TEDTalk: Medicine for the 99%... He's about 99% Wrong

A TEDTalk was uploaded in December 2011 titled Medicine for the 99 Percent - It's still on the front page of the most recently uploaded TEDTalks as of this publication.  Thomas Pogge is Director of the Global Justice Program and a philosophy professor at Yale.

He argues in this TEDTalk for the development and support of the Health Impact Fund, a global fund available to any innovator of a new drug.  The ostensible goal of the fund is to bring access to high impact drugs to all of the world's population at an affordable cost.  It's not subsidizing drug costs or aiding in the distribution of drugs, just incentivizing innovators to make a global commitment to cheap and accessible drugs.

Let me explain a bit more about how he introduces his argument and how it works, then I'll go into why this guy's presenting a straw-man at best.  He opens by saying medicines are cheap to produce and much cheaper than the alternatives ("hospitalization... operations... emergency rooms... the morgue"), and we need to be thankful to "pharmacologists" who research "these things and develop them" and to the pharmaceutical industry for "supporting these activities."
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Sigma-Aldrich: "All-U-Can-Eat" styrofoam with every purchase!*

*Substitute for weird grey flaky stuff at no extra charge!

Hi, everyone. Apologies for my absurdly long absence from the blog--I've been extremely busy hammering out an enormous project and writing grant applications to the Canadian government for the past few months.

Today's post is going to be a short one, but it's a problem that's been vexing me for the entire time I've been at grad school. As the person at my lab who is charge of ordering reagents, and partially responsible for the inventory and cataloging of them, I get to see first-hand how much packaging goes into a Sigma order. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the policies they use for determining "adequate packaging" are absurd to the point of being humourless (figures 1 & 2).

Figures 1 & 2. This is a 25g bottle of 1-decyne that we received today from Sigma, shown for scale with the size of the box and the amount of styrofoam used to ship it. This is far from the worst case of overpackaging I have seen.

Now, I understand several things:

1. These are indeed hazardous chemicals (sometimes)
2. A breakage or leak in transit would be a "non-trivial" (cf. dangerous and embarrassing) problem
3. The company is responsible for making sure that I receive the items intact and in perfect condition
4. There are numerous regulations regarding the transport and handling of these materials, both domestically and across international borders

HOWEVER. When receiving items from Strem or Alfa, the packaging isn't nearly as excessive (that is, they usually ship multiple items individually wrapped in a single box, unlike Sigma, who generally place a single item in a single box for an entire order, unless there are a series of similar items, such as various 500 mg bottles of pybox ligands). Both Alfa and Strem ship from the U.S., so I know that it isn't simply a border issue, and indeed, when things get shipped to us by Sigma from Oakville, Ontario, the reagents are still swaddled in enough layers of plastic pillows, styrofoam, grey fabric, or that weird flaky stuff to survive getting thrown out of an airplane. I've received orders where individual 1g bottles of reagents are packed in their own boxes, resulting in an entire garbage can full of packing junk after ordering only 5-10 g total of actual materials.

It may be a funny coincidence that I work in a "green chemistry" oriented laboratory, but all comedic weepiness aside, this packaging offends me every time I make an order. The amount of styrofoam alone that goes into the garbage here every week could probably fill a hot tub, and that stuff never goes away. I've found an aftermarket use for the grey fabric, and the boxes can be recycled easily, but the rest of it just goes straight to a dump.

So, I pose these questions to fellow chemists and other scientists in the States:

Does Sigma-Aldrich use the same asinine packaging policies when shipping domestically?

Does it enrage you, having to swim through a sea of styrofoam just to find your starting material?

Do you fantasize about sending back the box-o-styrofoam with a note encouraging them to re-use it?

Do you fantasize about collecting a year's worth of Sigma-foam and filling your swimming pool with it?

What is that weird greyish flaky stuff?

Nick

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Energy Frontier Research Centers

We cannot meet the expanding energy needs of our growing human population using oil-dependent, 19^th century technology. We need to expand renewable energy technologies, develop methods for storing renewable energy, and clean up problems generated from our oil dependency like atmospheric CO_2.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences is supporting this goal by funding scientific innovation on the atomic and molecular scale - the foundation of renewable energy technology. One such effort is the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) program which was established to “integrate the talents and expertise of leading scientists in a setting designed to accelerate research toward meeting our critical energy challenges.”

Each of the 46 EFRCs represent a collaborative unit that can contain universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and for-profit firms (mapped out below). Beginning in 2009 each center receives $2-5 million per year for a 5-year period to focus on one of the following: advanced nuclear systems, catalysis, clean and efficient combustion, electric energy storage, geological sequestration of CO₂, materials in extreme environments, hydrogen science, biofuels, solar energy utilization, solid state lighting, and superconductivity.

On May 25-27, 2011, the DOE will host the first Science for Our Nation's Energy Future: Energy Frontier Research Centers Summit & Forum to gather researchers from all the EFRCs and discuss recent progresses and the challenges ahead. The summit will include notable speakers like Steven Chu (U.S. Secretary of Energy) as well as presentations and posters by gradate students, research scientists and professors (The Official Agenda). The event is free and open to the public but you must register ahead of time.

In a build up to the summit, the DOE invited the EFRCs to produce a 2-3 minute video that “educates, inspires, and entertains an intelligent but not expert audience about the extraordinary science, innovation and people” involved with the program. Between now and May 24^th a contest is underway to decide which of the 26 submitted videos is the public’s favorite. The winning video will be shown at the EFRC Summit and may be featured on the DOE YouTube channel, Science for Our Nation's Energy Future website, and the DOE websites. Please vote for your favorite here. Here are a few of my favorite videos, in case you’re interested:

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$cience is Important

Last week Kei Koizumi, Assistant Director for Federal Research & Development for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, paid a visit to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (my new home as of mid-June). The visit included a tour of several laboratories where everyone did their very best to convince him that our funding (e.g. my salary) is worthwhile as well as a presentation by Mr. Koizumi that outlined the Presidents plans/goals/vision for scientific funding.

On many occasions, President Obama has voiced his strong support of the sciences. In an address to the National Academy of Sciences on April 27, 2009 he emphasized the importance of science by stating “Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before.” In addition to this type of powerful dialogue we have seen significant action.  Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the scientific funding boost that came through with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, purple block in the graph below). In addition to this quick funding boost there is a continuing effort by the administration to double the 2006 budget for the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation by the year 2017. The approved 2011 budget continues with this upward funding trend as outline in the graph below.

So what does the future hold? Every year a memorandum is sent from the Office of Management and Budget to the major funding agencies requesting their budget proposals for the upcoming year. In this memorandum the current administration outlines how they intend to direct their funding. In the 2012 memorandum, the Obama administration emphasized the following six areas of focus:

• Promoting sustainable economic growth and job creation.

• Defeating the most dangerous diseases and achieving better health outcomes for all while reducing health care costs.

• Moving toward a clean energy future to reduce dependence on energy imports while curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

• Understanding, adapting to, and mitigating the impacts of global climate change.

• Managing the competing demands on land, fresh water, and the oceans for the production of food, fiber, biofuels, and ecosystem services based on sustainability and biodiversity.

• Developing the technologies to protect our troops, citizens, and national interests.

The proposal writing process is no doubt an exercise in balancing wishful thinking and self control. Along these lines it is not unusual for an agency to submit several versions of their budget (above, below and the same as the previous year). However, due to the recent economic issues, the administration was particular in asking all agencies to submit a funding request that is reduced by 5 percent relative to the previous year. As of Monday, September 13^th the new budget proposals for the 2012 fiscal year were due. Over the next several months negotiations between the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science Technology Policy will determine the 2012 funding situation.  The 2012 budget will then be announced in the first week of February 2011. Although it is unlikely that every agencies budget will be reduced by 5% , 2012 is likely to be a tough year for many researchers.

tl;dr: All you have to do to guarantee funding in 2012 is submit a solid proposal for a commercially viable, bulletproof, CO₂ detecting solar energy converter that cures diseases while still maintaining the ecosystem.

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How many ways can you say something without plagiarizing?

In a recent post by Derek Lowe on a Chinese journal's finding that 31% of its submitted papers contained plagiarized material, an editor for a scientific journal noted in the comments that he randomly selected a Tetrahedron Letters paper from a developing country and Googled the first sentence. That sentence ("Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are important for generating high levels of diversity...") shows up in very similar form in three different papers, all from institutions in Iran and China. In two of the papers, the second sentence of the paper is exactly the same, all 22 words.

Also, compare the two first sentences, the first by Shaterian et al.[1] and the second by Adib et al.[2]  The highlighted words are the same.

"Multi-component reactions (MCRs) are important for the achievement of high levels of brevity and diversity. They allow more than two simple and flexible building blocks to be combined in practical, time-saving one-pot operations, giving rise to complex structures by simultaneous formation of two or more bonds, according to the domino principle."

"Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) are important for generating high levels of diversity, as they allow more than two building blocks to be combined in practical, time-saving one-pot operations, giving rise to complex structures by simultaneous formation of two or more bonds."

Nicolaou et al.[3]: "The azaspiracids are a group of notorious marine neurotoxins whose accumulation in mussels causes serious human poisoning known as azaspiracid poisoning syndrome (AZP) upon their consumption."

Geisler, Nguyen and Forsyth[4]: "The azaspiracids are remarkable natural products that combine a unique, complex structure with an acute and perhaps chronic human health hazard."

Evans et al.[5]: "(-)-Azaspiracid-1 is a structurally complex marine neurotoxin that is implicated in seafood poisoning."

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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Does anyone else have a difficult time trying to separate “good science” from “bad science”?  I’m a very black and white person.  I love facts and truths and logic, and that drives most of my family crazy.  Perhaps that’s why I struggle with identifying bad science; there’s seemingly no clear-cut, concise way of identifying junk that ends up published.  To be clear, I’m not talking about retractions for blatant disregard for scientific ethics.  I’d classify these situations (e.g., the Xenobe controversy, Sames’ retractions, Bell Labs, etc.) as “ugly.”  I’m particularly concerned with cases where during a presentation everyone sort of looks at each other, raises his/her eyebrows, frowns, and collectively mumbles, “Hmm.”

It seems the term “junk science” has been in use in the legal profession since the 1980’s.  Yet, despite its existence, “junk science” is actually an ambiguous concept.  In 1998, legal experts Edmond and Mercer attempted to conquer this beast by identifying “good science,” then considering outlying cases “bad.”  Here’s what they considered “the good”:

“’Good science’ is usually described as dependent upon qualities such as falsifiable hypotheses, replication, verification, peer-review and publication, general acceptance, consensus, communalism, universalism, organized skepticism, neutrality, experiment/empiricism, objectivity, dispassionate observation, naturalistic explanation, and use of the scientific method.”

Does this list really mean that everything else is considered “junk”?  I can think of a few brilliant studies that used trial and error methods in lieu of the scientific method.  Conversely, I’m aware of peer-reviewers who simply check the “publish” box without actually reading the manuscript.  As is argued on several other blogs, identifying “junk science” is a very gray area.

Perhaps one way to define junk science is to take the Jacobellis v. Ohio approach.  In a 1964 US Supreme Court case involving obscenity, Justice Stewart Potter wrote in his opinion, “I shall not today attempt to define the kinds of material I understand to be [pornography]…but I know it when I see it.”  Clearly the same frame of thought can be applied to junk science.  I am less inclined to accept the Jacobellis approach because it offers nothing tangble.

There must be some empirical qualities that set the good from the bad.  Despite all the skills I’ve learned with a mere decade of lab experience, I am disheartened to admit that I honestly never perfected the skill of detecting bad science.  So, like a responsible, up-and-coming assistant professor of chemistry, I went crawling through the literature to determine what separates the good from the bad.  Below is a list of a few things I learned.

In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy, science might be “junk” if…

Researchers are more concerned with holding press conferences than publishing results in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. One might assume that “breakthroughs” ought to be showcased in the most prestigious journals after being subjected to a rigorous peer review process.  Fast tracking all the way to the press conference phase certainly raises some flags about credibility.  I’ve seen this phenomenon happen first-hand, and when the science is questionable, the ensuing public announcement can get really ugly (and entertaining, for that matter).

Something about the research seems off kilter. If you think something doesn’t feel right, you might be correct.  Although going with your gut will only get you so far, analysis guides such as “Tipsheet: For Reporting on Drugs, Devices and Medical Technologies” help identify specific areas for journalists to consider when examining the veracity of medical therapies.  Cook and co-workers suggested that similar checklists might likewise serve the general scientific community when evaluating the credibility of reported work.

Conflicts of interest are not explicitly disclosed. In these cases, scientific integrity might be compromised for financial, political, or other external motivations.  In developing this article, I encountered journals, funding agencies, and governing bodies that require authors to declare any potential conflicts of interest while publishing or applying for grants.  Although editors and referees try to uphold strict transparency policies, authors can still fail to report external influences and biasing.  These cases essentially touch every facet of research--cancer, testing pesticides (Berkley Scientif. J. 2009, 13, 32-34), and even drug development.  The onus is put on the audience to look into the author’s sources of funding.

The flow of logic doesn’t make any sense. Junk science may have gaping holes in experimental descriptions or proposed models.  Fortunately, overly simplistic and inaccurate scientific explanations usually evoke sharp criticism from the scientific experts.  Credible “debunkers” often attack the logic of an issue by (for example) discrediting cited authoritative opinions, identifying assumptions, and/or offering overlooked hypotheses.

Colleagues in the field are widely skeptical of the work. Mix it up with your cohorts.  A simple, “Hey, what did you think about the most recent (insert name of researcher here) article in JOC,” can shed some light on the context of published or presented findings.  “[He] hasn’t published anything reproducible in the past 20 years,” my PI once said.  “I sincerely doubt that this latest paper is anything new.”

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NSF Reauthorization

The bill that will reauthorize the NSF had a markup by the subcommittee on Research and Science Education. Since what happens in the policy world can have repercussions in the science world here is a list of policy changes to NSF that caught my eye.

The Bill: NSF Reauthorization 2010
• 5% of the NSF research budget has to be used for high-risk high-reward proposals. (SEC. 201. SUPPORT FOR POTENTIALLY TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH)

The Amendments: NSF Reauthorization Amendments 2010

Daniel Lipinski (D-IL)

• Wants NSF to give cash prizes to high-risk, high-reward research challenges. (SEC. 207. PRIZE REWARDS)
• The prizes will range from 1 million to 3 million

I don't care what the topic turns out to be, but for that much money Chemistry Blog will organize and field an open team for the competition. How the NSF goes about and implements these contests will be interesting to see.

The NSF Reauthorization will be wrapped into the America COMPETES Act and likely will be voted on by the full House of Representatives before May 31st. The America COMPETES Act shouldn't suffer any major hurdles for passage.

Mitch

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Geoengineering Scientists and Congress

(From Left to Right)
Dr. David Keith
Dr. Philip Rasch
Dr. Klaus Lackner
Dr. Robert Jackson

Geoengineering is a wonderful example of taboo science. Most people would fall within 2 camps. Camp 1 considers geoengineering with disdain as it mucks with the natural environment. Camp 2 probably wouldn't want their government involved in planetary climate control. With those entrenched camps where do scientists fit in?

Scientists were called as witnesses before The House Subcommittee on Energy & Environment last week in regards to geoengineering. The witnesses invited were...

• Klaus Lackner (Geophysics,
  Earth and Environmental Engineering): Covering CO₂ sequestration
• Robert Jackson (Biology): Covering Biological and Land Strategies to lower CO₂
• Philip Rasch(Atmospheric Science but a chemist by training): Calling for a Manhattan project type approach to researching geoengineering
• David Keith (Chemical and Petroleum Engineering): Mainly advocating that some sort of global policy towards geoengineering needs to be developed. The most sane and coherent witness; scientists don't usually fair well before politicians.

So why care about taboo science? The simple matter is that it would cost 1-2 billion a year to return the planet to pre-industrial levels of temperature, assuming they use cheap sulphates to do the job. This means any number of nations, frankly any wealthy cohort of industrialists, can take climate control into their own hands.

Since geoengineering is a delicate subject to broach to the public, transparency is crucial and wasn't loss on the chairman Brian Baird (D-WA). Congressman Baird mentions how some citizens believe their government is placing psychotropic drugs in jet fuels, the so called chemtrails and remarked "...legitimate scientific research [in geoengineering] must not get tied up in these kind of things."

However, all the scientists were taken aback by Randy Neugebauer (R-TX), my favorite exchange was the following.

Randy Neugebauer (R-TX)

Randy Neugebauer, "What percent of the atmosphere is CO₂?"
Scientist, "390 parts per million".
Randy Neugebauer, "Less than one tenth of one percent...This tiny minuscule amount...[can't] be more important factor in our climate than solar activity".

I'm not even sure where to begin to broach such a deep misunderstanding of climate change. I would have mentioned to Mr. Neugebauer that he would be dead if that minuscule amount of CO₂ was removed from the atmosphere, as all plants would die followed by animals in short order. The concept of small amounts having huge impacts in large dynamic systems is an important lesson to teach, even more so to do it dexterously. These types of exchanges went on for some time. I'm left wondering why Randy Neugebauer is even on the Subcommittee on Energy & Environment in the first place.

The ranking Republican, Bob Inglis (R-SC), had this to say in his last remarks, "I believe in a basic role of government is to do basic research, its an important function that we do." It is nice to know that basic science research is appreciated by both sides, even though there is always a rogue member in every committee.

Press Release: Subcommittee Examines Geoengineering Strategies and Hazards

Mitch

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ARPA-E Gets a Congressional Hearing

(From L to R)
Dr. Arun Majumdar
Dr. Chuck Vest
Dr. Anthony Atti
Mr. John Denniston
Dr. John Pierce

ARPA-E is one of the newest funding programs at the Department of Energy. It was authorized in 2007 with the passage of the America COMPETES Act, but was only funded when The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was passed with an initial $400 million. ARPA-E is unique in that its first Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) was kept broad and only asked for 8-page proposals for high-risk but high-reward "transformational" technologies. Yesterday (Wednesday) in the House Committee on Science and Technology ARPA-E was examined, the chairman for the hearing was Bart Gordon (D-TN).

Arun Majumdar, the current director for ARPA-E, gave several examples why federal funding is necessary for energy research and used a graph on worldwide shipments of solar photovoltaic cells to make his point that America is losing its edge in energy technologies.

Arun also gave some metrics on the ARPA-E awards. 3,700 concept papers were received. Only 340 were invited to write a full proposal. 37 projects were selected and $151 million was pegged for those projects. 45% went to small business, 35% went to educational institutions, and 20% to large industries. Also mentioned was the start of their Fellows Program for recent PhD students interested in energy/policy.

John Pierce, the vice president of DuPont Applied BioSciences, gave a statement that called for "external advisory panels" to guide the perspective of the ARPA-E agenda. Which sounds like something industry would want.

Link to more information on the hearing: Program to Foster Innovation in Energy Technologies Is Off to a Promising Start

Link to ARPA-E: Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy

Mitch

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