The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science
Robert Park’s seven warning signs of bogus science is well worth reading, both for the laugh and for the exasperated realization people are actually trying to pull things like this off.
Category: Academics
Classes and coursework.
Stolen Themes – What I’ve Been Reading
The kind folks over at AJOB* have a neat feature that summarizes what they’re reading in the daily news. Once again, I have too many open windows and not enough time to write a full op-ed on each one, so I pay homage to the idea.
Report Faults Video Reports Shown as News – great. Next time you’re watching the news, just ask yourself whether or not it’s news, or actually an advertisement. The Daily Show covered this several months ago, but it’s still frustrating to see how widespread it actually is. Add this to another reason why I get the majority of my news from a frakkin comedy show.
Lessons in Conflict of Interest: The Construction of the Martyrdom of David Healy and The Dilemma of Bioethics – mules, COI, KOL – betcha never knew bioethics had so many acronyms. It’s like the government, only less headache inducing! Seriously, this is a really interesting article that I read when it originally ran in the print edition of AJOB. I came across it again recently, when it was brought up in a discussion on the AJOB blog. It takes a look at conflicts of interest in bioethics, and how two major journals, The Hastings Center and AJOB, handled the situation when unreported conflicts of interests came to light. It also raises some really interesting comments about COIs, all amidst a fascinating and indepth discussion of the Healy affair.
Pioneering surgery on girl, 12, reverses heart transplant – how cool is this? The girl suffered heart failure at age 2, and had a donor heart “piggy-backed” onto her own. This leaves her own heart in place, but the donor heart does all the work. 10 years later, she begins to reject the donor heart, and through a rather interesting and dramatic series of events, her own heart is reconnected… and works fine! How fabulous for this girl, and how monumentally important for medicine.
Pope condemns geneticists ‘who play at being God’ – The title basically says it all here, but in his Good Friday meditations, the Pope condemned geneticists playing at being God. This comes at interesting timing, what with there being a new clinic just opened solely for the purpose of creating tissue-matched siblings (see further down). It also indicates Benedict’s commitment to becoming a more conservative Papa.
Runners’ bar codes may help health officials: Boston Marathon provides training ground for tracking disaster victims – basically, runners bibs are being imprinted with a bar code. If they require medical assistance, they will be scanned as the enter and exit medical tents, providing tracking of movement. The theory is, in natural disasters, you slap a wristband on someone with a similar bar code, and track them as they are removed from the site of the disaster and moved around the country, providing better tracking. An aside of the technology, race designers will be able to see if there are hazards over the course forcing people to drop out, and epidemiologists will be able to analyze similar.
How long do you think it will be before we start hearing about the number of the beast (again)?
Print me a heart and a set of arteries – what else do you say to this, other than how fucking cool? I’ve been following this technology for several years now, when I first saw the concept on a Discovery-affiliate. Basically, bioink dumps cells designed to flow like liquid onto a supporting gel (biopaper), and the ink flows and grows together. Within a day, the chicken heart cells were beating in tandem… So let me just reiterate: how fucking cool. I love technology.
Do we still need the Cartagena Protocol? – a prominent proponent of the Cartagena Protocol says we don’t need it anymore, and that GM crops don’t harm people or the environment. …did he forget to talk to butterflies? Or maybe GM foods cause long term memory loss…
Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Troubles – this was an area of study for my sister when she was in school. Interesting to see it continued.
Lab-Grown Bladders Successful in Humans – speaking of growing organs… this is cool in its own right (although admittedly not as neat as printing an organ). Click the link to take a look at the picture, if nothing else!
My Black Skin Makes My White Coat Vanish: Even in one of the world’s most diverse cities, I have to convince my patients that I am the doctor. – an interesting personal take on the prejudiced faced by being a black, female doctor. That the bias is being continued by other black women is especially interesting, and speaks to greater problems than just getting through the bias in the established medical community.
UK team to open “designer baby” clinic – the Women’s Bioethics Blog saves my op-ed skin and presents an interesting tidbit about a new, designer baby, clinic opening in Britain. But it’s not just a designer baby they’re creating, but saviour babies…
*And I don’t say that just because some of them will be my professors in the upcoming years. They really are genuinely nice folks, and I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with them, which would be a large reason why I opted to throw my name in their grad program hat to begin with.
Faith, Science and The Art of Proof
Did a strong wind along the Gulf of Suez part the Red Sea? Did a freak meterological event cause a patch of ice on the Sea of Galilee, allowing Jesus to walk on it? Does it really matter? According to this article, no, it doesn’t.
And while I find myself agreeing with the article, I also disagree with it. Yes, for situations like whether or not the Red Sea parted or Jesus walked on water, or other matters of faith, that are oral traditions written down, there is no science in the world that will be able to prove what happened. All we know is that some people a while back believed it, and chose to continue telling it. And maybe that’s all we need to know; leave context such as cultural values and other oral stories to the scientists specializing in those fields, and remove the meterology from the question to begin with.
That said, I do see validity in dealing with objects like the Shroud of Turin or the Dead Sea Scrolls in a scientific manner. Figure out their date, their authenticity, and what’s going on. There were way too many artificats generated during the very dishonest dark ages in continental Europe; let’s at least make sure what’s being dealt with is at least somewhat near what the claim is. But, these are tangibles, things that can be tested, held, examined. They’re not intangible stories, but solid matter to be scientifically studied.
As noted, science and religion don’t play by the same rules. Attempting to squeeze one into the rules system of the other does nothing more than underscore the fact that science and religion serve very different and distinct functions within our lives.
Haiku for Phillip
I had to write a haiku about my mentor/mentee relationship with Phillip last week (long story involving a conference I’m presenting at). Most people did things rhyming and contemporary. I opted to go classical haiku, which includes references to the seasons as metaphors for periods of time in life. In Japanese culture, cherry blossoms are reverred for their beauty and ephemerality; the reason you see folks flocking in the Quad to take pictures is…well, complicated, I guess, and I don’t feel like typing it all out. Some time I will. In haiku, cherry blossoms symbolize change, transition.
papers, books, advice;
laughter mixes with critique –
cherry blossoms fade
The Daily: Green Pigs and Ham
Green pigs and ham
Publish Date: 2006-04-03Although only their shells are green, the Araucana chicken has brought us green eggs for years. But until now, our ham has been a nice, hammy shade of pink.
No more — these days, even our pigs can be turned green.
While it’s not new, per se, the jellyfish pigs — so called because they have the glowing jellyfish protein inserted into their genetic material while still embryos — have been in the news again lately for two reasons.
The first is the “achievement,” announced in January by Taiwanese researchers, of the creation of jellyfish pigs that glow, inside and out. From snout to eyes to liver and heart, these oinkers are fluorescent green through and through.
The second scientific announcement came March 26, in the online edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology (the print copy will be released this month). A group of scientists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Missouri and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have created five tiny white piglets whose muscle tissue is “larded” with omega-3 fatty acids.
Almost anyone can tell you that omega-3 fatty acids are typically associated with fish, and believed to be “heart-healthy” — to lower cholesterol and help prevent cardiovascular disease.
While it hasn’t yet been concretely shown that these fatty acids will survive from pig to table, the hope is they will, so that a “healthy” version of bacon and other pork products can be produced.
If the genetically modified pigs do retain their omega-3 fatty acids, the researchers have plans to expand beyond pigs, creating cows who produce the fatty acids in their milk to chickens laying fatty-acid-enhanced eggs (now to simply get Araucana chickens to do this).
And why is this a good thing?
Well, as reported in The New York Times, Alexander Leaf, professor emeritus of clinical medicine at Harvard, said that genetically modified pork and other foods with omega-3 fatty acids would eventually get to the consumer, and “people can continue to eat their junk food … you won’t have to change your diet, but you will be getting what you need.”
But the problems with diet and obesity in this country will not be solved by changing the genetic content of the food we eat; as the Snackwell craze proved several years back, it doesn’t matter if food is labeled healthy, or non-fat — if you regularly eat a box of Snackwells in one sitting, you’re going to gain weight.
Likewise, changing the makeup of a pig isn’t going to mean you can suddenly eat all the bacon in the world and never gain weight or have any problems.
Regular bacon is bad to eat in massive amounts — the key is not genetically modifying pigs to produce omega-3 fatty acids. The key is learning to eat in moderation.
As Queen Latifah so eloquently said on The Daily Show last Thursday, “Don’t mess with bacon!”
If you want to eat healthy bacon, have turkey bacon.
While it is hard to argue against the lifesaving potential of some genetically modified organisms, especially those that will help relieve famine and create disease tolerant plants (and potentially animals) in Third World countries, that is not the case here.
We’re deluding ourselves if we think that the key to managing our health is in managing and modifying the genomes of the food we eat.
I do not like green pigs and ham, I do not like it, Kelly I am. I do not like them here or there, I do not like GMOs anywhere.