The fate of sea turtles, the fate of Avandia, the fate of long-form science writing, the fate of the Pepsi challenge to bloggers, science is no joke.
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UPDATE ON OILY TURTLES, PLUS TURTLES AS WEAPONS. You may recall that sea turtle eggs, refugees from BP's biggest-ever oil spill in the Gulf of Mexiso, were to be transported to safety, allowed to hatch, and sent off to unknown fates from oil-free Atlantic beaches, an effort described here a couple weeks ago.
The Associated Press is reporting that the first 56 turtle hatchlings were released from Florida's Canaveral National Seashore this week. We await their fate.
But it may never be known. How much impact the oil spill will have on sea turtles is impossible to determine with present data and data-collecting methods, according to a timely report from the National Research Council, released this week. Lauren Schenkman provides details and a todo list at ScienceInsider.
Meanwhile, the Texas shrimping season is supposed to be opening, but environmentalists are protesting, reports Shaila Dewan at the New York Times's Green. Because of suspicions that at least some of the hundreds of dead sea turtles recently recovered in the Gulf were drowned in shrimp nets rather than smothered by oil, environmentalists are asking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to do more to protect turtles from shrimpers — including continuing the current ban on shrimping in the Gulf.
There's some turtle comic relief this week, although also in a morbid vein. At Mind Hacks, Vaughan links to a paper in the Journal of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery describing — how's this for a niche specialty? — head injuries in ancient Greece. It recounts how Aeschylus, father of Greek tragedy, author of the Oresteia trilogy, The Persians, Seven Against Thebes, etc, met his ignominious end in 455 B.C., at age 70. A passing eagle dropped a turtle on the great man, apparently mistaking the playwright's bald head for a rock that could split open a tasty turtle treat.
Vaughan calls this death "cosmically poetic." I would call it comically undignified. A derisory trick the universe played on a genius who had the nerve to write solemn tragedies.
AVAST, AVANDIA. Among the week's odder tales, described by Lisa Jarvis at The Haystack, Chemical & Engineering News's pharma blog, is that of the Food and Drug Administration advisory committee's split decision on whether Avandia, GlaxoSmithKline's diabetes drug, should be taken off the market. There's evidence that Avandia, formerly the world's most popular diabetes drug and an immense money-maker, causes heart problems — and, furthermore, that GlaxoSmithKline knew about the heart risks and suppressed the negative data.
At the WSJ Health Blog, Katherine Hobson tallies the vote and lays out the convoluted possible interpretations thus:
You could say (and some have) that of all the categories, the "pull-it" option got the most votes. But added together, there were more (17) panel members who recommended restricting its use, instead. And those folks plus the 3 who endorsed the status quo mean that 20 panel members voted to keep the drug on the market. Or, you could say that 29 panel members voted to place restrictions on Avandia or yank it entirely.
Alison Bass takes the opportunity to point out that we've heard this song before. In her book Side Effects, which won the NASW Science in Society award last year, Bass described how Glaxo suppressed data on negative effects of its antidepressant Paxil. She concludes:
We can only hope that GSK and all the other drug companies who have practiced similar deceptive tactics over the years are finally getting the point: Crime doesn't pay.
For the short term, at least, the evidence suggests that such hope is a waste of energy. The FDA still must make a final decision about whether Avandia stays (with restrictions) or goes. As Hobson points out, some business pubs think it almost doesn't matter, the drug is a goner. But the ever-optimistic stock market has for the moment declared otherwise; the New York Times's Prescriptions blog reports that Glaxo stock ended today (Thursday) up a couple of points in a day of declines.
SMART STORIES ARE LONG STORIES AND THE FOLKS WHO READ THEM ARE SMART TOO. OR SO WE HOPE. Megan Garber meditates on the (perhaps promising) future of long-form writing at the Nieman Journalism Lab. The example being Slate, which has run a number of long pieces/series in its "Fresca" project, and which requires all staffers to spend several weeks delving deep into a topic of particular interest to them and deliver the results to readers. Slate claims these long articles get lots of page views and also enhance the magazine's reputation as a place to go for smart journalism — which in turn attracts advertisers.
I am wondering how this development — if indeed a development it is — might be part of the future of science writing. We all know how unsatisfactory it is to try to explain the stuff we must explain, and then fit it into a social context, in the brief space of briefs. But editors, especially online editors, are devoted to briefs. Also, considering the unhappy fate of most dead-tree science pubs, which featured longer features that didn't attract enough readers to attract enough advertisers, I wonder about the ultimate utility of the Slate strategy for science writing.
If Slate's project is successful, perhaps that's because Slate is still a place mostly for (relatively) short pieces. The long pieces are infrequent. They are also conveniently divided into bite-size chunks, and I think some ran as a series rather than all in one day. Some also had interactive features. They also were structured skillfully so that the tail end of each mouthful propelled you toward the next bite. Which makes these examples different from — and more reader-friendly than — traditional long-form features.
These techniques could, of course, be applied to writing about science. So there might be a future for this specialized web-based long-form approach for science writing. But it's going to take time and some hard data to persuade online editors that long pieces can work on the web. It will also take a sugar daddy willing to subsidize the demonstration project(s). And I'm betting that even if that happens, and long pieces of science writing can attract web audiences, they will still account for only a small part of an online pub's content.
UPDATE ON LAST WEEK'S PEPSI CHALLENGE. Our last episode described the furor at ScienceBlogs, Seed magazine's aggregator that has been home to many most prominent bloggers. A significant number of them fled last week because Seed management permitted PepsiCo to set up a blog that was ostensibly to be about how PepsiCo was contributing to good nutrition, a ridiculous idea on its face.
If you want to catch up with what the bloggers who quit are up to, Skulls in the Stars has interim info here. Thanks for the tip to one of the departed, David Dobbs at Neuron Culture, who reprinted the list.
There's no real news about these events this week, but by all means see Jonathan Eisen's diverting sportswriter take on the Pepsi challenge to science bloggers at the Tree of Life. Eisen, academic editor-in-chief at PLoS Biology, riffs on on the activity, and possible activity, and potential activity, and speculative activity, of bloggers who are moving or might possibly move or are thinking about moving from ScienceBlogs, with an extended speculation on whether Ed Yong will move Not Exactly Rocket Science away from Discover.
Eisen's piece is, to mix sports, a bit of inside baseball — most fun if you know the blogs discussed and the extended tale of basketball superstar LeBron James. Cleverly done, and a painful reminder that sportswriters are, unlike most of us, permitted and even encouraged to write long. Thanks to John Hawks for the link.
SCIENCE IS NO JOKE. In hopes of a little comic relief from this oppressive summer, turn to Richard Grant's post on the winners in his scientific jokes contest at The Scientist's blog, Naturally Selected. I would say the top winner, a physics joke, is clever rather than funny. But it is very clever. The runner-up is genuinely amusing about the culture of science, but also a reminder of a huge gap in science data that can lead to wrong conclusions. The NASA joke is just sad, very sad. I hope your sense of humor is in better shape than mine.
