Once more, Tuskegee-style human experimentation, but this time in Guatemala. 2010 Nobel Prizes: All carbon, all the time in chemistry, physics, even medicine.
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SEXUALLY TRANSMITTED INFECTION RESEARCH IN GUATEMALA, 1940s STYLE. What US government breach of medical morality could possibly be worse than the notorious Tuskegee experiment of the 1940s? (Wherein, you'll recall, effective treatment was withheld deliberately from black men with syphilis, the frightful and potentially fatal sexually transmitted infection.)
Here's a candidate: From 1946-48, US docs deliberately infected unknowing Guatemalan men with STIs. At least some of the Guatemalan men were treated, although it's not entirely clear how many, or whether they were cured.
Blogging about this scandalous addition to the already horrifying catalog of human experimentation in the 1940s has been oddly low-key, with some of the posts simply quoting from news stories. Katherine Harmon provides more details at SciAm Observations, and so does Jennifer Welsh at Discover's 80beats.
The longest outsider commentary can be found twice: David Gorski engages in extensive analysis at Science-Based Medicine and then, cribbing from himself under his nom de guerre Orac, repeats much of it at Respectful Insolence. You can extract facts about the Guatemala experiments from these posts, but his chief aim is using the revelations to beat up his favorite targets. That would be the more intemperate of the Alternative Medicine folks, who have seized on the Guatemala revelations as yet another example of how untrustworthy science is, not to mention evil.
For science writers, one of the fascinations of this tale is how it was disclosed and became so high-profile. Historian Susan Reverby of Wellesley happened upon it when she was researching her 2009 book Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and its Legacy. In a long post at the Hastings Center's Bioethics Forum, she describes how she found out about the Guatemala study, how she researched it, and how she wrote it up in the usual academic precincts. And then how, almost by accident, government agencies found out about it, resulting in last week's joint apology from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sibelius, not to mention President Obama's apologetic phone call to the President of Guatemala. See also this press release on the Wellesley site.
WHAT THE HECK, LET'S HEAR IT FOR CARBON! Ah, Nobel Week. Always an enjoyable time, as we analyze and second-guess and argue merits (and demerits) and revel in fun facts — like the fact that one of this year's winners has also won an Ig Nobel — a first — and that others won their real Prize by using sticky tape to pull two-dimensional layers of carbon from pencil lead.
But 2010 is extra special because I can draw attention to this year's pleasing symmetry. The Prizes for chemistry and physics went for research involving carbon, and the physiology-or-medicine Prize went for research on how to make the carbon-based life form known as Louise Brown.
THE CHEMISTRY OF CARBON. At the Nature Chemistry blog The Sceptical Chymist, Neil Withers sums up the joy as the chemistry Prize honored "real chemistry." It was awarded to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis." Can't get more real chemistry than that. Several links to explanatory sites.
At the Great Beyond, Mark Peplow explains:
These reactions allow chemists to stitch molecules together into the complex structures that make up pharmaceuticals, pesticides and the like. The palladium catalysts developed by the three chemists honoured today mean that normally recalcitrant carbon atoms can be connected quickly, efficiently, and with few of the unwanted by-products that can all too often turn chemists' reactions into useless brown sludge.
At CENtral Science's Terra Sigillata, David Kroll crows, "This year, a chemistry prize for the chemists!" David Bradley has posted a video of the chemistry announcement at Sciencebase.
THE PHYSICS OF CARBON. The physics Nobel went to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov for their work on graphene. As Joerg Haber explains at All that Matters, graphene is simply a single sheet of graphite, which can be visualized as chicken wire just 1 atom thick. It's super-strong, super flexible, nearly transparent, conducts electricity and heat, and has other intriguing properties that make for a lot of excited speculation about its potential applications — of which there are none yet because the work is only 6 years old.
At the Guardian's Life and Physics, particle physicist Jon Butterworth takes time to take pleasure in this triumphant Nobel year for UK scientists and also to describe the work for which Geim won the physics Ig Nobel in 2000 — without, oddly, mentioning that noble Prize by name. The Ig work was unrelated to graphene but did involve a carbon-based life form. Geim and a colleague used magnets to levitate a frog. Movies here.
Ig Nobels are handed out by actual Nobel Prize winners, so we can all look forward to the recursive evening when previous Ig Nobel winner Geim hands an Ig to a new winner. This will be a unique event because Geim is the first individual winner of both an Ig Nobel and the other kind. (I'm assuming readers of a blog about science know what the Ig Nobels are. But in case not, delve in here and enjoy. See also this proud Ig post about Geim's Nobel.)
Dave Mosher of Wired Science has rounded up some lovely graphene pix here. At the aptly named Nobel Intent blog at Ars Technica, John Timmer lives up to the blog name, posting the best summary of this year's physics Prize I've seen. He's clear and succinct on the science of graphene and its potential applications, but he doesn't forget the importance of striking metaphors or the Ig Nobel. Nor the startled human emotional reaction that decorates his lede. (Timmer's post on the chemistry Prize is superior, too.)
THE PHYSIOLOGY OR MEDICINE OF CARBON. Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe invented human in vitro fertilization, and the result was Louise Brown and a mind-boggling 4 million other people, most of them born to joyful formerly infertile couples. Roxanne Khamsi gives background at Spoonful of Medicine. And the reliable John Timmer goes into detail about how Edwards moved from his mouse work into human IVF.
Just a few years elapsed between the graphene work and the Prize for it, even though there are as yet no real-world applications . Robert Edwards waited 30 years for his Nobel, and Patrick Steptoe didn't live long enough to get his. It's pretty easy to conclude that the political and religious controversies surrounding test-tube babies are an important reason why the folks in Stockholm dragged their feet as 4 million human beings were born. This is not to argue that only good has come from IVF. Moreover, some of its recent applications — genetic testing of embryos, for example — have alarming potential.
IVF continues to serve as a political ploy. Colorado voters are considering Amendment 62, which would classify embryos as persons. At Big Think, Trina Stout describes a TV commercial arguing that, if passed, the amendment would prevent infertile couples from using IVF.
Finally, paleoanthropologist John Hawks explains why he's glad to be in a field without a Nobel. Hawks thinks there should be a Prize for scientific audacity. Maybe there already is; it's just that an audacious scientist (such as Edwards, for example) must wait decades for his reward.
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