On science blogs this week: Danger?

WHY WARREN BUFFETT SHOULD LEAVE HIS PROSTATE CANCER ALONE. 81 year-old Warren Buffett may be a wizard with money, but it appears that he's just as snowed by medical propaganda as the average guy. Listen to Science Friday today (April 27) and you'll hear science writer Laura Newman explain why she thinks it was a big mistake for Buffett (1) to get screened for prostate cancer in the first place; and (2) to have signed on to radiation treatment for a tumor that is said to be "not remotely life-threatening." Laura caught Ira Flatow's eye with a post on her blog Patient POV listing the Top Ten reasons why Buffett's decision to get treated for prostate cancer bug her. Laura's interview is scheduled for around 3:30 Eastern time.

XNAS, THE NEW SYNTHETIC NUCLEIC ACIDS THAT CAN EVOLVE. Hard to imagine current research news more likely to have an impact on the future of research than the discussion around researchers' synthesis of six novel polymers, alternatives to DNA and RNA called XNAs, that are entirely laboratory creations but can store genetic information and evolve through natural selection.

The comments on Ed Yong's explanatory post at Not Exactly Rocket Science very nearly vibrate with excitement. Even superserious Ed, not a science writer susceptible to hype, says the work

expands the chemistry of life in new uncharted directions...This new study is just one of many attempts to expand the palette of molecules that carry genetic information. Every part of the ladder is up for alterations, from the bases to the sugars.
Not nucleic acids, but I liked it. It's the logo for Microsoft's tools for game developers.

Jeffrey Perkel described how the work was done in biochemical detail at the Huffington Post. Suzanne Elvidge's summary at Genome Engineering was brief but included links to background on previous related genetic tinkering.

At her Philadelphia Inquirer blog Planet of the Apes, where the mission is to help readers understand evolution, Faye Flam described the research's implications for ideas about the origin of life.

The work bolsters a prevailing hypothesis that life as we know it evolved from simpler life forms, no longer here, and those evolved from something simpler. There may be no moment when the first life emerged, but instead an evolutionary process by which chemicals that most of us would consider non-life gradually gave rise to living cells through natural selection.

At the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Boyce Rensberger complained that the news stories about XNAs portrayed the work's importance by relying on "the widely used but often lame so-what claim that the findings 'could' help scientists develop new drugs." Some of the blog posts, he would find, are less lame and more specific about why this work matters — matters a lot. This is a case where blogs work much better than conventional news stories. It's largely a question of space; explaining this research, and exploring its ramifications, demands a lot of it.

In John Timmer's detailed Ars Technica walk-through of the biochemical steps the researchers took to invent their XNAs, for example, he also points out that the XNAs imply that DNA and RNA being essential for life on Earth is an accident, and that they may even have been preceded by a different compound that generated life in the beginning.

Timmer forecasts:

And (for now at least) we're not at the point where we could grow an XNA-based cell. We don't have enzymes that can copy XNA into more XNA without going through DNA (although, reportedly, these are in the works). And the cell can't synthesize its own raw materials for XNA — they have to be supplied externally. But none of these things are necessarily insurmountable, so it's entirely possible to imagine we could have XNA-based bacteria floating around a lab at some point in the not-too-distant future...When it comes to life elsewhere, the options are wide open.

A number of the posts point out that XNAs could figure in drug development. Flam notes:

they could be particularly important in a growing field of medicine in which scientists prompt chemicals to evolve into new drugs. Scientists refer to such evolution-derived drugs as aptamers. One, called Macugen, has already received FDA approval for the treatment of an eye disease known as macular degeneration.

There's some justice in Rensberger's objection, but that's because so early in the game researchers have only caught glimpses of where synthetic genetics might go. It's not hard to suppose, even, that XNAs' ultimate significance might turn out to be applications no one has yet imagined. Or — let's indulge in some potential reality checks amid all the oooos and aaaahs — their significance might lie in the disasters they make possible.

To wit, as Charles Choi pointed out at the Huffington Post, XNAs might be much better than DNA and RNA for applications in medicine and biotechnology because, unlike the natural nucleic acids, they aren't biodegradable. On the other hand, the fact that no natural enzymes break them down might not necessarily be good for existing life forms, including our own.

I'm tempted not to link to Robert Gonzalez's post at io9 because he uses the forbidden term "breakthrough." For shame. But I gotta concede that XNA research comes close to actually deserving that description.

GOLDEN GOOSE AWARDS HOPE NOT TO LAY AN EGG. OTOH, maybe XNA research will end up winning a Golden Goose award.

If you were paying attention to science back in the 20th Century, you will be familiar with the Golden Fleece awards, Wisconsin senator William Proxmire's monthly pillorying of wasteful government spending. Science was one of his targets. In a willful misrepresentation of science methodology, those awards often roasted animal research — studies of alcoholism in rats, for example — as if they had no relevance to human life.

Proxmire's last Golden Fleece was awarded in 1987. Now, only a quarter of a century later, some science policy folks are trying to turn that precedent topsy-turvy to show what fabulous things science has done. They have invented the Golden Goose Awards, to be bestowed on science that sounds funny on the surface but has really generated some good for the world. (Yes, this does sound something like the Ig Nobel prizes sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research and awarded annually by genuine Nobel Prize winners. But never mind.)

The part of Senator Proxmire, who died in 2005 and in fact had a pretty classy career except for his falsification of science, will be played by a heretofore obscure Congressperson, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN). Obscure to me, anyway, and if this only reveals my ignorance of Tennessee politics, so be it. At ScienceInsider, David Malakoff explains the mechanics of the Golden Goose Awards. The plan is to make the first awards in the fall. Send your nominees to info@goldengooseaward.org

THE DISPUTE OVER WHETHER TO PUBLISH THOSE H5N1 FLU VIRUS PAPERS GOES ON AND ON AND ON. Speaking of potentially dangerous research, David Malakoff is also involved in H5N1 matters at ScienceInsider, the controversy about whether to publish two studies that show how to make the H5N1 avian influenza virus transmissible between mammal species. Yesterday (Thursday April 26) he moderated a live chat with Gregory Viglianti, who professes microbiology at Boston University College of Medicine and researches HIV. Find the video and comments here.

Yesterday was a big day for airing issues generated by the publishing dispute. The Homeland Security Committee of the US Senate held a hearing on the risks of so-called dual-use research: potential winners of the Golden Goose Award that might also be misused. The hearing starred Anthony Fauci, Paul Keim, and other biosecurity luminaries. Find the video here.

Earlier this week, Martin Enserink reported on how the debate is going in the Netherlands at ScienceInsider. The Netherlands because the country is home to virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam, author of one of the papers in contention. The Dutch government is saying that Fouchier needs an export license to publish or even to post the paper on his lab's web site. Why an export license would make a potentially dangerous paper safe has been hard for me to figure out; perhaps you'll do better. "This is pure censorship, as far as I'm concerned," Fouchier has said.

Virologist Ed Rybicki has collected his cogent comments at ViroBlogy. After pointing out that all the mutations described in the (as yet unpublished) papers are almost certainly present in nature, along with many more with an equal potential for making trouble, he points out

Don’t discount other flu subtypes, either: while everyone is obsessing about H5N1, H3N2 is busy popping out of pigs in the USA; H9N2 in birds in Bangladesh; H5N2 in ostriches in South Africa – and all it would take is one or a couple of fortuitous reassortments, and a whole new flu virus could be unleashed. While the “deadly” H5N1s are being worked on in lockdown facilities.

One of the potential dangers is an H5N1 mutant that is resistant to antiviral drugs like Tamiflu. Joe Magliocca explains how a resistant H5N1 mutant could develop at the Biochem Blog at NC State.

We'll give Rybicki the last word:

It was always going to come out somehow, and now these two papers will probably [be] the most cited flu papers ever. Nothing like a little hype! Meanwhile, H5 and its brothers and sisters are out there mutating away, with no help needed from anyone. Roll on universal flu vaccines!!

SWINY'S BIOETHICS BOOT CAMP. It seems to be all ethical issues here this week, which makes it the perfect place to tell you that you can now attend the all-day session on bioethics recently hosted by the Science Writers in New York, SWINY, which was supported by a grant from the National Association of Science Writers, host also to this blog. Videos of the sessions have been posted on YouTube. Listen to the talks and panels featuring bioethicists, scientists, and editors talking about the ethics of topics like conflict of interest, assisted reproduction, and death and dying.

April 27, 2012

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