Autism, vaccine, and The Lancet retracts. Facilitated communication about coma and vegetative states. Obama's science budget is a wow. Plus a cool tool.
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AUTISM, THE MMR VACCINE, AND THE LANCET RETRACTS. The most important tale of the week is undoubtedly The Lancet's formal retraction of its 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues that suggested a link between the childhood measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism. Fallout from the paper, which was finally and completely discredited in the last week, has been incalculable. Parents have backed off from getting their kids vaccinated, leading to unnecessary illness, disability, and even death. There's more public mistrust of the medical literature and mainstream medicine, and mountains of money has been wasted on dead-end research.
The controversy has also been a major stimulus to blogging. Some samples from this week:
At Nature's The Great Beyond, Richard van Noorden briefly outlines the facts and links to background items. At the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog, Jacob Goldstein is almost as brief.
At Booster Shots, Thomas Maugh describes how Wakefield responded to Maugh's Los Angeles Times article about the retraction. At Science Progress, Chris Mooney asks "Will the Vaccine-Autism Saga Finally End?" Then answers his setup thus: "Not likely. You can retract a scientific paper, but not a mass movement."
At Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski analyzes last week's finding by Britain's General Medicine Council that Wakefield's "conduct was irresponsible and dishonest." And Steven Novella discourses on what effect the Wakefield study — and others that are questionable — have on the integrity of peer-reviewed research.
Gary Schwitzer's Health News Review enumerates the controversy's lessons for journalists, with video. He also points out that a few journalists — notably Brian Deer — dug into this tale and revealed its deficiencies and deceptions several years ago. Here's Deer's account of his investigations.
And in the last-but-by-no-means-least division, there's Orac at Respectful Insolence. Orac has posted early and often on the vaccine-autism controversy, but here's Thursday's screed, which is mostly about the failures of journalism, especially television journalism, with video examples. The Orac analysis: "These two clips illustrate one of the most frustrating things about the media's coverage of medical issues, namely that it's not about the science. It's about the human interest and the conflict." Discuss.
FACILITATED COMMUNICATION ABOUT VEGETATIVE STATES. Speaking of science-writing failures, last November I criticized the credulous stories about Rom Houben, who supposedly had been in a persistent vegetative state for 23 years. Incautious journalists and bloggers declared that Houben had been shown to be neurologically intact and was able to convey his state of mind through "facilitated communication."
Experts noted at the time that "facilitated communication" — in which a "facilitator" supports the hand of the mute patient over a keyboard while the patient appears to type responses — has been repeatedly discredited. But they were agnostic about Houben's brain state because they had not seen reports on his imaging studies.
This week the New England Journal of Medicine published the work in English. It described a handful of people in an apparently vegetative state who showed specific changes in brain activity during functional MRIs. The patterns corresponded to established activation patterns associated with thinking about specific activities, such as playing tennis. (Nothing, of course, about facilitated communication.)
It was front-page news, but also blogging fodder. Smriti Rao at 80beats provides a useful summary that asks both medical and ethical questions. Melissa Healy at Booster Shots reports that one of the researchers told her he and his colleagues hope to use their technique to communicate with other patients in what docs call a locked-in state, where patients are aware and awake but can't communicate, perhaps because of paralysis.
At Mind Hacks, Vaughan calls the study "incredibly impressive," but notes its limitations. "Many news reports seem to suggest that researchers have found a way of 'reaching inside coma' with a brain scanner to communicate with patients but the findings are much more modest, only 5 out of 54 patients could reliably produce specific brain activity on command and only one was tested who could answer simple yes / no questions in this way."
MORE JOBS FOR SCIENTISTS — AND SCIENCE WRITERS? The hed at ScienceInsider says it all: "Science Triumphs in Obama's 2011 Budget Request." Jeff Mervis followed his hed with a lede that could not have been more succinct: "Wow." The Obama budget presented this week is a big boost for science and therefore a big potential boost for science writers.
Assuming it happens. Congress is waiting to chew the Obama budget up and perhaps spit it out. Wherever it comes to rest, the real-world US budget for 2011 will certainly be different.
In the meantime, we can fantasize about all the work to come our way. At Wired Science, Alexis Madrigal outlines the good news briefly. But ScienceInsider has several posts this week that will give you details about increases for specific agencies and disciplines.
The National Institutes of Health is a big winner, supposed to get $1 billion more, according to Jocelyn Kaiser. That would raise its take to $32.1 billion. "It may be a modest 3.2% raise, but aside from the $10.4 billion NIH got last year in Recovery Act money, the $1 billion is the largest increase proposed by the Administration for NIH in 8 years," she reports.
And new NIH director Francis Collins breathes a sigh of relief: "It could have been a lot worse." NIH will be using its money to emphasize five themes Collins outlined last year: genomics, translational research, health care reform, global health, and reinvigorating the biomedical community. Kaiser's piece has details for the many among us who write about matters medical.
Yudhijit Bhattacharjee says the Department of Defense's basic research budget would jump $200 million to an even $2 billion. DARPA is slated to get $100 million less than the 2010 appropriation, down to a paltry $3 billion.
Erik Stokstad notes that the projected budgets for the Department of Agriculture and Evironmental Protection Agency spell a new emphasis on competitive grants at those two agencies. Competitive grants programs get a 64% hike to $429 million at USDA and 40%, to $87.2 million, at EPA. Jennifer Couzin-Frankel says the Food and Drug Administration would get a little over $4 billion, a 23% increase.
The Department of Energy's Office of Science gets a "healthy" $226 million funding increase, to $5.12 billion, according to Adrian Cho. Most would go to the basic energy sciences office, which funds research into condensed matter physics, materials science, chemistry, and related fields. But the fusion energy sciences program gets cut nearly 11%, to $380 million.
Robert F. Service describes major realignments for nanotechnology. Because the Administration is pushing clean energy, green manufacturing, and advances in health care, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will be getting a 7% raise, to $919 million. That seems tiny compared to other agencies, but Service says it keeps NIST on track to double its budget by 2017.
And to top off the encouraging news, the Science Careers Blog reports that the number of online help-wanted ads in science-related jobs jumped in January — although competition among job-seekers was also strong.
COOL TOOL. If you write about matters medical and periodically troll for ideas, here's a nifty new way of doing it: Medical Search of the Day. It presents news tips based on top search terms from SearchMedica, the medical specialists' search engine.
Click on the daily item and you'll be taken not only to the paper the docs were looking up, but links to other papers and reviews on the topic (with a separate category for evidence-based papers), along with practice guidelines, news articles (heavy on articles from the medical trades), a list of clinical trials, and patient ed materials.
Talk about one-stop shopping. Some phone calls and you're done. Well, except for the writing. And yes, it's free and open to all. You don't even need to register. Past daily posts remain available, so already there are several weeks' worth of ideas you can scroll through since Lois Wingerson set up the Medical Search of the Day blog at the beginning of the year.
Lois also manages SearchMedica, created for doctors and other healthcare professionals. "SearchMedica searches all the medical literature, but ONLY the authoritative medical literature," Lois noted on the NASW-talk listserv on Tuesday. SearchMedica's parent company publishes journals, but "they get no preferential treatment on SearchMedica", she said. Full Disclosure: I've known Lois forever and wrote for her happily for several years at the much-mourned BioMedNet.(Remember the departed HMS Beagle? [Sob].) But I would praise Medical Search of the Day even if she had been my worst editor ever, instead of one of the best. This thing is very, very handy.
OH, YEAH. WHATEVER HAPPENED WITH THAT FEDERAL HEALTH CARE LEGISLATION? Not much. Not in public, anyway.
