk of cancer if they get one. The President's administration also forced the National Cancer Institute itself to remove correct information from its website -- an explanation that the idea of an abortion-breast cancer link had been settled in the late 1990s with large studies, including a major study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 -- and replace it with a misleading "fact sheet" that "erroneously suggested that whether abortion caused breast cancer was an open question with studies of equal weight supporting both sides." (The link and quote are from the website of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Following a political skirmish, the NCI was able to restore the correct information to its website.) So not only has President Bush blocked real research, he also has actively worked to promote falsehoods and misperception about what's already known. Thanks for your work, President Bush.

The bill that was signed Friday, sponsored by Democratic Senator Barbara Mikulski, Democratic Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and Republican Congresswoman Sue Myrick, is a good one. Seeing Bush associated with it, though, reminds me of some of what's so deeply wrong with his administration: such reluctance to do the right thing, and such obstinate refusal to try to understand root causes. It's great that low-income women will continue to benefit from subsidized cancer screenings. I'm just very worried, for those who are diagnosed, that their options for treatment will be limited because we simply are not learning about the disease fast enough, in large part because this country's biological research program has been suffocating under Bush for the last six years.

The "Mad Scientist" frame and the crusade for food purity

by emptypockets

I cooked some macaroni and cheese the other night, and I used a "totally natural," "homegrown" brand. I knew it was "totally natural" and "homegrown" because the box said so. It also said the following:

As you'd expect, [we] would never use chemical dyes to color our cheese. The orange you see comes naturally from seeds of the annatto tree, and the pasta is certified organic. No weird chemicals. No artificial anything.

Let me put aside the irony of an organic natural brand having to go fluorescent orange to be taken seriously in the marketplace and then having to rationalize that the fluorescent orange color additive comes from a "natural" source. And let me further put aside the observations that the color additive annatto is chemically extracted from annatto seeds in a large-scale industrial process and that the dye is one of the most widely used color additives in processed foods (particularly processed cheese). And for charity's sake let me also put aside the question of whether the free use of "natural" packaging by the food industry is muddying the real mission of nutritional reformers, as well as the fact that this packaged mix tasted sort of funky.

Instead, I'd like to tell you why I think we need to expand what we mean when we think about science advocacy, and specifically why something as seemingly frivolous as a trend in food packaging matters for the things we do care about, like stem cell research and science funding.

Infantilizing Women To Make a Point

By Mimikatz

The Supreme Court upheld the federal late-term abortion restrictions this morning in Gonzales v. Carhart (yes, that Gonzales), with justice Kennedy writing the majority opinion, joined by Roberts and Alito, and Scalia and Thomas, who in a separate concurring opinion basically said Roe v. Wade should be overruled.  Justice Ginzburg wrote a blistering dissent, in which Justices Stevens, Breyer and Souter joined.  There are excellent commentaries at Scotusblog and Balkinization, as well as observations by Ed Kilgore and pretty much everyone else in the blogosphere.

In terms of the issues we follow here, there are many implications.  First, the language used by the majority truly infantilizes women, making it clear that Congress knows better than they how they ought to deal with the kind of desperate situations that call for late-term abortions.  And not only does Congress know better than pregnant women, it knows better than the medical profession.  For those who thought Justice Kennedy had some intellectual integrity, the majority opinion is a major disappointment.  For example, the Act in question made illegal a form of abortion known as "intact dilation and extraction" in which the fetus was extracted, during which procedure it died.  There are situations in which that is the medically preferred option.  But now women in that position will have only the choice to carry the fetus, with whatever consequences that might entail, or undergo a non-intact d & e, during which the fetus is extracted essentially in pieces.  No fetuses are thus saved by this opinion, but some women might suffer serious health problems or even death, because the law survived even without exceptions for the life of the mother. Why?  Just to make a point.

Second, abortion is back front and center, despite what  Rudolph Giuliani might have wanted.  Roe survived, but only because the majority did not explicitly overrule it.  What they did overrule, by implication only, of course, was O'Connor's somewhat sophistic "undue burden" test, under which a law survived unless it created an "undue burden" on women.  Death is evidently not an undue burden when there is a point to make about abortion.  Because Roe survives, there will be new laws passed and new cases filed to test just how far states hostile to abortion can burden a woman's right to choose whether to finish or end a pregnancy.  This, in turn, will affect the most those states in which a majority is hostile to abortion.  California is not going to outlaw the procedure, or even make it more difficult.   New York undoubtedly will not.  But other states will, enlarging the gulf between states where science and individual freedom are valued and those which seek comfort in a rigid religious view.  The more divided the state, the more contentious will be the debate, perhaps dwarfing other important legislative priorities.  As more and more restrictions are placed on abortions, poor and young women and women in rural and exurban areas will suffer the most.

Finally, the Court majority has made it much more difficult to bring what is called a "facial" challenge to a statute.  Rather, only a woman who, herself, is directly affected by the restriction can challenge this law as it applies to her.  This is of a piece with Chief Justice Roberts' crabbed views of standing--the federal courts are not for little people, but for litigants with serious commercial interests.

As many have said, this case illustrates that elections have consequences, and so does voting for laws and judges, a point now coming hoime to roost for several Dem Senators.  My sense is that the decision will help the Dems where they are already strong and not do much for the GOP where it is strong.  In the purple states it will marginally help the Dems, particularly, I hope, with young people.  Most of all, it makes it crystal clear why Bush should not have another Supreme Court nomination approved by the Democratic Senate.  Not one, and not one more federal judge as long as the Bush "Administration" refuses to acknowledge Congress as a co-equal branch of government.

Flu Stories: Bird Flu aka Cat Flu?

by DemFromCT Well, what do you expect when cats eat birds? As if bird weren't enough to worry about, maybe H5N1 should be aka cat flu.

"The prevalence of the virus is quite high" judging from preliminary tests on swabs of the cats' upper airways, C.A. Nidom, a scientist at Airlangga University in Surabaya, said in a telephone interview on Feb. 28. Nidom found H5N1 in 98 of 500 cats living near poultry markets in high-risk areas on the island of Java and in Lampung province on southern Sumatra island.

There have been concerns about cats for some time, originally brought forward in Feb 2006 by a scientist named Andrew Jeremijenko, but the extent of the problem, at least in high risk geographic areas, has been under-appreciated by many. You can assume if there's a SE Asian live bird market where H5N1 is found, and there are cats in the vicinity, that's a risk area. This is an important story for many reasons. At its core, it highlights the difficulty of just 'getting rid' of the H5N1 virus. That's the idea of culling chickens... remove the virus host, give prophylactic tamiflu (a tamiflu 'blanket') to the surrounding community, and hope you stamped out a pocket of viral mutation, thereby preventing millions of human deaths around the world. This is work that literally goes on every day by international public health people (talk about unsung heroes). Yet, how realistically can you expect people to comply? And if you're talking about applying that strategy to mammals... well, you can't. It's hard enough to ask Indonesians to bury their food supply. And when you add this, it gets even harder.

“We are very worried,” an Indonesian official told Intellectual Property Watch, adding that there is an “unfair mechanism” regarding the sharing of samples of viruses. Some manufacturers will use the samples to develop vaccines, but there is no guarantee that poor developing countries such as Indonesia would be provided with the vaccine, as manufacturers’ production capacity is only 40 million, he said, referring to the more than 6 billion people in the world. There is a “high gap in demand and supply,” he said.

So, if you want some insight into the current negotiations between Indonesia and WHO as to whether there'll be a vaccine developed from a virus that Indonesia provides to the first world, that Indonesians cannot afford to buy for themselves, pet the cat and think about it. In the meantime, Revere at Effect Effect Measure has compiled recent H5N1 headlines in a 24 hour period:

Headlines in the last day: South Korea records seventh outbreak; Bird Flu Strikes Hanoi, Over 1,000 Chickens Culled; Bird flu erupts in Vietnam south; total 5 provinces infected; Bird flu found in 6 more areas of Afghanistan; Laos teenager dies from bird flu; Indonesian Villagers Hide Birds And Spread Flu; Myanmar takes preventive measures against bird flu; Southern China is epicenter of bird flu, U.S. researchers find; Suspicious bird flu deaths in Tehran's Pardisan Park; World experts in Kuwait as more bird flu cases detected; Dubai plans bird flu blood tests at airport -- Report: plan to make 80,000 passengers arriving daily pass through temperature scanners; Ulster tourist tested for killer flu.

H5N1 is a problem that hasn't gone away.

When the liar is a friend

by emptypockets

When you read a news story, do you take it at face value until something raises a flag or do you look at the source and decide in advance whether you're going to read with a skeptical eye? Are you more likely to believe news if it fits neatly into your existing worldview or are you really objective? Without a healthy skepticism, we would fall for every sales pitch on TV -- but by trusting some sources less it follows that we trust some sources more, and that leaves us vulnerable to carefully placed deceit. I wonder if there's any way to reduce that weak spot without losing trust altogether.

I like to think of this site as having a special interest in evidence-based debunkery. emptywheel's book, Anatomy of Deceit, is a great example. DemFromCT's FluWiki is another. The rest of us have our own pet projects, from Kagro X putting the lie to "we don't have the numbers" to DHinMI putting the fool's cap on fraudsters and conspiracy theorists. My own little project recently has been to show up a series of anti-science lies from PETA that recently crossed over into the mainstream press. Besides exposing the lies themselves, it's worth talking about how they spread and how they've been unspread.

The lies -- which falsely claim that a scientist in Oregon named Charles Roselli is (1) a homophobe, (2) trying to cure gayness in humans, (3) has already cured gayness in sheep, and (4) is cutting open sheep brains, attaching electronic devices, and injecting their brains with hormones to do so -- began last August, and after debunking these claims I wrote a post laying out a strategy I'd used for "unspreading" the lie, and detailing how well it had (and hadn't) worked. In short, the method was first to write a detailed factual post that corrects the lies, then to use search tools to identify blogs repeating the lies, and finally to systematically visit those sites and write comments referring the bloggers to the correction post (without trying to convert them ideologically, and sticking strictly to correcting the facts). That exercise last August proved to be a small-scale practice run for the onslaught of misinformation that followed when the story crossed into the mainstream press about three weeks ago. The basic model has held up fairly well. Here, I'll run through how well it scales up and what improvements may be made. The question to keep in mind is whether a story simply has a life of its own, or how much its spread depends on its source -- and what that implies for debunkery.