- December 9, 2009
- 11:48 PM
- 674 views
Parasites in the Brain
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
"In 1896, the Scientific American published an article, Is Insanity Due to a Microbe?''," and thus started a lively discussion on infectious causes of schizophrenia, epilepsy and other diseases of the mind...... Read more »
da Silva RC, & Langoni H. (2009) Toxoplasma gondii: host-parasite interaction and behavior manipulation. Parasitology research, 105(4), 893-8. PMID: 19548003
- December 9, 2009
- 11:31 PM
- 626 views
Grow Fat and Lazy, and Vascular Dementia Awaits
by Reason in Fight Aging!
Metabolic syndrome is a shorthand for the unfavorable changes that result from eating too much, exercising too little, and packing on the pounds of visceral fat. These lifestyle choices alter the operation of your biology for the worse: in most people they will cut short life expectancy, boost chronic inflammation, and raise the risk of suffering all of the common disabling and fatal age-related conditions, such as dementia, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so forth. If you let things rust, don't be surprised when they fail and fall apart more readily. Degeneration of the mind is perhaps the worst consequence of a lifestyle of fat and indolence. Metabolic syndrome brings with it fat-induced chronic inflammation that significantly increases the risk of suffering a range of neurodegenerative conditions, such as vascular dementia - destruction occurring in the brain as a result of damage and dysfunction in small blood vessels. Here is a paper from the Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging to back up that claim with data: We investigated the relationship of metabolic syndrome (MetS) and its individual components with incident dementia in a prospective population-based study with a 3.5-year follow-up. ... A total of 2,097 participants from a sample of...... Read more »
Solfrizzi V, Scafato E, Capurso C, D'Introno A, Colacicco AM, Frisardi V, Vendemiale G, Baldereschi M, Crepaldi G, Di Carlo A.... (2009) Metabolic Syndrome and the Risk of Vascular Dementia. The Italian Longitudinal Study on Aging. Journal of neurology, neurosurgery, and psychiatry. PMID: 19965842
- December 9, 2009
- 10:42 PM
- 639 views
Low back pain while running..a real problem in the but? Part 1
by Dr. Wayne Button in Sport Injuries and Wellness
Learn how back pain when running can be because of problems in your buttock region.... Read more »
LIEBENSON, C. (2007) Hip dysfunction and back pain. Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies, 11(2), 111-115. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbmt.2007.01.005
- December 9, 2009
- 10:41 PM
- 777 views
White Bears – The Paradox of Mental Suppression
by Shaheen Lakhan in Brain Blogger
Whatever you do, don’t think of a white bear. Go on, close your eyes, relax, but don’t think of a white bear… So, what happened? Most likely, you were overwhelmed by thoughts of a white bear. This mini-experiment highlights the fascinating paradox of thought suppression. That is, once we explicitly try not to think of [...]... Read more »
Wegner, D., Schneider, D., Carter, S., & White, T. (1987) Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5-13. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5
- December 9, 2009
- 06:12 PM
- 602 views
Could Kepler find something closer to home?
by Niall in we are all in the gutter
You might have heard about Kepler and NASA space mission to find planets around other stars. But recently this paper came out recently showing how it could be used to probe unknown distant reaches of our own solar system.... Read more »
Eran O. Ofek, & Ehud Nakar. (2009) Detectability of Oort cloud objects using Kepler. Submitted to ApJL. arXiv: 0912.0948v1
- December 9, 2009
- 01:00 PM
- 689 views
Psychologists find a drug-free way for fears to be unlearned
by Christian Jarrett in BPS Research Digest
In an exciting breakthrough for psychological science, researchers in the United States have demonstrated a drug-free way to prevent the return of a learned fear. It's hoped the discovery will lead to improved therapeutic techniques for people with phobias or intrusive traumatic memories.Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues exploited the fact that memories are particularly vulnerable to modification just after they've been recalled. The procedure began with 65 participants learning to fear a coloured square that appeared on a computer screen. Each time the square appeared they received a mild but unpleasant electric shock to their wrist. In a real-life scenario the equivalent might be a repeatedly bad experience on each attempt at giving a class presentation.The next day, the participants were repeatedly presented with the square but without the shock. This is a well-established procedure in psychological therapy known as extinction, the idea being that the person unlearns the fear associated with the stimulus or situation. A real-life equivalent might be to repeatedly practice giving a presentation in a safe environment, perhaps to sympathetic friends and family, or to a "virtual audience".Crucially, a minority of participants undertook the extinction trials just ten minutes after they were given a reminder of the coloured square. This reminder will have rendered the memory of the square temporarily "labile" or vulnerable to modification. Other participants completed the extinction trials six hours after a reminder - too late to capitalise on the memory's vulnerable period - whilst a third group of participants had no reminder at all. A short-coming with extinction therapy is that even after people appear to have unlearned the fear associated with a stimulus or situation, that fear can creep back. In the lab, on day three, the participants were again presented with the coloured square. Even though they'd all responded without fear at the end of the previous day's extinction training, the majority of the participants - those who'd had the 6-hour reminder before extinction, and those who'd had no reminder - showed a renewed fear response (as revealed by their sweat response), just as typical happens after extinction therapy in real life.Not so for the participants who'd had the ten-minute reminder before the previous day's extinction trials. They were ice calm, unmoved by the coloured square. For this group, it's as if their memory of the square had been permanently modified. When on the previous day they'd been reminded of the unpleasant shock-square experience, the memory was briefly vulnerable to modification, and just at that critical time they'd had the innocuous, shock-free presentations. For the fictional student with a fear of class presentations, the trick would be to recall their nightmare experience in class, and then begin the safe, innocuous practice of presentations with friends. This study gets even more impressive because the result carried over when a subsample of the participants were retested a year later - those who'd had the ten-minute reminder before extinction were still unmoved by the square whereas the other participants still showed signs of fear.What's more, the intervention is highly specific. The researchers repeated the procedure but with three differently coloured squares - two associated with a shock, and one safe square. They then used the pre-extinction reminder procedure for one of the feared squares but not the other, and it was only this targeted square that remained fear free.Phelps said: "Previous attempts to disrupt fear memories have relied on pharmacological interventions. Our results suggest such invasive techniques may not be necessary. Using a more natural intervention that captures the adaptive purpose of reconsolidation allows a safe way to prevent the return of fear.”Phelps also told the Digest that any concerns that their procedure could be abused - for example to erase eye-witness memories or implant false memories - are misplaced. The types of emotional memory that were modified in the current study are represented in the amygdala, whereas the "declarative" memories involved in eye-witness testimony have a different neural representation, she explained. Indeed, all the participants in the current study were able to remember that the coloured square had previously been paired with a shock, it's just that those who undertook extinction ten minutes after a reminder no longer showed an automatic fear response to the square. "In short," Phelps told us, "eyewitness testimony depends on identifying (recollecting) what occurred before. We are not affecting that kind of memory."_________________________________D Schiller, M-H Monfils, C Raio, D Johnson, & J LeDoux (2009). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature
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D Schiller, M-H Monfils, C Raio, D Johnson, & J LeDoux. (2009) Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature. info:/
- December 9, 2009
- 12:26 PM
- 433 views
Strike Two
by Journal Watch Online in Journal Watch Online
Another veterinary drug found to be fatal to vultures
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Naidoo, V., Wolter, K., Cromarty, D., Diekmann, M., Duncan, N., Meharg, A., Taggart, M., Venter, L., & Cuthbert, R. (2009) Toxicity of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs to Gyps vultures: a new threat from ketoprofen. Biology Letters. info:/10.1098/rsbl.2009.0818
- December 9, 2009
- 11:28 AM
- 773 views
The Lancet: Active Transportation Could Cut Ischemic Heart Disease Prevalance by 25%
by Travis Saunders, MSc in Obesity Panacea
With the world's leaders currently meeting in Copenhagen to discuss strategies to reduce climate change, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, The Lancet, has released a series examining the public health benefits of various strategies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One of these papers focuses on the impact of widespread adoption of active transportation, and the estimated public health benefit is nothing short of astonishing.... Read more »
Wilkinson, P., Smith, K., Davies, M., Adair, H., Armstrong, B., Barrett, M., Bruce, N., Haines, A., Hamilton, I., & Oreszczyn, T. (2009) Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: household energy. The Lancet, 374(9705), 1917-1929. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(09)61713-X
- December 9, 2009
- 10:47 AM
- 456 views
Biofuel’s indirect environmental effects
by Katie Kline in EcoTone
Biofuels hold promise for reducing the world’s consumption of unsustainable fossil fuels. But like any new technology, they come with their own host of issues and problems. One such problem is the so-called “indirect” effect of biofuels on the landscape and the atmosphere. For example, when farmlands are converted to biofuel crops, the food formerly [...]
... Read more »
Melillo, J., Reilly, J., Kicklighter, D., Gurgel, A., Cronin, T., Paltsev, S., Felzer, B., Wang, X., Sokolov, A., & Schlosser, C. (2009) Indirect Emissions from Biofuels: How Important?. Science, 326(5958), 1397-1399. DOI: 10.1126/science.1180251
- December 9, 2009
- 10:35 AM
- 464 views
Are flu vaccines effective in the elderly?
by iayork in Mystery Rays from Outer Space
There’s been a fair bit of discussion online about the new study in the British Medical Journal1 throwing doubt on Tamiflu’s effectiveness against influenza. (If you haven’t already seen this, see the Avian Flu Diary for an excellent summary of the situation, and an update here.2 Also see the CDC’s recommendations for antivirals here.)
There’s a [...]... Read more »
Jefferson, T., Jones, M., Doshi, P., & Del Mar, C. (2009) Neuraminidase inhibitors for preventing and treating influenza in healthy adults: systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ, 339(dec07 2). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.b5106
Godlee, F., & Clarke, M. (2009) Why don't we have all the evidence on oseltamivir?. BMJ, 339(dec08 3). DOI: 10.1136/bmj.b5351
Baxter, R., Lee, J., & Fireman, B. (2009) Evidence of Bias in Studies of Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness in Elderly Patients. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 2147483647. DOI: 10.1086/649568
- December 9, 2009
- 10:31 AM
- 1,049 views
Conclusion: Darwins Dilemma, Creationist Propaganda and Corrupt Christians
by Johnny in Ecographica
According to “many published scientists,” there is a “story being told by Darwinists” that DNA and genetics play a role in evolutionary development, protein synthesis and the ontogeny of the physical characteristics displayed by animals. In hopes of edifying the masses of wayward “Darwinists,” these same “many published scientists” point out in Darwin’s Dilemma that DNA lacks the potency and mechanical know-how required to undertake these tasks. In actuality - according to “many published scientists” - all of life is derived from non-genetic “information” that is harbored within each irreducibly complex cell. Furthermore, this “information” does not arise from earthly processes, rather these “blue prints” are “preordained” by an “intelligent source.”
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Axe, D. (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds. Journal of Molecular Biology, 341(5), 1295-1315. DOI: 10.1016/j.jmb.2004.06.058
- December 9, 2009
- 09:30 AM
- 741 views
Ocean rigs as vectors for entire communities of invasive species
by Rob Goldstein in Conservation Maven
Scientists have long recognized marine transport as a vector for exotic species invasions. But relatively little attention has been given to the transport of semi-submersible rigs - the installations that are used for oil drilling...... Read more »
Wanless, R., Scott, S., Sauer, W., Andrew, T., Glass, J., Godfrey, B., Griffiths, C., & Yeld, E. (2009) Semi-submersible rigs: a vector transporting entire marine communities around the world. Biological Invasions. DOI: 10.1007/s10530-009-9666-2
- December 9, 2009
- 08:08 AM
- 762 views
Testosterone, Aggression... Confusion
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
Breaking news from the BBC -Testosterone link to aggression 'all in the mind' Work in Nature magazine suggests the mind can win over hormones... Testosterone induces anti-social behaviour in humans, but only because of our own prejudices about its effect rather than its biological activity, suggest the authors. The researchers, led by Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, said the results suggested a case of "mind over matter" with the brain overriding body chemistry. "Whereas other animals may be predominantly under the influence of biological factors such as hormones, biology seems to exert less control over human behaviour," they said. Phew, that's a relief - for a minute back there I was worried we didn't have free will. But look a little closer at the study, and it turns out that all is not as it seems. The experiment (Eisenegger et al) involved giving healthy women 0.5 mg testosterone, or placebo, in a randomized double-blind manner, and then getting them to take part in the "Ultimatum Game".This is a game for two players. One, the Proposer, is given some money, and then has to offer to give a certain proportion of it to the other player, the Receiver. If the Receiver accepts the offer, both players get the agreed-upon amount of money. If they reject it, however, no-one gets anything.The Proposer is basically faced with the choice of making a "fair" offer, e.g. giving away 50%, or a greedy one, say offering 10% and keeping 90% for themselves. Receivers generally accept fair offers, but most people get annoyed or insulted by unfair ones, and reject them, even though this means they lose money (10% of the money is still more than 0%).What happened? Testosterone affected behaviour. It had no effect on women playing the role of the Receivers, but the Proposers given testosterone made significantly fairer offers on average, compared to those given placebo. That's not mind over matter, that's matter over mind - give someone a hormone and their behaviour changes.The direction of the effect is quite interesting - if testosterone increased aggression, as popular belief has it, you might expect it to decrease fair offers. Or, you might not. I suppose it depends on your understanding of "aggression". For their part, Eisenegger et al interpret this finding as suggesting that testosterone doesn't increase aggression per se, but rather increases our motivation to achieve "status", which leads to Proposers making fairer offers, so as to appear nicer. Hmm. Maybe.But where did the BBC get the whole "all in the mind" thing from? Well, after the testing was over, the authors asked the women whether they thought they had taken testosterone or placebo. The results showed that the women couldn't actually tell which they'd had - they were no more accurate than if they were guessing - but women who believed they'd got testosterone made more unfair offers than women who believed they got placebo. The size of this effect was bigger than the effect of testosterone.Is that "mind over matter"? Do beliefs about testosterone exert a more powerful effect on behaviour than testosterone itself? Maybe they do, but these data don't tell us anything about that. The women's beliefs weren't manipulated in any way in this trial, so as an experiment it couldn't investigate belief effects. In order to show that belief alters behaviour, you'd need to control beliefs. You could randomly assign some subjects to be told they were taking testosterone, and compare them to others told they were on placebo, say.This study didn't do anything like that. Beliefs about testosterone were only correlated with behaviour, and unless someone's changed the rules recently, correlation isn't causation. It's like finding that people with brown skin are more likely to be Hindus than people with white skin, and concluding that belief in Brahma alters pigmentation. It could even be that the behaviour drove the belief, because subjects were quizzed about their testosterone status after the Ultimatum Game - maybe women who, for whatever reason, behaved selfishly, decided that this meant they had taken testosterone!Overall, this study provides quite interesting data about hormonal effects on behaviour, but tells us nothing about the effects of beliefs about hormones. On that issue, the way the media have covered this experiment is rather more informative than the experiment itself.Eisenegger, C., Naef, M., Snozzi, R., Heinrichs, M., & Fehr, E. (2009). Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature08711... Read more »
Eisenegger, C., Naef, M., Snozzi, R., Heinrichs, M., & Fehr, E. (2009) Prejudice and truth about the effect of testosterone on human bargaining behaviour. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature08711
- December 9, 2009
- 08:00 AM
- 586 views
Thinking about electric vehicles
by sciencebase in Sciencebase Science Blog
Electric vehicles reduce noise and local air pollution, such as nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and ground-level ozone, but do they simply relocate the carbon tire-tracks to fossil-fired power stations or are there benefits on the global scale?
Fundamentally, an electric engine can achieve 85 to 90% energy conversion efficiency, which contrasts starkly with the internal combustion [...]Thinking about electric vehicles is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog
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Åsgeir Helland. (2009) Well-to-wheel CO2 analysis of electric and ICE vehicles: are global CO2 emission reductions possible?. Int. J. Global Warming, 1(4), 432-442. info:/
- December 9, 2009
- 07:45 AM
- 1,439 views
Tip of the Week: GRAIL for prioritizing SNPs
by Mary in OpenHelix
Perusing my copy of Nature Genetics last week, I was flipping through the pages and noticed an unusual graphic. I looked at it a little closer and was convinced it was one of the Spirographs that I used to make as a kid. (Remember those? I always liked that….) I looked a little bit closer and realized it was somewhat more informative than the Spirographs I used to draw. This represented the relationships between genes, based on the literature. Hmmm….how did they do this, exactly?
The paper I was reading was Genetic variants at CD28, PRDM1 and CD2/CD58 are associated with rheumatoid arthritis risk by Raychaudhuri et al, which was interesting enough. I like to read the GWAS papers to see what the current techniques and strategies are, not only for the specific genes themselves. And this paper reported the strategy that they used to prioritize their SNPs, and that they used GRAIL to generate the data for this graphic of gene relationships. Check out Figure 1 for the strategy.
When I saw the name GRAIL I thought–huh….GRAIL is back with a new use? I thought that was…ah…retired…at this point. But this isn’t that GRAIL (http://compbio.ornl.gov/Grail-1.3/, Gene Recognition and Assembly Internet Link). This is a different GRAIL–the new one is Gene Relationships Among Implicated Loci. So I had to go and read that paper, which is Identifying Relationships among Genomic Disease Regions: Predicting Genes at Pathogenic SNP Associations and Rare Deletions by Raychaudhuri et al.
This new GRAIL is all about text mining. It is a tool that relies on statistical text mining of the literature for genes in a region and examines the relationships among those genes in the text. The focus in their case is disease regions, but there’s no reason that you couldn’t use it for a variety of other topics. As the authors state:
Given only a collection of disease regions, GRAIL uses our text-based definition of relatedness (or alternative metrics of relatedness) to identify a subset of genes, more highly related than by chance; it also assigns a select set of keywords that suggest putative biological pathways.
So you pull a set of genes out of the literature based on SNPs or locations of interest, and you can begin to assess what’s interesting in the set. Now, the tool makes a lot of assumptions that you should be aware of if you are going to use it. It assumes each region contains a single pathogenic gene. I’m not sure that’s always going to be the case, but for this tool as long as you know that, that’s a fair assumption. They suggest this helps to keep from multigenic regions from dominating the analysis. Fair enough, but…what if that is the interesting aspect? Still–that’s ok as long as you know.
In the paper they use validated SNPs from 4 different research areas:
SNPs associated with serum lipid levels: GRAIL finds genes in the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway.
SNPs associated with height; they identify pathways they consider plausible.
Crohn’s disease; they confirm associations that have been seen.
Schizophrenia–and here they used rare deletions as the items of interest; they find related genes, many highly enriched in the CNS. So this suggests using this not only for SNPs but for CNVs this may be a useful strategy.
Their Figure 1 nicely summarizes the strategy:
One curious tweak of the data analysis was that they used the literature prior to December 2006, because right after that there was an onslaught of GWAS papers that would list a whole bunch of genes associated with regions that might be more tenuous still. I understand this in theory, but I imagine it also eliminates more current research on genes of interest from other methods too. I saw in the tool you could choose either pre-Dec 06 or a more up-to-date literature set. It would be useful to try both if you use GRAIL and keep that in mind.
Another point to keep in mind: some genes are just not found in the abstracts, and they mention that is an issue. So the set you can examine are those that were in the abstracts, and were identified properly with nomenclature, spelling, etc. Text mining is cool, but has a lot of limitations around those aspects, and the use of synonyms too in general. It’s not just an issue for GRAIL, but for all text mining tools at this point.
They also devise a way to use Gene Ontology (GO) and some expression data in GRAIL as other “relatedness” metrics. You’ll find those available from the GRAIL tool as well.
They don’t show any spirographs in their figures in this first GRAIL paper. That one that drew me in was Figure 2 in the arthritis paper. So I went over to the software to try to generate these myself. The outcome at this point is a web page with text and links to UCSC Genome Browser, and Entrez Gene (from the individual genes and from the keyword list–keywords collect multiple Entrez Genes). I was a little surprised that the keyword link wasn’t to PubMed as well. Currently it doesn’t provide the graphic, but maybe that will come along over time. If it does I’ll be sure to mention it on the blog.
One final note on the paper: in the supplemental section they compare GRAIL to other tools in this arena. If you are interested in tools like we are here you may find some of them interesting as well. The tools are listed with URLs in Table S5, and the comparison outcome is in Text S1:
Prioritizer [2], Gene2Disease (G2D) [3,4,5], Commonality of Functional Annotation (CFA) [6], and Prospectr [7]. There were five supervised tools: Endeavour [8], GeneSeeker [9], SUSPECTS [10], TOM [11], and CANDID [12]
So check out GRAIL and see if you find gene relationships. But don’t forget those caveats about the genes not listed in the abstracts, or the literature coverage dates. The software can be found here: http://www.broad.mit.edu/mpg/grail/
I know it’s a beta. But I think it has a lot of potential to help people sift through the results they are getting from a variety of techniques. Check it out.
NOTE: you may find periods that you can’t run GRAIL because it puts a burden on the servers. You should try again during off hours if you are seeing problems with getting it to run. This happened to me during my testing of it last week.
The list of GWAS data I used to test GRAIL came from the NHGRI catalog, which we discussed here: List of GWAS studies. I tried the straight hair SNP list, and got a pretty interesting set of results that certainly included “epidermis” and “skin” as keywords, among other things.
++++++++++++ Citations ++++++++++++
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Raychaudhuri, S., Plenge, R., Rossin, E., Ng, A., , ., Purcell, S., Sklar, P., Scolnick, E., Xavier, R., Altshuler, D.... (2009) Identifying Relationships among Genomic Disease Regions: Predicting Genes at Pathogenic SNP Associations and Rare Deletions. PLoS Genetics, 5(6). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1000534
Raychaudhuri, S., Thomson, B., Remmers, E., Eyre, S., Hinks, A., Guiducci, C., Catanese, J., Xie, G., Stahl, E., Chen, R.... (2009) Genetic variants at CD28, PRDM1 and CD2/CD58 are associated with rheumatoid arthritis risk. Nature Genetics, 41(12), 1313-1318. DOI: 10.1038/ng.479
Medland, S., Nyholt, D., Painter, J., McEvoy, B., McRae, A., Zhu, G., Gordon, S., Ferreira, M., Wright, M., & Henders, A. (2009) Common Variants in the Trichohyalin Gene Are Associated with Straight Hair in Europeans. The American Journal of Human Genetics, 85(5), 750-755. DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2009.10.009
- December 9, 2009
- 07:32 AM
- 696 views
Breaking the waves – conservation conundrum of bioshields
by CJA Bradshaw in ConservationBytes
Today’s post covers a neat little review just published online in Conservation Letters by Feagin and colleagues entitled Shelter from the storm? Use and misuse of coastal vegetation bioshields for managing natural disasters. I’m covering this for three reasons: (1) it’s a great summary and wake-up call for those contemplating changing coastal ecosystems in the [...]... Read more »
Feagin, R., Mukherjee, N., Shanker, K., Baird, A., Cinner, J., Kerr, A., Koedam, N., Sridhar, A., Arthur, R., Jayatissa, L.... (2009) Shelter from the storm? Use and misuse of coastal vegetation bioshields for managing natural disasters. Conservation Letters. DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2009.00087.x
- December 9, 2009
- 07:02 AM
- 837 views
On Public Relations
by Richard Grant in Confessions of a (former) Lab Rat
Regular listeners will remember the Science Online London gathering back in August. The day before, Mendeley hosted a pre-conference ‘fringe’ event, organized by Jenny. It turned out to be quite a wild evening, and there is video evidence of shenanigans.
One thing I remember clearly (some of you might be surprised I remember anything from that evening, but anyway) is David Colquhoun getting a tad rabid about PR. The gist was that science doesn’t need PR, it’s a waste of time and money; I don’t remember him saying explicitly PR people are professional liars but that was the impression I came away with.
I thought that was bollocks, and I still do.
PR is necessary not simply because scientists like to eat, and therefore need to be funded, and therefore need to convince various bodies (and by extension the people who influence those bodies) to give them money (and I want to talk a little about about ‘justification’ of research in another post) but also because there are crucial social and public health aspects of what we do. We don’t just have to convince the wider community that a particular piece of research is ‘correct’, but we need to demonstrate—somehow—that it directly affects their health (or their wallet, or whatever).
I’m reminded of this because a friend of mine sent me a link via Facebook last week, saying
Some (including me) would argue that the greatest battles against illness and suffering should be fought on the PR/HR front, rather than purely in the arena of science. You, O Great Stream Feeder in the Gyre of Science Publication, may well have already seen this: RT David McCandless RT @GreatDismal: Emotional Epidemiology Of H1N1
The article is from a medical doctor (or possibly here), and describes the reactions, preconceptions and attitudes of visitors to her clinic in the face of the H1N1 epidemic; or, as she describes it, Emotional Epidemiology. In brief, her patients at first demanded a vaccine against H1N1 (despite not wanting the seasonal jab…) and then, when the vaccine became available, refused it.
It certainly isn’t related to logic or facts, since few new medical data became available during this period. It seems to reflect a sort of psychological contagion of myth and suspicion.
Another report last week backs up my claim. The Daily Express reported that taking aspirin could “significantly reduce” age-related macular degeneration. Sounds great. But let’s see what the NHS has to say:
This is a well-designed and well-conducted study, the results of which have been incorrectly reported in the press. This study found that low-dose aspirin had no effect in preventing age-related macular degeneration, a common cause of sight loss in the elderly.
Far from being a significant reduction, the authors of the reported (large, double-blind) randomized controlled trial took pains to stress that there is no benefit. Indeed,
There are risks associated with taking daily or alternate-day aspirin, which should be weighed against the benefits. Elderly people, to whom this research will be most relevant, are most at risk of gastric irritation if they regularly use aspirin.
What’s going on, here?
In both cases, it’s a failure of PR. It’s not simply a matter of education. It’s a matter of getting things right, and getting that information out there, to the public—via the newspapers or schools or physicians in surgeries. Just as with anthropogenic global warming there is no (serious) debate about the science; it’s a matter of PR. And I know it’s difficult. I have no idea who Jo Willey is (apart from Health Correspondent for the Daily Trainwreck), but I would love to see the press release that she read. Because I also know that they are difficult to get right. On Monday I had to completely re-write a release that we were about to publish because the person who produced the copy got the message of the research completely wrong.
PR is necessary. And it’s hard; perhaps even harder than the science.
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Christen, W., Glynn, R., Chew, E., & Buring, J. (2009) Low-Dose Aspirin and Medical Record–Confirmed Age-related Macular Degeneration in a Randomized Trial of Women. Ophthalmology, 116(12), 2386-2392. DOI: 10.1016/j.ophtha.2009.05.031
- December 9, 2009
- 06:00 AM
- 686 views
Fouled ship hulls not a big risk to freshwater systems
by Rob Goldstein in Conservation Maven
So with all the depressing studies about maritime vessels as a vector for invasive species, new research in the journal Diversity and Distributions offers up some relatively good news about transport in the Great Lakes...... Read more »
Sylvester, F., & MacIsaac, H. (2009) Is vessel hull fouling an invasion threat to the Great Lakes?. Diversity and Distributions. DOI: 10.1111/j.1472-4642.2009.00622.x
- December 9, 2009
- 02:25 AM
- 1,684 views
Empathy for the Mentally Ill in Medical Education
by Dr Shock in Dr Shock MD PhD
Empathy is an important asset for a doctor. This ability to appreciate patients’ emotions and express this emotional awareness improves clinical outcomes, professional satisfaction, and patient adherence to medical recommendations, and is believed to significantly improve patient satisfaction. More on empathy and what it is can be read here
There is a significant decline in empathy [...]
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William Bunn, D.O. and Jan Terpstra, M.D. (2009) Cultivating Empathy for the Mentally Ill Using Simulated Auditory Hallucinations. Academic Psychiatry. DOI: 10.1176/appi.ap.33.6.457
- December 8, 2009
- 11:14 PM
- 844 views
Hammer Time
by Dr. M in Deep Sea News
Every time you see me that Hammer’s just so hype
I’m dope on the floor and I’m magic on the mic
Now why would I ever stop doing this
With others makin’ records that just don’t hit
I toured around the world from London to the Bay
It’s Hammer Go, Hammer MC Hammer, Yo Hammer
And the rest can go and [...]... Read more »
McComb, D., Tricas, T., & Kajiura, S. (2009) Enhanced visual fields in hammerhead sharks. Journal of Experimental Biology, 212(24), 4010-4018. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.032615
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