UPDATED
KOMEN BREAST CANCER FOUNDATION VS. PLANNED PARENTHOOD. I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought (and/or hoped), immediately on hearing that the Susan G. Komen breast cancer charity was defunding Planned Parenthood, that the decision would come back to bite them. But I bet none of us could have predicted the size of the backlash, or that the flood of compensatory contributions to Planned Parenthood, well over $600K so far, would include up to $250K in matching funds from the personal fortune of New York City's media mogul mayor, Michael Bloomberg. But it did, and the outrage ain't over yet.
In fact, outrage hardly begins to describe how the health care and policy blogs exploded, and their comment tails much more so. I'm not even going to risk getting swept up in the tweet stream, doubtless a deluge.
News organization blogs posted often. You can follow breaking news on this easily by checking The Washington Post's Wonkblog, the Los Angeles Times's Booster Shots, and National Public Radio's Shots. Julie Rovner's update on Shots is a fine brief summary as of late Thursday.
Komen made sure of its place in the news by issuing serial conflicting — and improbable — explanations for its withdrawal. First, it was because Komen didn't give money to organizations undergoing official investigation. That seems to refer to a Florida Congressman who says he's investigating whether PP should be investigated.
The next excuse was that Planned Parenthood doesn't do mammograms but only referrals for them. But PP also does breast examinations, thousands every year, which, like referrals, are necessary preliminaries for getting mammograms. And nearly all the exams send women away with peace of mind. Why is that an activity suddenly unworthy of support?
Attention focused on Karen Handel, a new Komen VP for Policy who is also a failed candidate for governor of Georgia and has advocated defunding Planned Parenthood. But at Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff said the spotlight belonged also to Charmaine Yoest, President of Americans United for Life, which last year issued a report calling for investigation of Planned Parenthood. It was the report that apparently prompted the congressman's curiosity. The group has urged that no federal money be given to Planned Parenthood and has drafted model legislation for states to keep abortion providers like PP from getting federal money even when they don't spend it on abortion services.
In the Thursday summary at the Wall Street Journal Health Blog, Katherine Harmon reported on a protest resignation at Komen and asked readers to vote on whether they sided with Komen or PP. I can't decide whether these ubiquitous blog-based "surveys" are tolerable simply for the sake of reader venting. That's because they are also pernicious, since they can, and often do, imply to an ordinary reader that this is a scientific head-count that will generate trustworthy data about trends in public opinion.
It remains only to marvel at the continuing tone-deafness of organizations and individuals who keep landing themselves in these easily avoided morasses despite a string of previous cautionary tales. Didn't anybody at Susan G. Komen for the Cure say, "Hey guys, this is not only wrong, it's really dumb." Or "Hey guys, the social media will have our guts for garters." Or, most important, "Hey guys, this will end up costing us money." (Komen says its donations are up too, but has provided no data.)
PINK RIBBON UPDATE. Several sources are reporting that Komen has backed down, and the praise has begun to flood in. But at Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff is not so sure that the Komen apology means quite what others seem to think.
LEWIS CARROLLING OF THE WEEK, DEPARTMENT OF SLITHY TOVES, GYRATING DIVISION. I guess the Komen-PP mud-wrestle is kinda fun if you ignore the fact that we're talking about people's lives here. But this one is more of an unalloyed hoot. Let's begin with a John Timmer post at Ars Technica that vivisected a peculiar paper in a new open-access journal called Life.
The paper is a radical theory-of-everything (except that it seems to ignore all subatomic particles save electrons}. It models life's basic structure as a gyre, which the author defines as a spiral or vortex--a term that ought to have set off alarm bells all by itself. Apparently the paper was peer-reviewed. It was also promoted by a press release from Case Western Reserve University, home to the paper's author, biochemist Erik Andrulis. Which prompted Timmer to discuss the sometimes-uncomfortable role of the PIO and the purpose of peer review.
Others took up the cudgel. Resignations from the journal's editorial board appear to have been triggered by an inquiry from Carl Zimmer to one of them. At Retraction Watch, Ivan Oransky published a wan defense of the press release by Case Western's head PIO. UPDATE: Ivan later commented on the journal editor's not-very-explanatory explanation of how the paper got published.
Evisceration central is to be found at Pharyngula, although PZ Myers also spares a sympathetic tear for the author. Drawing on academic gossip, he says, "what this is most like is a developing personal tragedy."
In any case, 'Twas certainly brillig.
STILL MORE ABOUT SCIENCEONLINE2012. I covered a lot of the ScienceOnline2012 content in my previous post, to be found here. But there is no end to the goodies, for example Carin Bondar's music video of snippets that emphasize the partying.
David Wescott's rant at It's Not a Lecture, taking off from a #SciO12 session, was about attacks on science and why the science community is not fighting back effectively.
But collectively, I don't think this community has anything resembling the sense of urgency or the strategic consensus required to overcome it ... The other side has a strategy, and they are committed to action more than analysis. They're always on offense. It's time to develop an overarching strategy that positions science and scientists as the good guys and critics as the bad guys.
There's no mistaking his passion, but is he right that there's an organized anti-science strategy on several fronts? I'm not clear on what the point would be. The folks who attack science have wildly different motives and care about wildly different topics. I haven't seen any evidence that the anti-vaccine contingent or the anti-evolution continent are making common cause, either with each other or with the people who are fighting acceptance of climate change because they fear more regulation and more expensive mitigation rules.
I suppose there might be virtue in thinking of these movements together if it meant developing strategies for fighting back that would be useful against all of them. See, for example, discussion of brain differences between liberals and conservatives in this post at The Intersection by Andrea Kuszewski. Kuszewski and Chris Mooney co-moderated the session on political neuroscience.
MAKING BOOK ON E-BOOKS. I can't let go of SciO12 without a brag about the session organized around practical approaches to getting a book (or long-form article) published in e-book format, which I co-moderated with Carl Zimmer.
I take full credit for proposing the session because I thought that science e-books were a topic whose hour had come. But it was Carl who made the jam-packed hour work so splendidly, and I sat there sponging it up like everyone else in the big crowd, bless you Carl. He got help from audience members with ebook experience, including author David Dobbs, paleoanthropologist John Hawks, Olivia Koski from The Atavist, and Amanda Moon from SciAm/Farrar Straus. And others whose names I don't know, sadly, but whose contributions were essential. Thank you one and all.
Carl and I put together a pretty comprehensive reading list on e-books, with links to all. It covers e-book basics and some caveats too, with an emphasis on the how-to of e-book publishing. Rachel Nuwer's take on the e-book session can be found on the SciO12 site here.
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