NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND. Not so hard to figure out why we were transfixed by the rescue of the Chilean miners this week. In contrast to nearly all other events in the world, this was the perfect tale for the human brain and the human psyche: Suspense, followed by technological fixes, followed by more suspense, followed by a happy ending. At Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin rhapsodized, "H. Sapiens at its Best." Joel Achenbach at Achenblog speculated on possible miner post-rescue behavior. Plant a tree? Hire an agent?
Not so hard, either, to figure out why the miners survived in what seems like good shape. They had supplies, they were in a familiar environment, they had each other, they had communication with the outside world and their kin, they had solid reasons to believe they'd be rescued, and, best of all, their rescue came in mid-October instead of Christmas as originally forecast. They had hope, and the hope was based on reality, not fantasy.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME. Or are they really not in good shape? Katherine Hobson at the Wall Street Journal Health Blog and other sources describe possible long-term difficulties such as post-traumatic stress disorder and circadian rhythm disruption. Not that these are new speculations; nearly two months ago, I described NASA's potential contributions to the miners' mental health.
According to Brendan O'Neill at Spiked:
...the overlords of the therapy industry, see something different: not a happy ending to a two-month nightmare, but the start of an even longer nightmare of ill-health, craziness and PTSD for these unfortunate creatures from the dark. According to the experts, what we're really witnessing in Chile today is a volcanic eruption of human instability, as 33 ticking timebombs of emotional frailty are raised to the surface.
O'Neill describes a rocky relationship between the miners and onsite psychologists and says, for example, that the therapists censored the miners' communications with relatives and withheld treats such as TV when miners declined phone therapy sessions. O'Neill cites no sources for these statements, a crying shame and an example of what can go so wrong with blogging. This is a nasty-great story if true, and, if not, I'd like to know who is circulating the anti-therapy tales and why. Serious journalism follow-up, please.
ALL NEWS, ALL THE TIME. I'd also like to see this story: who stage-managed the media's relationship with the rescue effort, and how did they accomplish it? There was plenty of media presence; at the Guardian's Environment Blog, Damian Carrington notes that the BBC spent at least 100,000 pounds on its Chile coverage, perhaps twice that. In the process the Beeb eviscerated its coverage of the next round of UN climate change talks in November. And yet a lot of coverage — quotes from official tweets and press conferences for example — struck me as a bit arm's length.
I heard somewhere that the video camera work and feeds were handled by the Chilean government, but I haven't been able to nail that down. If true, it would help explain why Chile's president and his consort were immovably front-and-center for all those long hours, and costumed to stand out as well. Brilliant, but how were the world media persuaded to agree to such limited access to the action?
How close were the on-site media folks permitted to come to the rescue scene? Not close, it seemed to me from the TV coverage I saw; how were they kept away? Who researched and wrote the info-tidbits — name, age, marital status, hobbies, favorite colors and other fun facts — that the network anchors purveyed about each miner as he emerged from the confines of that capsule?
This was was one of the slickest, most efficient media management operations ever, and even more admirable because it was also crisis management. Who and how?
NEWS YOU CAN USE ABOUT US NEWS. Oh, man, here's a horrifying new wrinkle — new to me anyway — in commercialization of blog posts. Mary Knudson's "Why I Won't Blog for U.S. News and World Report," a guest post for Deborah Blum's blog Speakeasy Science, describes what happened when US News invited Mary to blog about heart failure. The subject is a natural for her, since she is co-author of Living Well with Heart Failure and a recovered heart failure patient herself. (Full disclosure: Mary is also an old friend and colleague. So is Deb, for that matter.)
What happened, short version, is that US News embeds commercial links in its blog posts and the author has no sayso, no control whatever, over them. Read it and weep — and be very. very careful if you are thinking about blogging on a site you don't control.
Mary tells me in an email that her post was retweeted scores of times and cited on a number of other blogs, among them Andrew Van Dam's Covering Health at the Association of Health Care Journalists and Gary Schwitzer's Health News Review. She writes, "Lots of interest in ethical practice of journalism."
Amen.
THE BUZZ ABOUT HONEY BEE COLONY COLLAPSE. A certain amount of agitation has surrounded a PLoS One paper suggesting that the cause of the worldwide death of honey bee colonies — officially known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) — may be simultaneous infection with the fungus Nosema and invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV), which makes infected creatures glisten.
ERV explains details of the research, which he admires but does not quite buy into. The researchers themselves point out that the case is not yet proved. So it's a little puzzling why, as Knight Science Journalism Tracker Charlie Petit points out, some news sources (and especially their hed writers) presented the news as demonstrating that the fungus-virus combo is definitely what causes CCD.
Absent from these stories, because it was not known until midweek, was the fact that the paper's first author did not disclose that he got research money from Bayer Crop Science, which makes pesticides, which at one point were blamed for CCD. At Myrmecos, Alex Wild went wild in response, fulminating against "shameful" commentary on the Internet. He argued that conspiracy theories linking Bayer's interests with a paper suggesting that CCD was due to infections rather than pesticides was "a flimsy narrative in support of a preexisting agenda." Mebbe so, but the researcher should have acknowledged the Bayer funding even if the company didn't finance the infection research.
For more on the CCD findings, see also Casey Johnston at Nobel Intent. Aaron Berdanier at Biological Posteriors, and Noam Ross, who argues:
If we can protect bees from IIV and Nosema, great. However, it is just as important to build resilience and diversity into our agricultural system so as to reduce the risks associated with unknown future diseases. Otherwise we will be unprepared for the next CCD that will inevitably come.
FLAWED RESEARCH, I MEAN REALLY FLAWED RESEARCH. Thematically related to the uncertainty over whether researchers have really ID'd the cause of honey bee colony collapse is this David Dobbs post at Neuron Culture. Not about the brain, his usual beat, but instead calling attention to a piece in the Atlantic about John Ioannidis, the researcher who has shown that more than half of new biomedical research results are wrong.
It can be argued, of course, that wrong results are exactly what science is about: an incremental (and in recent decades communal) process that creeps ever so slowly toward the truth by finding and eventually rejecting a series of falsehoods.
When the results are a matter of mostly intellectual interest, that's swell. Does that new planet-that-could-maybe-possibly-perhaps-support-life exist? Or not? It's a fascinating question, but that's pretty much all it is.
In the real world, however, not so swell. Bee colonies are crucial for supporting life on this planet. They pollinate lots of crops — to say nothing of the plants that other creatures eat. The US Department of Agriculture informs us, "About one mouthful in three in the diet directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination." Finding out what's killing bees (and fixing it) can't come a moment too soon, so nailing down whether this virus/fungus thing is really the cause should be a top priority.
Ioannidis's work does not bear on those particular questions; he covers biomedical research only, an enormous area by itself — and one in which lives hang in the balance. Patients get lousy advice all the time. Some of it comes from docs who are lazy and/or ill-informed. Some comes from docs who work hard at staying informed, but who have themselves been advised poorly by lousy research. Dobbs observes:
This presents some really difficult problems for doctors, patients — and science and medical journalists. Ioannidis is not saying all studies are wrong; just a good healthy half or so of them, often more. In a culture that a — for good reason — wants testable knowledge to draw on, what are we to draw on if the better of the tests (the papers and findings, that is) are false ... The stakes run much higher when the treatments cost a lot in money or health. Yet little in our regulatory, medical, or journalistic cultures or practices acknowledges that.
And if we could acknowledge it, what then? That's a question to make your brain ache. How can I write about a new paper when I know there's a better than 50% chance it's just wrong?
