Death Penalty Drug Talk in the Comics?

Yep.  Though many of you probably haven’t heard of the comic (even if you still read newspapers).  Barney and Clyde has taken it’s first serious tumble at a current event, and the strip opted for a relatively obscure one involving death penalty drugs.

This isn't in your editorial pages

The current story in Barney and Clyde concerns sodium thiopental, and whether or not Barney’s company (he’s the CEO) will manufacture the drug – specifically for purposes of execution.  Regular readers will be familiar with the shortage of sodium thiopental and the consequences of that shortage on state executions.  As of today (June 30), there have been just two strips on this subject, so I don’t know if it will really explore the specifics of execution drugs, or go for a more character-specific exploration of what Barney will or will not due to benefit his company.

(as an aside, should you enjoy Barney and Clyde, and don’t have it in your local paper, bug your paper and the Washington Post Writers Group about it).

The Current and Future Fight Over Avastin is NOT About Science

Earlier today the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Oncologic Drugs Advisory Committee voted to withdraw the accelerated approval that the FDA had granted the drug Avastin for use in treating breast cancer.  This process was started last December, and will reach some kind of resolution by the end of next month.  Today’s meeting was a first-of-its-kind review requested by the drug manufacturer, Genentech.

The rationale behind the withdrawal, per the FDA announcement last December (boldface mine):

“The agency is making this recommendation after reviewing the results of four clinical studies of Avastin in women with breast cancer and determining that the data indicate that the drug does not prolong overall survival in breast cancer patients or provide a sufficient benefit in slowing disease progression to outweigh the significant risk to patients. These risks include severe high blood pressure; bleeding and hemorrhage; the development of perforations (or “holes”) in the body, including in the nose, stomach, and intestines; and heart attack or heart failure.”

This kind of argument should be familiar to those who have followed debates over changes to screening procedures that were an attempt to respond to the significant side effects of those screenings, or the questionable effectiveness of the screenings.  The regulators are trying to balance the risks of the disease (which affects a small segment of the population), against the consequences of the treatment or screening (which may affect a larger percentage of the population, or have a larger overall negative impact).  That kind of risk calculation doesn’t happen for those who have the disease or a family history of the disease.

As you might expect, patient advocates are not keen on the FDA decision, and several protested the hearing.  Some see the setback as an example of a regulatory agency walking back the accelerated approval process in favor of more government control.  But the language used in one part of this Wall Street Journal editorial suggests how this isn’t really about the science, because that’s what they talk about.  Dr. Pazdur heads the FDA office responsible for cancer drugs (boldface mine):

Tau Day A Good Idea, Just Avoid the Pluto Tactics

Math(s) fans and Google Doodle groupies are likely familiar with one of the designations of March 14 (3/14) – Pi Day.  The day managed to get recognition from the U.S. Congress in 2009.  It’s an excellent excuse for math(s) to get a little publicity, aside from whenever students are working on their circle-related formulas.

However, there are others who are arguing that Pi is the wrong number to be using for all those pesky calculations.  They advocate for using Tau, which is twice the value of Pi, in these formulas.  And today, June 28, is Tau Day.  The advantages of using 6.28 rather than 3.14 (taking these numbers as far out as you like) become clearer when working with higher level mathematics, primarily polar coordinates (very useful for trigonometry) and many different integrations.  But using Tau for the more fundamental calculations really doesn’t affect much.  The only place where things get hairier with Tau is using it for the area of a circle, as you introduce a fraction where there wasn’t one before.  In other words, if you do heavy lifting with your math, you’ll probably like Tau.  If you don’t do such heavy lifting, I don’t think you’ll mind (or notice).  Tweak the formulas a bit, and there you go. Or, as math author Danica McKellar noted,

Happy Tau Day! (if you have to ask…)—
Danica McKellar (@danicamckellar) June 29, 2011

What’s struck me as odd is this faux-confrontational arguments and efforts to make the switch.  And that’s where I think there are similarities with the hullabaloo over reclassifying Pluto as a minor planet back in 2006.  While I don’t see a math book coming out trying to argue for Pi to keep the public engaged (like some folks tried and failed with Pluto), this notion of opposing camps strikes me as counterproductive.  And absent the presence of a math(s) standards body to dictate terms, I see no good reason why Tau supporters don’t just start using it.  The implementation challenge will be with education, and that’s more in terms of doing it all at once rather than piecemeal.

So come one, why not make it Tau Day every day?

Science and Technology Guests on Late Night, Week of June 27

Update June 30 – I missed an animal expert guest on last night’s (Wednesday, June 29) Lopez Tonight.  Steve Mehren from Saving Wildlife International visited George Lopez, no doubt with some animals.

Original Post

There is an unfortunate convergence of factors that lead to this week’s thin gruel.  The NBC shows (Leno, Fallon), are in repeats.  The Comedy Central Shows have a rare science and technology free guest lineup.  The animal handler guests are out in force.

So, there’s not much this week, unless you like what usually passes for animal expert segments in late night television.  Those can be found on Wednesday (Dave Salmoni, Jimmy Kimmel Live!) and Thursday (repeat of Jeff Musial’s appearance with Jimmy Fallon from earlier this month).

The bright new spot of the week is a return appearance by NASA Astronaut Mike Massimino.  Massimino appears to be the talk show go-to guest from NASA’s Astronaut corps.  In addition, Last Call with Carson Daily will re-air the April appearance of Timothy Allen, photographer involved in the recent BBC series Human Planet.

Perhaps the following musical segment from Jimmy Fallon’s show last Thursday night will help fill the void.  It’s a tribute to the Space Shuttle program.

Jackie Neptune & the Planetariums (Motown Goes To Space) bit.ly/llGW61—
jimmy fallon (@jimmyfallon) June 24, 2011

NIH to Play Drug Matchmaker?

This summary of a recent Science article piqued my interest.  The key phrase:

“this month NIH Director Francis Collins unveiled something fresh: an effort to persuade drug companies to open up their troves of abandoned drugs to academics, who would look for new uses.”

As I have no Science access (or Nature, either, even when I’m cited), I had to look elsewhere for a guess at what was going on.  The article appears to be based on a presentation from the most recent meeting of the Advisory Committee to the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  Amy Patterson, Associate Director for Science Policy, spoke (at roughly the 1:11 mark) about a new effort to support repurposing of drugs.  While some compounds are marketed for purposes that aren’t connected with the reasons why the compounds were developed (Viagra is a noted example), there isn’t a systematic method for exploring such alternate uses for other compounds that were not successful.  Dr. Patterson notes that thalidomide – a drug withdrawn from the market for causing birth defects – was eventually recovered for other purposes, and NIH is interested in finding other drugs, to fulfill their health mission and to extract additional value from the research and development money invested in drug development.

This drug recovery work is part of a larger effort to improve the transition or translation of medical research into knowledge, tools or compounds that can be used in practice.  Director Collins outlined the abandoned drug compound portion of this in an article from earlier in the year, and the NIH effort to establish a center for translational research is another component of this work.  There are a number of logistical, legal and administrative challenges to rescuing abandoned compounds, and it makes sense that the Office of Science Policy is involved.

The specifics are discussed in the presentation, and suggested in the Collins article linked to above.  Efforts are underway to standardize agreements for sharing and access to abandoned compounds, and to expand and augment the databases in existence that cover such compounds and related clinical trial information.  This would be coupled with increased discussions with private and public sector researchers.

It is easier to envision doing this in fields where there are tangible items at the end of research efforts rather than just failed hypotheses.  I think existing economic and other pressures make it worthwhile to see how other fields might be able to systematically examine ‘failed’ research and see what other areas of applications might exist.

Belated Blogging Celebration – Cotton Anniversary

I managed to miss the second anniversary of this blog earlier in the week (the 22nd).

While I have some basic understanding, via WordPress statistics, that site views have improved this year over last, it’s hard to be terribly confident in the strength of those numbers.  There’s always a fair amount of referral spam, and WordPress doesn’t give an easy means of counting the hits via feed readers and other syndicated means.  I can do it for individual posts, but not for any day-to-day (or week-to-week) comparisons.

I still haven’t grown to the level of any of the major players or collections of bloggers.  That’s going to take either a long time or some kind of partnership.  Twitter has helped, but it’s been a nudge rather than a push.  Two of my biggest referrers are strongly connected to my past blogging – Prometheus and Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog.  ScienceBlogs sneaks into the top three on the strength of the linkage to TFK.

The best indicator of how small-time I am is what happened last December, when Thoughts From Kansas over at the ScienceBlogs mothership linked to one of my posts.  Traffic exploded that day and that month, and the post is one of the top four viewed posts as of the end of my second year of blogging sole proprietorship.  The top quartet:

• Newton’s Third Law of Funny
• Seriously, Don’t Put Words in the Mouths of Engineers. Don’t Even Imply It.
• Commerce Department Names Members of National Innovation Council
• The Newest Superbug Laughs at Your Hand Sanitizer

For comparison, the topics of this crop of top viewed posts bears little resemblance to last year’s.  This bunch ranks high in part because of the broad appeal of the first and fourth entries.  Apparently trying to find Newton’s laws demonstrated visually is often done via a search engine.

Plans for this next year?  Nothing concrete just yet, outside of redecorating the place (that should be done in time for the 1500th post).  I keep toying with the notion of editing series of posts into longer form pieces, but without a sense of where to publish them (besides here), that’s likely to remain on the back burner.

Varmus PCAST Vacancy Filled…11 Months Later

While the Obama Administration received proper kudos for its early series of science and technology appointments, its actions since have more closely resembled the typical U.S. government pattern of tardiness and inattention provided to science and technology positions in the government that require Presidential appointment (with or without Senate confirmation).

Harold Varmus left the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) at the beginning of July 2010 when he took his current position as Director of the National Cancer Institute.  Only this month has there been an announcement of his replacement (an announcement that escaped the notice of many).  Mark Gorenberg will join PCAST in time for its July meeting.  He is currently a Managing Director of the software investment firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.  Hummer Winblad focuses on software companies, and Gorenberg worked for Sun Microsystems prior to joining the company.  Gorenberg is also involved with environmental issues, and is the current Chair of the Board of Trustees at the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment (the Center needs to update its board list).

Good News, Everyone! Rap Guide to Evolution *Revised* Is Out Now

Tonight is a science culture Thursday for more than one reason (at least in the States).  Futurama returns with new episodes on Comedy Central tonight (check those local listings).  Math jokes will make an appearance sometime during this new batch.

The other new math and science entertainment today is from Baba Brinkman (yes, this blog will shamelessly promote his peer-reviewed rap projects much like it did for TMBG’s Here Comes Science two years ago).

By now you can listen to all of the tracks on The Rap Guide to Evolution Revised via Brinkman’s website.  If you’re going to see the show in New York City this summer, it closely resembles this album, rather than the first iteration of RGE, which was unveiled in 2009.  There are four new tracks, and the rest are revised versions of tracks from the first RGE.  The revisions are in both beats and lyrics (sometimes subtly).  In some cases the songs sound very different while expressing the same ideas.  Genetically speaking the genotypes aren’t that different, but the phenotypes diverge a fair bit.  The tune with the widest divergence shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s been paying attention.

You can stream the music already, and download it under a name your own price arrangement.  If you’re still reading this post by now, I’ll bet you give and give generously.  Me, I’m sufficiently old school to hold out for a tangible CD.

NPG Dives Into Still Growing Open Access Publishing

Tucked away in this Scientific American discussion (reprinted from Nature) of the latest paper outlining the growth of open access publishing is the entry of a possible major player in the field.  Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has started Scientific Reports, an open access electronic journal.  Authors will pay a per-article fee (currently on par with that of PLoS One, the king open access journal, but apparently without the discounts the Public Library of Science makes available to institutional members or the fee waivers available to those with a limited availability to pay), and Scientific Reports will be the sole open access title in all of NPG.  Articles will be archived in PubMedCentral.  Since Scientific Reports is in its first week, any discussion of its future strikes me as highly speculative.

Part of the reason NPG is doing this is the continued growth in both open access journals and articles.  As the PLoS One article describes in Scientific American, growth in open access publishing is significantly greater than it is in subscription journals.  To wit,

“Since the year 2000, the average annual growth rate has been 18% for the number of journals and 30% for the number of articles. This can be contrasted to the reported 3,5% yearly volume increase in journal publishing in general.”

Open access is still a young, and small, share of the total scientific publications universe.  The authors noted that in 2009 articles in open access journals represented 7.7 percent of total peer reviewed articles.  It stands to reason that NPG sees market share for the taking.  If open access articles continue to grow at 30 percent per year as they have since 2000, NPG could help make sure some eyeballs at least glance at their pay-for-access materials by hosting open access content at nature.com.

I see no particular problem with NPG entering the field, as the quality demands they will have for the content in Scientific Reports can only help reinforce the perception of open access journals as offering the same quality content and peer review that make for high impact factors and top-flight research articles.  Now if they end up steering submissions to their non-open access titles, we’ll have a problem.

Hey, organization formerly known as the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Any plans to follow in Nature‘s footsteps?

A Time War That Isn’t

I noted this mildly provocative essay in The Boston Globe on Sunday, suggesting that the having Universal Time (previously known as Greenwich Mean Time) as the center of global time was under challenge.  The challenger is a clock tower in Mecca, Saudi Arabia that was completed last October.  The clock is not fully operational, which likely makes any challenge moot for the moment.  Since you may consider the notion of shifting universal time a bit odd, the author does a good job explaining how that wasn’t always such a strange idea.  For while time is a phenomena independent of humans, the measurement of it is very much dependent on us.  A universal time standard is less than 130 years old.

The notion is that this clock tower in Mecca would serve the same function for the world’s Muslims as the Greenwich Observatory in the U.K. did for the British Empire.  Time would originate from the meridian going through Mecca, which would place time 21 minutes off from the time zones currently in operation (the clock, when running, is set to that time).  It should be noted that some parts of the world do operate in time zones that are 30 minutes off (or between) from the rest.

Aside from the lack of a fully functioning clock, the idea has not born fruit since the tower was completed last October.  Few in Saudi Arabia have indicated they would change their time to match the Mecca Clock, and the bigger debate in the region appears to be over the encroaching development on the site of the Kaaba, the final destination of the pilgrimage to Mecca.  That might change should the clock become fully functional.