The Next Hurrah

The slippery slope of stem cell research

by emptypockets

Anti-research groups who oppose federally funded stem cell research like to argue that the use of frozen blastocysts leads us down a slippery slope: "Death-row inmates are slated to be killed," they say. "Do you advocate doing experiments on them too?" This is a deeply un-serious argument and the debate deserves better. But, just as a Sunday-afternoon thought experiment, let's see where it takes us.

The position here is that federal funds can't be used to derive new lines of embryonic stem cells because that would involve "murder," or to use their awkward phrase, "the destruction of human life." Well, surely the same experiment done with private funding is no better (on the contrary, while federal and state governments are sometimes allowed to destroy human life, say in capital punishment or war, private individuals cannot, other than in self-defense). Clearly these anti-research groups must also advocate a law that would prohibit privately-funded stem cell experiments as well.

But a law isn't really necessary, is it? Because we already have a law prohibiting the destruction of human life. That's called homicide. And it seems to me that the anti-research groups must believe that researchers who derive new stem cell lines are guilty of it. So it would follow that they must want all scientists who have conducted experiments with blastocysts to be tried for murder.

The "Mad Scientist" frame and the stem cell vote

by emptypockets

This is Kate. She is the niece of dailykos user noweasels (who gave me permission to share her story and photo here). Kate has juvenile diabetes, and hopes stem cell research will someday fix that.

What I think is great about Kate is, here's this teenager who understands science is a force for good. That's clear to her, because she knows she would have died as an infant without it. She comes skin-to-needle with science every day.

Unfortunately most adults don't get that. In particular, 174 Representatives in the U.S. House showed yesterday that they still don't get what Kate has understood for years. They've been duped by a pernicious frame: that "Mad Scientists" are running amok.

I'll have more to say on the stem cell vote in a later post. For now, I'll just note that its function was to see where we stand in the new Congress, and we find we're about where I thought we'd be: a handful of votes have flipped, but we need another 24 or so. In the coming Senate debate, keep an eye on whether Bob Casey can lead the anti-abortionists out of the woods.

The reason we haven't won yet on stem cells is the same reason we're still struggling on global warming, on evolution teaching, and on funding the NIH. A large chunk of the public simply doesn't trust scientists. They see them as something like evil wizards, meddling with nature.

Mea Culpa (and open thread)

by emptypockets

In my post last week criticizing the Sunday Times' treatment of the "gay sheep" research, I made a screw-up that I want to fix. I referred to a 1991 study by Simon LeVay as "discredited" -- which is wrong. The short version is that I didn't look into the background deeply enough, and I'm sorry.

A wolf in gay sheep's clothing: Corruption at the London Times

by emptypockets

This week the Sunday Times of London published a pack of lies so transparent, so thoroughly discredited, that its appearance can't be chalked up to mere journalistic sloppiness. Rather, the timing of the piece, its willful disregard of the truth, and the behavior of the journalists themselves indicate a deliberate political hit job purposefully dressed up in the garb of one of the most internationally respected newspapers. The Times repeats and amplifies lies made by PETA in August claiming that Dr. Charles Roselli is experimenting on gay sheep to try to cure homosexuality -- total nonsense, but PETA saw that by targeting Roselli's work they could exploit the gay rights community and promote their anti-research agenda. At the time, I spoke out against PETA and talked with many bloggers who had been duped to set the record straight -- the story then died down, until it re-emerged, almost unchanged, in the Sunday Times last weekend. The question is, who's pulling the gay sheep fleece this time? And why?

I won't go over the science in detail this time -- you can read it here if you're interested -- but the upshot is that Roselli is one of many scientists trying to understand the biological basis of behavior, including sexual behavior. His work is no more aimed at curing gayness than it is at curing straightness; in fact, if anyone were to attack his research I would have expected it to be the religious Right because his results demonstrate that homosexuality is a normal part of the natural world. But instead, it was PETA: they picked Roselli over the dozens of other major labs doing this work, as Shalin Gala of PETA explained to me by email, not because he is a special threat to gays but rather because Roselli works on sheep. That means he is required by NIH to follow a higher standard of animal care than labs that work with mice, and that extra documentation gives PETA more details to distort. (Also, I'm guessing a fuzzy lamb is a better fund-raiser than a rat would be.)

That's the background. That was August 2006. Now, last weekend, for some reason we find this four-month-old dead fish wrapped in the Sunday Times. The first thing to notice is the timing. The article is tied to no news event. It gives the impression that a new study has been released, for example stating that "The research is being peer-reviewed by a panel of scientists in America." I contacted Roselli by email, as I did in August, to check this out. He emailed me that they have no study undergoing review now, and that nothing new has been published in the last six months. The last thing they put out was a paper last June in the journal Endocrine in which, Roselli wrote by email, "we failed to significantly alter any aspect of sexual differentiation." That wasn't worth a mention in the Sunday Times when it was fresh, let alone six months later. Something else clearly prompted this article. What -- or who -- was it?

The Unspoken Debate on Stem Cells: "E Pluribus Plurum"

by emptypockets

Last week, New Jersey decided to spend $270 million on stem cell research, with an eye on a total of a half-billion dollars next year. It joins California, Maryland, Connecticut, and Illinois in establishing state-level funding for stem cell research. Might research funding become another case where the new federalism (if that's the right word) moves reponsibilities that have been abdicated by the US government to the level of the states?

Let me say up front that I'm ambivalent about asking the states to assume more of the burden of research funding, and this post is my way of working through the pros and cons of it. And, to be clear, I don't think the states will take up the full $30 billion per year output of the NIH -- but they may, increasingly, be responsible for growth above that level and for funding in areas like stem cell research. Would a "California Institutes of Health," a "New Jersey Institutes of Health," be good for those states? For the country? For science?

The answers, I think, are yes, maybe, and sometimes. It will fuel growth in the states that do it; it may come at the cost of increasing the disparity between high-research and low-research states; and it will decentralize funding which may weaken the quality of the science but will protect it from the harmful hands of anti-research Presidents.

Flu Stories: More H5N1 Cases

As a follow-up to the policy piece I wrote Friday pointing out that the H5N1 story was not over, there are three new cases in a single family being reported today in Egypt.

Egypt has detected a third new case of the H5N1 bird flu virus, just hours after confirming two new cases in a brother and sister, a World Health Organization official said on Sunday. Hassan el-Bushra, regional adviser for communicable diseases surveillance at the WHO said the three cases were from the same household, which houses an extended family of 33 people living together in a village in Egypt's Gharbiya province. Bushra said the family raised ducks, and had slaughtered the flock after a number of ducks had become sick and died.

Almost all human cases are from bird exposure (we think), though there are other hosts including mammals that are under suspicion. cats, especially are getting a lot of attention as a potential intermediary host, as is the (unrelated) civet cat.

Flu Stories: H5N1 And The Potential Threat Of Pandemic Flu

Well, here we are 2 years after starting to write about the pandemic flu threat and nearly 10 years since H5N1 emerged (and 3 years since it re-emerged) as a potential pandemic candidate. The media hype has come and gone, but the virus remains a threat. H5N1, as we are learning, has seasonal patterns. And as the chart shows, Indonesia has been a major focus over the last year. Given the Jan-March peaks, it is not surprising that H5N1 in birds has reemerged in Nigeria and Vietnam over the last week, with a recent outbreak, again in birds, in South Korea. And where birds are, people cases follow.

And planning for potential pandemics continues. A new story in the Lancet drives the point home that modern medicine is not necessarily the answer - at least not yet, not without a vaccine.

"A flu virus as deadly as the one that caused the 1918 Spanish flu could kill as many as 81 million worldwide if it struck today, a new study estimates. By applying historical death rates to modern population data, the researchers calculated a death toll of 51 million to 81 million, with a median estimate of 62 million. That’s surprisingly high, said lead researcher Chris Murray of Harvard University. He did the analysis, in part, because he thought prior claims of 50 million deaths were wildly inflated.

Like a cat 5 hurricane, when and where remain impossible to predict. Maybe it'll be H5N1, maybe some other flu virus, but sooner or later, the next pandemic will come. In fact, these days the only people pooh-pooing it are right wing writers railing about government intervention (see Michael Fumento in the Weekly Standard). Because of that, the feds are starting to get serious about planning. But there are really a limited number of tools in the preparedness toolbox. The power tools, vaccine and antivirals, will take time to develop and stockpile. The hand tools are called NPI for non-pharmaceutical intervention, and include closing schools at the start of pandemic, cancelling large (>100 people) public gatherings, and keeping the kids away from the mall. The CDC is discussing these measures with the public and with many of the stakeholders in state and local government. Okay, so it's Science Friday, but what's that got to do with politics? Well, if your local school board has to consider the ramifications of closing the schools for 8-12 weeks, shouldn't you be involved in the process? I'd think as a parent or as an employer you'd want to be. Expect a policy announcement in January from the Feds on the topic of NPIs and community mitigation. Stay educated so you're in a position to be part of the process at the local level, where it counts. And recognoze that this isn't just an issue for specialty sites like Flu Wiki. This is an issue for all of us.

[Update]: Excellent year-end review here.

Nature: Molecular HIV Evidence Backs Accused Medics

We've written before about the dire straits the Tripoli health care workers from Bulgaria (nurses) and Palestine (doctor) are in. Libya has accused them  of infecting Libyan children with HIV and because of that, they are sentenced to death.

International experts in DNA forensics say that a paper published online by Nature this week provides a firm alibi for the six medical workers facing the death penalty in Libya. The workers have been charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. In the study, an international team led by researchers from Oxford and Rome used the genetic sequences of the viruses isolated from the patients to reconstruct the exact phylogeny, or ‘family tree’, of the outbreak. Analysing the mutations that accumulated over time allowed the researchers to work out when different outbreaks occurred. They showed that the strain of HIV with which the children had been infected was already present and spreading locally in the mid-1990s, long before the medics arrived in Libya in 1998. The trial of the six medical workers ended in Tripoli on 4 November, and a verdict is expected on 19 December. Despite mounting international pressure to free them, defence lawyers are pessimistic about the outcome, and Nature has fast-tracked publication to make this new evidence available before the verdict (see Nature 444, doi:10.1038/nature444836a; 2006).

You can read more at Effect Measure:

Depoliticizing science

by emptypockets

"God and uranium were on our side.
And the wrath of the atom fell like a commandment,
And the very planet quivered with implications."

Those words were written by the great Norman Corwin and broadcast by Orson Welles on radio waves that mixed with nuclear dust over a freshly surrendered Japan. Later that fall, as those implications became clearer and the reality of the nuclear age sank in, Corwin sounded a less triumphant note in "Set Your Clock at U235":

"The secrets of the earth have been peeled, one by one, until the core is bare:
The latest recipe is private, in a guarded book, but the stink of death is public on the wind from Nagasaki"

Without a politican whipping the horses, would science have invented the atomic bomb? Perhaps not -- and yet, the power of science is so immense that it can never be entirely let free of those reins. Science costs too much, and can provide too much good to society, for it to balk altogether at the hand of the public. That is the tension: science cannot be driven by political whim, but it must be founded on public support.

I'm interested in how to insulate science from rapid changes in the political wind while keeping it responsive to society's needs and desires. As an exercise, for now, I'm grouping these ideas together under the rubric of a piece of legislation: The Scientific Integrity Act. The goal of this policy is to act as a shock absorber, to smooth out the monthly-to-yearly ups and downs of political fashion onto the 5-to-10-year time scale where most science operates. It will not remove politics from science, nor should it, but it is a modest attempt to allow scientists to make long-term research plans without fear that experiments may suddenly be restricted or their funding may vanish.

Proving Bush's Irrelevance: Veto Override

by emptypockets

Last month I argued the path to stem cells lies through Missouri. The election results there would decide whether we would be able to override Bush's veto on stem cell research.

We won both the important votes there. Missourians are sending Claire McCaskill to the Senate armed with a strongly pro-research agenda and they amended their Constitution to guarantee protection of stem cell research. Not only does McCaskill's victory bring us one vote closer to an override in the Senate -- it sends a signal to Republicans that if they don't support stem cell research, they will be replaced by Democrats who do.

2007 is the year when Republicans in Congress will have to choose between joining the bipartisan majority that wants to fund stem cell research as the American public demands, or abandoning bipartisanship and joining Bush in blocking key medical cures and keeping on playing politics with science.

Our fight is still uphill. In the Senate, we needed four more votes. We picked up pro-research seats in Missouri, Montana, Ohio, and Virginia, but we lost one in Tennessee (where pro-research Frist is replaced by anti-research Corker). That leaves us one vote shy of an override.

We're going to have to ask Senator-elect Bob Casey to reconsider whether he thinks embryos that are going to die anyway are equal to grandparents with Alzheimer's and children with diabetes. Democrats and his fellow Pennsylvanian Arlen Specter ought to talk with him honestly and frequently about this issue.

Similar conversations should be held with John Sununu, who faces re-election in 2008 and is one of the vanishing New England Republicans. (Norm Coleman and John Cornyn are also up for re-election in 2008 and come from states where the other Senator is pro-research.)

In the House, by my most recent count about 16 anti-research Republicans have been replaced with Democrats (the arithmetic is fuzzy: the anti-research Bonilla in TX-23 may yet lose his seat, also I'm presuming most of the 16 new Democrats will be pro-research). In any case we still need about 30 more House votes for an override.

Flipping 30 anti-research votes in the House is possible. Going from democraticavenger's excellent 2008 House targeting list, I see 23 anti-research Representatives who received less than 55% of their vote, 12 more anti-research Representatives from districts where Kerry got at least 45% of the vote, and another 4 Representatives who may be in trouble for other reasons.

That gives us 39 "targeted for '08" Representatives whose anti-research votes we may flip. They can see that blocking stem cell research is a lost cause politically -- Americans support it, the votes have been there in Congress for years, and Bush will not be in office forever (although it may seem that way). They can join the bipartisan majority and support research or they can further risk their seats and stall research just 2 more years.

For too long "being bipartisan" has meant "Democrats enabling Bush." It is time to make clear that embracing Bush, on either side of the aisle, means giving the finger to bipartisanship -- embracing Bush just means more blocked votes, more failures by the extreme right, and more ignoring of the popular desires of the American mainstream.

What being bipartisan really means is rejecting Bush and joining the bipartisan majority that supports stem cell research. Former red-state Missouri has shown that support for research transcends political boundaries. Nancy Pelosi intends to bring a stem cell research bill in the first 100 hours of her term as Speaker. It is time to ask Republicans in Congress to stop playing politics with science, to reject Bush and to embrace bipartisanship, and to support stem cell research by overriding the President's veto.