October 2008 Archives

Happy Halloween. Over 23 million people have voted in early elections across the United States. People are now driven to distraction by the election, even Acronym Required at times. But we're also distracted by science topics.

• Decidin'

  For instance take the cartoon that accompanied an article in last week's New Yorker. It was a drawing of a TinTin looking character, eyes wide, eyebrows arched, finger to his pursed lips, puzzling over two choices on a wall chart. On the left I saw a rooster. On the right I saw a Drosophila.

  The accompanying article "Undecided", by David Sedaris, discussed the baffling group of supposedly undecided voters:

  "I look at these people and can't quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?"

  He placed the dilemma in terms of airline food (he probably flies in the class where the still have that):

  "The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"

  It still took me a while to figure out that the cartoon character was standing in a voting booth. The choice was not a silly Rooster or Drosophila but "chicken" or "shit with bits of broken glass" in it. The Drosophila wasn't that at all, just a giant red-eyed other type of more fuzzy fly, standing on a small brown mound that represented Sedaris' subject, "shit". In an effort to explain my confusion, I'll just say I was writing about C. elegans at the time, another model organism, so perhaps that's why I saw Drosophila melanogaster.

• Buggin'

  It was a Drosophila kind of week. Scientists and many knowledgeable Americans (and French) were angry that V.P. candidate Sarah Palin dissed fruit fly research as waste. Of course she wasn't talking about Drosophila melanogaster, but olive fruit flies in a completely different taxonomic family. But the outrage over her perfunctory dismissal of California agricultural research is warranted.

• Poisonin'

  Updating our melamine coverage from previous posts, this week brought China and Hong Kong melamine contaminated eggs, thus widening the scandal. The culprit may be melamine laced grain which has spread the toxic chemical throughout the food chain. China is now culling chickens. The past year has seen the demise -- through culling and dumping -- of some major protein sources, pigs, milk, eggs, chicken -- hopefully there's some unadulterated beans and soy and rice around.

• Labelin'

  India passed the Prevention of Food Adulteration (Fifth Amendment) Rules, 2008, which will require food product labels starting in March, 2009. Fruit products cannot be labeled as such unless they contain fruit, etc. Cardiac conscious customers will now be able to identify transfats such as "vansapati", hydrogenated vegetable cooking oil which is commonly found in packaged food.

• Trick-or-Treatin'
  The cost of drugs to treat type 2 diabetes doubled between 2001 and 2007, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, from $6.7 billion dollars in 2001, to $12.5 billion dollars in 2007. The higher cost is due to new drugs, which can be 10 times higher than old drugs, as well as increased numbers of patients. The number of patient visits increased from 25 million in 1994, to 36 million in 2007.

  But today's Halloween. So here's a carbohydrate chart (PDF!) from "DLife" (For Your Diabetes Life!") For example:
  - 3 Musketeers 16 gram fun-sized bar: 12 grams
  - Gummy Bears 11 pieces: 30 grams
  - M&M's "Halloween" mini box: 10 grams
  - Tootsie Roll midgets 12: 30 grams
  - Heath Bar 1.4 oz. bar: 20 grams
  

• Cravin' Palin

  One of this year's most popular costumes is a Sarah Palin costume. This would be a challenging one to pull off for three reasons. One, it's just gonna' be an icky couple of hours sitting in that particular suit. Two, do you really have her style down? Sarah Palin is hot, according to, well, everyone, which may be hard to live up to. I recently got an explanation of this relative hotness -- it's "niche hot". Therefore if she doesn't win the vice presidency maybe she'll vamp through Playboy, with a "hot" politician theme, and if not that, then she actually already has her Palin calendar awaiting your purchase.

  But she's a tricky act to follow, which brings us to your third challenge. You might be able to cackle "you betcha!" with the best of them, you might be able to wink wildly, you might be able bend the elite right wing news staff of the Weekly Standard, the National Review, The Hill, and the New York Times to your side by leading them around by the front of their pants, as a recent New Yorker article describes¹.

  But do you really have her diction down? Can you remember to drop the "g" on pallin', and lyin' -- like Palin'? Maybe, but can you remember to leave the "g" on the word when necessary? Can you remember to say "cravING", as she does? As in, American's are craving that straight talk"? And Americans are craving something new and different..." You're not hearing "I'm Sarah and I'm cravin'". Americans are cravinG.

  Sure "it's genuine, not affectation", just like she's genuine in every other way, an outsider, didn't hire lobbyists to buff her image as Alaskan governor. I think it's a tough Halloween costume to pull off.

• Swoopin' & Spookin'
  Merriam Webster's Word of the Day is Chiropteran:

  "Chiroptera" is the name of the order of the only mammal capable of true flight, the bat. The name is influenced by the hand-like wings of bats, which are formed from four elongated "fingers" covered by a cutaneous membrane. It is based on the Greek words for "hand," "cheir," and "wing," "pteron." "Cheir" also had a hand in the formation of the word "surgery," which is ultimately derived from the ancient word "cheirourgos," meaning "doing by hand."

  Acronym Required wrote a little about bats in "Bats, Riddles, and Viruses."

• Mappin' not Spyin'

  The town of Molfsee, Germany, is rebelling against Google's "Street View". Google would dispatch vehicles with camera's to map the town's streets, but the 5,000 citizens have laid down the law. The company would need a special permit to photograph the city's streets, which the town politicians refuse to grant. The town's concerns about privacy are shared by state and federal privacy experts, according to Spiegel.

• Votin'

  As for the election, some, like Larry David, are pacing and suspicious. There's been a steady stream of alarming reports about voting machines, it's no wonder that everyone's a bit on edge.

  There's apparently a trend now, everyone's droppin' their g's. On the positive side, voting turn-out so far is great. Pray; no Hope; no Work for the most honest, cleanest result.

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¹ This article also contends that this one young Republican started a blog advocating Sarah Palin for Vice President, and that blog precipitated a lot of conservative enthusiasm: "In the month before Palin was picked by McCain, Brickley said, his Web site was receiving about three thousand hits a day". To put this in perspective Daily Kos gets about 2,604,779 page views a day, so if there's about 3-4 hits per page view, DKos gets about 6 million hits a day. Brickley was getting about 1000 pages a day -- not too much.

A UCLA study published in the Neurobiology of Aging found that age related decreases in myelin correlate to decreased motor function after the age of 39. The researchers suggest that sensory and cognitive processing speeds are also effected by the loss of myelin.

That would be problematic for scientists. The age at which U.S. researchers get their first NIH grant increased from 34.3 in 1970 to 41.7 in 2004, according to a recent paper on arxiv.org by Yves Gingras et al. The authors studied 13,680 university science professors and showed that productivity rises between 28-40, rises more slowly between 41-50 and decreases until 50-55 years old. Although it's a measure with limited value, the authors counted "productivity" as published papers. For multi-author papers the study credited one paper per listed author. In short, the study found that scientists still produce papers up through retirement, publish in well respected journals, and are cited more frequently.

Neither study is earth shattering, but there's value to aging. Motor processing does slow down, but other studies have shown that with some motor function, movement accuracy improves, compensating for decreased speed. For many reasons, lab dynamics, prestige, networking, etc., older scientists may not publish more, but their quality of production (by measures by which people judge, anyway) may increase.

Book Search, More, Better

Google has reached a settlement with the Author's Guild and the Association of American Publishers which will pave the way for digitization of copyrighted books for on-line use. The authors and publishers brought suits against Google in 2005, accusing the company of copyright infringement. Google wanted to digitize books for internet perusal, but the publishers had their own opinion of that: "They keep talking about doing this because it is going to be good for the world. That has never been a principle in law. They 'do no evil' except they are stealing people's property."

Google paid $125 million to settle the suit, which will cover legal fees and fund the Book Rights Registry, to be modeled after the music industry's copyright clearing house ASCAP. Google will structure a deal to put thousands of digitized books on the web. Readers will be able to access books or buy a digitized copy and publishers and authors will get some percentage of the customer fees.

Newspapers Stop Printing

Print is steadily moving on-line. The Christian Science Monitor announced yesterday that it will soon (just about) cease printing:

"in April 2009 the daily print edition of The Christian Science Monitor will shift to a 24/7 daily Web publication. This will be combined with the launch of an attractive new weekly print publication that looks behind the headlines..."

The continued cuts to newspapers is not always seen as a good thing. Some papers aren't ready to give up their print editions (with much more lucrative advertising than on-line). Instead they cut staff. Noted one commenter:

New Jersey, a petri dish of corruption, will have to make do with 40 percent fewer reporters at The Star-Ledger, one of the few remaining cops on the beat. The Los Angeles Times, which toils under Hollywood's nose, has one movie reviewer left on staff.

As everyone knows, this won't be too good for many blogs and on-line media outlets either.

And Textbooks?

The textbook publishing industry should be next to change models and offer more open content. Congress recently passed a law that helps keep textbook prices transparent to students, professors and colleges. Six states have similar laws.

In the past couple of years the textbook and learning divisions of several publishing companies have changed hands, including Houghton Mifflin in the US to Riverdeep, Thomson Learning, Worters Kewer's educational arm, and Reed Elsevier's Harcourt Education. The companies weren't adept at changing their business strategy to meet the increasingly web savvy customer base, and alternative on-line options were increasing. Although five textbook publishers have now launched CourseSmart to offer online textbooks cheaper, it's not clear that this is a burgeoning enterprise.

In addition to the "traditional" textbook model, the Christian Science Monitor mentioned in a recent article a couple of "radical" textbook alternatives. One, Connexions (cnx.org), is a project of Rice University. Connexions offers Creative Commons licensed learning tools that are "non-linear modules" authored by independent authors and hosted on their site. The Connexions philosophy is based on their contention that the traditional textbook "system is broken." California State University has a site called Merlot, which I can't say I understand after spending, well, not very much time browsing through. There's also Wikibooks, and of course many professors simply write their own books from lecture notes.

Subcommittee to FDA: Room For Improvement

The FDA subcommittee reviewing the FDA's August 2008 draft report has released its first recommendations(PDF) on the draft BPA report. The subcommittee brought lots of suggestions for improvement.

They wrote that the draft did not adequately provide scientific support for their method of choosing which studies to include: "Specifically, the Subcommittee does not agree that the large number of non-GLP studies should be excluded from use in the safety assessment."

The subcommittee also questioned the use of "no observed adverse effect level" (NOAEL) standard the FDA employed to determine the safety of exposure. The panel pointed out that so many studies show effects in neurobehavioral development, prostate gland, mammary gland and puberty in females, that it seems BPA must bind to gonadal hormone receptors during development. The panel said this suggests safe exposures "at least an order of magnitude below the 5 mg/kg/bw/day NOAEL identified in the draft assessment." The panel authors suggest several alternative ways to measure dose response that would model findings across the many studies that the FDA excluded in its draft.

The subcommittee offered additional point by point criticism and noted that the studies cleared by the NTP's Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction (CERHR) indicate that the FDA standard should be "substantially below (i.e., at least one or more orders of magnitude lower than) the 5 mg/kg bw/day level selected in the draft FDA assessment."

Living Through Chemistry -- U. Michigan and Dow

The FDA panel released their draft at an opportune time. Philbert was under increasing pressure about his role on the panel given appearances of conflict of interest. Acronym Required wrote a couple of weeks ago on Philbert's directorship of the University of Michigan SPH Risk Science and Analysis program, founded and heavily contributed to by Charles Gelman, a retired manufacturer and tireless critic of chemical regulation. Had the subcommittee's report dared reach the opposite conclusion than the pressure would have increased.

Following our post Martin Philbert wrote a letter to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel protesting the paper's allegations that his work would be influenced by the donations he accepted from Gelman: "This simply is not true", he said.

To illustrate his point he described in his letter the $15 million dollar grant the Risk Science Center took from Dow Chemical for a dioxin study. Philbert told how, given the grant, his colleagues "still found that people living near the Dow plant had higher levels of dioxins in their bodies."

Nobody found Philbert's assurance about his work for Dow Chemical comforting since Dow manufactures bisphenol A and takes political action to protect its market when necessary. For instance at (http://dowaction.com/grassroots/notice-description.tcl?newsletter_id=30665022), you can read Dow's letter thanking their employees for their "Best in Class", 31.5% "grassroots" effort in defeating California SB 1713 Bisphenol-A Ban.

The University of Michigan task in the Dow study was to measure blood dioxin levels of home-owners in different geographic areas -- not to investigate health affects. In that sense the dioxin study is not an analogous situation to the BPA panel. But even if were comparable, the University of Michigan results got Dow off the hook in a way, by finding that the variation in dioxin levels was due to things like age and body mass index (BMI), not levels of dioxins in the air or soil.

Media, politicians, citizens and scientists criticized the study because Dow had long been under pressure from the EPA to clean up dioxin contamination ¹ and the study was seen as a stalling technique. The EPA had this to say in one memo: "the study was initiated at the request of Dow in order to downplay the risks of exposure to dioxin contaminated soils." The EPA went on to say:

"public presentations of the preliminary results have emphasized how little effect living on contaminated soils has one an individual's dioxin blood level. This emphasis has resulted in numerous media stories, an understanding by some members of the public, that remediation of dioxin contamination is unnecessary."

The BPA memo on the FDA draft will no doubt assure the doubters in the public that Philbert's panel has their best interests in mind. ² If not, Philbert warns that he will "think long and hard" before taking time to "perform this kind of public service".

Stay on your toes...

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¹ Burnham, D. "1965. Memo Show Dow's Anxiety on Dioxin.", NYT 1983)

² Perhaps Dow's BPA economy is not at stake in Michigan? John Dingell (D-MI), bulldog for the auto-industry, has also taken on BPA.

Methods Suspect. Evidence of BPA Harm Swept Under the Rug?

In their August 2008 draft evaluation (PDF) on the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), the FDA used industry studies to reaffirm that an older, no observed adverse effect level (NOAEL) for humans. Their evaluation that BPA was safe flew in the face of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies that show low doses of BPA has potentially damaging affects on human development. In our last post we described how congress is closing in on the FDA, criticizing their methods for evaluating the safety of BPA and questioning FDA conflicts of interest.

Last week, 36 bisphenol A researchers also called into question the FDA's procedure for evaluating BPA science. In their published paper Myers et al analyzed an industry study authored by Tyl et al, (including authors from Bayer, Dow, ACC, TRI, and SABIC Innovative Plastics) paper ¹, used by the FDA in their draft assessment, earned ten pages of criticism from Myers et al.

Neurobehavioral Affects Swept Under the Rug?

Two recent NIH reports, the 2008 NTP report, and Chapel Hill Consensus Statement indicate that the "greatest level of concern [for BPA] was directed towards possible neural and behavioral effects caused by BPA exposure in utero." Low dose bisphenol A is implicated in "changes in brain structure, brain chemistry and behavior represent the largest portion of the published low-dose BPA literature."

The NTP is supposed to advise the FDA on regulatory matters, but the FDA's draft report did reflect NTP conclusion that there was "some concern" about neurobehavioral effects. Instead, the FDA draft said that there was no evidence to support such a warning. Included in " documents on the FDA site is a research review of neurobehavioral studies contracted by The American Chemistry Council's (ACC) to Exponent ¹, a consulting company in San Francisco, California. Exponent unsurprisingly found "no consistent adverse effects of perinatal exposures to low doses of BPA on neurobehavioral endpoints based on the 18 studies," a decision reflected in the FDA draft.

Good Laboratory Practice: "FDA's Misguided 'Gold Standard'"

The many, many low dose studies should convince anyone that BPA is not safe. Yet the chemistry industry keeps coming up with its own studies, one after another, which show the opposite results of non-industry scientists. The 2008 FDA draft gave the most weight to two industry studies that followed Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) standard.

Myers et al explain that the FDA designed the GLP standard to stop widespread private lab fraud in the 1970's, following a federal investigation of private lab practices. Scientists in the 1970's investigation needed to re-run 4000 tests by 235 companies and re-examine safety profiles of 15% of all U.S. pesticides on the market. Several men from one company were sent to prison for doctoring data. The Myers et al authors note:

"...fraudulent results were possible because contract lab studies used in the regulatory process are rarely subject to the checks and balances that peer-reviewed, replicated scientific findings undergoes."

The FDA's resultant industry GLP standards require extensive record-keeping to halt the type of fraud that Myers et al say is largely prevented in peer-reviewed research conducted under NIH grants. Another impediment of using GLP in academia is that GLP standards require large sample numbers of rats. 8000 rats were killed in a 2002 industry BPS study (a distressingly gross pile of dead rats). Such a large number of sacrificed animals would violate the animal care guidelines under the NIH grants.

GLP Trumps Good Methodology?

Among the supporting documents for the FDA draft here on the FDA site, you can find the ICF consulting product that Acronym Required mentioned in our last post, the neurobehavioural review contracted by ACC to the consulting company Exponent², and various other reviews and communications.

There's obviously industry involvement in the FDA review. However, it is the government agency's job to consider the arguments of all constituents. I challenge anyone who doesn't know BPA research very well to make too much out of the content of these documents. However, given the FDA's conclusion you can's help infer that some of the industry sponsored research on the site influenced their decision. One you suspect that the FDA is influenced by industry, every document could look suspect.

For instance in one document ("Bisphenol A - Review of studies conducted by Vom Saal et al, Nagel et al, and MPI Research"), an FDA scientist, Dr. Sprando, compared low-dose studies on prostate development from Frederick Vom Saal's lab to an industry study where the scientists tried (and failed, with much public ado) to repeat Vom Saal's results. The MPI study used more animals in its experiments, which Sprando says makes the industry study "more powerful", an assertion that's not necessarily true.

More disconcerting, MPI's positive control failed. The FDA noted the lack of positive result, dismissed it, and concluded that all the results conflicted on neurobehavioral affects, therefore no decision was warranted.

Who To Trust?

On one hand you have several studies from Vom Saal's labs, as well as a later study from another academic lab showing negative affects of BPA on prostate development. On the other hand you have the MPI study sponsored by The Society of the Plastics Industry, Inc. which finds nothing. As with every other endpoint, the FDA compares NIH studies to an industry study, a "GLP" study, and favors or heavily weighs the industry result.

Myer's et al have concluded that the industry studies used by the FDA are "invalid":

"The fact that the U.S. regulatory community is willing to accept these industry-funded, antiquated and flawed studies as proof of the safety of BPA, while rejecting as invalid for regulatory purposes the findings from a very large number of academic and government investigators using 21st century scientific approaches, is of great concern."

"Industry research" shouldn't be code for "fraudulent", but it's difficult to read through these documents and not be suspicious. The GLP standard intended to lend credence to industry research which is not peer-reviewed, research that is subject to conflict of interest and historically littered with fraud. Now GLP is ironically being used for an important health decision on BPA to exclude over a hundred peer-reviewed studies.

Not only does this blemish industry research, it makes you wonder about academic research. Taxpayers invest in unbiased, peer-reviewed research on issues like whether BPA is safe for human consumption. The far wealthier chemical industry can fund a study showing some opposite result every time it sees something that might impede business. The FDA appears as if at times to be in cahoots with industry -- no? But what about the people? There's got to be a better way.

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¹ Tyl et al: Two-Generation Reproductive Toxicity Study of Dietary Bisphenol A (BPA) in Mice. April, 2008: Toxicol Sci 104: 362 - 384.

² Exponent is chemical consulting company located in San Francisco. Elizabeth Anderson, who is on the management team, was previously the president of Sciences International, the company fired for conflict of interest from the NIEHS bisphenol A contract, which we wrote about here and here, founded the journal Risk Analysis.

BPA: Trade Globally, Regulate Slowly

Today there are over 1000 bisphenol A studies, with evidence in hundreds showing connections between low-dose exposure to the chemical and harm, especially during perinatal development. Some of the reported effects of BPA are so commonly known that recent headlines for Asian, Indian and UK papers reported on Canada's new ban: "Canada to Ban 'Gender-Bend' Baby Bottles".

But chemistry and plastics companies keep up the relentless marketing. In 1999 the American Plastics Council (APC, now subsumed into the American Chemical Council (ACC) wrote this:

"Consumer Reports has committed a serious error alleging dangers from the use of polycarbonate plastic baby bottles, based on an apparent lack of understanding of toxicology or safety and risk assessment. Because of the misleading and needlessly frightening statements made in the Consumer Reports article, the American Plastics Council has requested that the publication issue an immediate retraction."

In addition to press releases, letters to editors, and scientific studies, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) owned a corral of internet domains where they posted reassuring consumer information on topics like the safety of plastic baby bottles. Sites such as the ACC's www.babybottle.org assured parents via scripted Q&A's like "Ask the Doctor", that plastic bottles were the absolutely safe. Explicit notice about the site's ACC affiliation was missing, as such, the messages were pretty convincing.

Just last week the Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group issued a press release saying they'd just reviewed the weight of the BPA evidence. The research, from Gradient Corporation in Massachusetts, and a convened panel on the matter, found BPA harmless. The same scientists sat on this panel that sat on preceding panels, in 2004 at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis and in 2006 by the Gradient Corporation. They reach the same conclusion despite the flood of research on BPA. Two more studies indicating derogatory effects on fetal neural development were included in the October issue of Environmental Research in its feature "A Plastic World".

The lead panel member and author of the Gradient paper is Dr. Lorenz Rhomberg. Acronym Required last caught up with Rhomberg when he was working for the American Plastics Council (APC) writing letters to editors of California papers. Our 2006 post covered the failure of California legislators to get AB 319 through appropriations. AB 319 would have banned phthalates and bisphenol A in the state, but failed following the intense lobbying by the ACC and American Plastics Council (APC) (California came back with a different version later). Rhomberg now works for a private research lab in Boston.

Does the ACC own the FDA on BPA?

Recently the public has increased their response and even outrage over the extent of the deceptions by chemical companies and their lobbies. Congress has beefed up its scrutiny of the BPA regulation, and scientists continue to spend time and money responding to the flood of industry research. The current focus is how much the chemical industry seems to influence the FDA. The FDA issued a decision in August, 2008 saying basically that BPA was safe, weighing its decision on two industry studies. The FDA's decision conflicted with statements of concern from other agencies and scientists.

We previously wrote about the investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives and Committee on Energy and Commerce, chaired by John D. Dingell (D-MI), and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. On October 15th, the committee wrote to a letter to FDA Commissioner von Eschenbach questioning the appointment of the FDA BPA advisory panel chair Martin Philbert and possible conflicts of interest. Philbert's panel was to review the April, 2008 decision of the FDA.

In that same letter the Dingell requested "all records of communication between FDA and ICF Consulting relating to their BPA work for the agency." As Dingell and Bart Stupak (D - MI) wrote:

"summary assessments of BPA were created for FDA's BPA panel by ICF Consulting, a private contractor that has done prior work for BPA manufacturers, and whose board members have ties to BPA manufacturers."

Acronym Required found supporting documents for the FDA draft here on the FDA site. Among them you can find the ICF consulting product as well as the neurobehavioural review contracted by ACC to the company Exponent¹, along with various other reviews and communications about BPA research that you can pick through.

Markey To FDA: Are Americans Not Worthy Of Canada's Standards?

In other action from the legislature, Congressman Ed Markey wrote a letter to the FDA Thursday asking if the FDA analyzed the same studies that the Canadian government's did, and if so why it hadn't decided differently on BPA.²

"Does the FDA consider a different level of risk acceptable for American consumers including infants, than the Canadian government is willing to accept for its consumers? If so what is the difference in risk assumption and why is the difference appropriate?"

Markey wrote that he was concerned that Americans, "including our most vulnerable infant populations", were being exposed to unsafe doses of bisphenol A. Senator Grassley (R-IA) also asked the BPA to answer questions about the criteria it used for its decision.

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¹ Exponent is chemical consulting company located in San Francisco. On the management team, Elizabeth Anderson was previously the president of Sciences International, the company fired for conflict of interest from the NIEHS bisphenol A contract, which we wrote about here and here, founded the journal Risk Analysis.

² Acronym Required wrote on the different economic and political climates of the two countries and their BPA policies in "The Politics of Everyday Bisphenol A".

Once Red State - Blue State, Now Internetland - Radioland?

The news is all economy and election: Warren Buffet, accustomed to being courted by the press, software tycoons and presidential candidates flexes his muscles and asks that everyone go buy stocks. The people totally ignore him. Greenspan rears his head, a haunting apparition moaning about 'the one think he didn't know'...The market swoons again....

Sarah Palin goes for the rich little poor girl image...McCain supporters stage increasingly hostile and bizarre threats to Obama supporters and all the media...The liberal Internet pulls for a landslide Democrat win that if necessary parts of the blogosphere could accomplish by sheer force of editorial will. The liberal-nets feature daily reports from conservatives and their sons and daughters and commentators who either disapprove or are defecting from the Republican Party (Goldwater,Schwartzenegger, Powell, Buckley, Brooks, Adelman...) If Huff Po ran out of Republican offspring essays to feature I'm sure there's room to increase the pixel size of their headlines from 70-80 to 700.

Bloggers predict that the internet is bringing an end to the era of Rove style politics...Karl Rove writes a letter to the editor of Harper's to point out that Grover Norquist, not him, said: "We can go to students at Harvard and say, 'There is now a secure retirement plan for Republican operatives'"

The media talks about back-stabbing and Republican resumes reportedly flying out to corporations...Nobody's too happy that Imelda Palin spends a lot on make-up in addition to shoes. (Still, I think it's way to soon too start cheerfully humming 'We never promised you a rose garden')

Meanwhile in science news:

The Oddities in Commodities

• Chinese Milk Scandal: We last reported on melamine in milk made in China when the tainted milk had killed three kids and sickened a couple of thousand. Now 5000 are hospitalized in China, and products across the world are found to be toxic with melamine. Along with the "rabbit hole" of the economic despair and the "rabbit hole" of the McCain's campaign strategy, there's the imported melamine tainted "White Rabbit" candies found on candy shelves throughout the world. The United Nations noted this week that the Chinese government's oversight system needs "urgent review and revision".
  
  
• Scientists are Eager to Explore your Genome: Last month Sergey Brin advertised on his blog that his genome indicated an increased risk of Parkinson's. This week George Church announced the first 10 volunteers had signed up for the Personal Genome Project and release parts of their genetic information and medical records to Harvard investigator. Church is "hoping to offset ethical concerns" that the data may breed discrimination in jobs, health insurance and how volunteers and their families are perceived."

  Before you sign up, the "Personal Genome Project" wants you to know a couple of things. On the positive side they say you're doing good for "society" and your donation (if you will) might allow you to indulge in a little "self-curiosity". One possible negative they mention is that someone could "claim statistical evidence that could affect employment or insurance or the ability to obtain financial services for the participant."

• Open Access: In "Publish and be Wrong", earlier this month, the Economist pointed to a PLoS Medicine article that argues the science publishing model is seriously flawed. According to he authors, there's a false scarcity of publication slots at top science journals, and the criteria for publication doesn't assure that quality papers get published.

  The weight of the article rests with its title: "Why Current Publication Practices May Distort Science". Along with some familiar points, the writers offer shaky economic comparisons, vague criticism, and some recommendations that are just as vague as the criticism. In one line of argumentation, the authors rework the idea that journals should include more negative results and fewer positive results. They reason that a glut of published data with negative results (along with analysis, peer review, time) would help solve the problem of too much data with too few publication outlets, which is their primary concern. Review by peers is so flawed they say, let's let the more unprepared, less science literate readers, as opposed to scientists familiar with the research, sort through the data. Is this a recipe for sound science?

  The team writes that many top journal publication results turn out to be flawed, and bases this on previous research by lead author John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Ioannina School of Medicine, Greece, who in 2005 wrote "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False". I didn't pick through the 2005 study, but assuming his assertions are true -- for the sake of discussion -- lots of published results get overturned. Therefore as I read it, lots of research is "negative", but published. So why isn't that "negative" research coveted as much by the authors of the current PLoS Medicine as the unpublished "negative" research they say are so important?

  Ioannidis et al assert that "scientific information is a commodity" and say there's a "moral imperative" to consider how its judged and disseminated. Maybe so, but if that then why separate the publishing from the foundation that its built upon (academia, tenure, granting)? And to be consistent, can we talk about drugs as commodities? And the moral imperative for generics?

  There's more to say, but in short, from my view some of the most spurious research emanates from public relations departments of universities or lobbyists in the form of press releases. Some of the most flawed research (sometimes what seems like reworked press releases) shows up in esteemed media outlets (for instance FT and the related Economist). And if I were a certain type of policy advocate who wanted to push policy under the guise of science I'd welcome the chance to elevate my editorial -- I'd pay to publish my "research" in PLoS Medicine along with all the genuine great research, and if I got rejected there than I'd settle for PLoS One, with all its real research. Upon publication I'd mail out press releases touting my PLoS research.

  Sure we have far from a perfect system, but open access has its pitfalls too.

  Along with Ioannidis, the collaborating authors are Neal Young, an MD at the NIH, and Omar Al-Ubaydli, an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University and a research fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Seen In Space

• India to the moon: India is aiming for the nation's first lunar exploration by putting an unmanned spacecraft, Chandrayaan1, into orbit for a 2 year mission on the moon.
  
  
• NF₃: The journal nature Nature reports that scientists found much higher levels of nitrogen trifluoride 3 from plasma TV's in the atmosphere then they had predicted.3 replaced perfluorcarbons and is "12,000-20,000 times more efficient at trapping heat than carbon dioxide". A UC Irvine scientist correctly predicted earlier this year that the emission rate of the chemical was more that previously assumed by scientists. An alternative technology to the plasma screens is LCD screens.

Picking Teams

• The American Bar Association lists lawyers who might be chosen by Obama or McCain to serve their administrations. For Obama they list Robert Sussman for the EPA, a former Clinton administration deputy administrator. They name Cass Sunstein as possible White House Policy Advisor (a libertarian, but "no idealogue" writes ABA). Sunstein has written extensively on various topics; see for instance "The Paralyzing Principle" about the precautionary principle in the December, 2002-2003 issue of Cato's journal Regulation. ABA also picked Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick as possible attorney general choice.

Hundreds of Men

The background story of almost every Nobel Prize awarded includes the biographies of one or more people who did lots of research but didn't get the prize. The New York Times published an article today about Douglas Prasher, who first cloned and sequenced Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP).

Prasher didn't share the Nobel Prize awarded to Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, Roger Y. Tsien, who all worked to make GFP into the versatile tag that scientists use to visualize the inner workings of live cells and organisms. The GFP Chemistry Nobel Prize is like some but not all of the Nobel Prize awards, in that hundreds of people from many science disciplines developed GFP to its current state of usefulness. The committee could only choose three winners.

The history of GFP research in the past 50 years traces the history of biology itself over the last half a century. In 1961, Osamu Shimomura discovered the protein while purifying and characterizing aequorin. Shimomura came to the US from Japan, when as a teenager, he was only 12 kilometers from the Nagasaki bomb explosion. After piecing together his education and life, he worked in a lab in Japan isolating and characterizing another protein, thereby earning his Ph.D. Shimomura was recruited to Princeton by Frank Johnson, co-author of the 1962 paper that first mentioned GFP. ¹ Their paper gave a nod to the history of bioluminescence research to that point:

"In experiments that have become classic in bioluminescence, Dubois (1885, 1887), first prepared from a luminous elaterid, Pyrophorus, and a luminous clam, Pholas, respectively, crude extracts containing a substrate, luciferin, and an enzyme, luciferase, which luminesced on mixing in aqueous solution containing dissolved oxygen."

The 1962 paper gives the reader a view into some of the techniques used by cell biologists and biochemists at that time as well as insight into the fortitude of the researchers. It's perspective that's useful to understanding how science works, on many levels.

Thousands and Thousands of Jellyfish

People like to recount how Shimomura collected tens or hundreds of thousands (the accounts vary) of the Aequoria jellyfish used to conduct his GFP and aequorin experiments. Non-scientists might be able to imagine collecting tens of thousands of jellyfish. But that's only the start. Most people probably can't fathom what its like to try and figure out how to extract of luminescent parts of the jellyfish "squeezate" without destroying them, how to determine a method for purifying a protein via repeated chromatography, or how to deduce under what chemical conditions a protein glows and at what wavelength, information that makes a protein useful, etc.

In 1962, the GFP protein, not the focus of Shimomura's study, was a bit of a mystery. Scientists didn't know exactly how it accomplished its glowing or interacted with aequorin that was the focus of his study. Here it is mentioned in by the authors in footnote number three:

"A protein giving solutions that look slightly greenish in sunlight though only yellowish under tungsten lights, and exhibiting a very bright,. greenish fluorescence in the ultraviolet of a a Mineralite, has also been isolated from squeezates. No indications of a luminescent reaction of this substance could be detected."

In later work Shimomura et al went on to determine the emission spectrum of GFP and figured out that the protein absorbs light in the blue spectrum emitted in Aequorea victoria by the calcium activated aequorin, then emits its fluorescent green light. Over the next few decades others advanced the work as Tsien wrote in review paper of the GFP in 1999:²

"Morin & Hastings found the same color shift in the related coelenterates...and were the first to suggest radiationless energy transfer as the mechanism for exciting coelenterate GFPs in vivo. Morise et al purified and crystallized GFP, measured its absorbance spectrum and fluorescence quantum yield, and showed that aequorin could efficiently transfer its luminescence energy to GFP when the two were coadsorbed onto a cationic support. Prendergast & Mann obtained the first clear estimate for the monomer molecular weight. Shimomura proteolyzed denatured GFP, analyzed the peptide that retained visible absorbance, and correctly proposed that the chromophore is a 4-(p-hydroxybenzylidene)imidazolidin-5-one attached to the peptide backbone through the 1- and 2-positions of the ring...The crucial breakthroughs came with the cloning of the gene by Prasher et al and the demonstrations by Chalfie et al and Inouye & Tsuji that expression of the gene in other organisms creates fluorescence."

Traditions of credit-giving vary widely across labs, but in general the inclination to list co-authors runs the opposite of the instinct of the Academy Award winners to give thanks to their extended families. Behind each of these papers was a team of scientists, advisors, and support who went unmentioned.

Rainbows of Fluorescent Proteins

Prasher's contribution defined GFP research. Sequencing in the late 1980's was laborious, much more so than it is today. Prasher spent years accomplishing his research, but then didn't get the funding to take the work forward from there. As Tsien and Chalkie acknowledged, their work depended on his. Prasher passed his results on to Chalfie and Tsien and moved to another lab. In the light of the Nobel prize, Prasher's seems like a stark tale when written up by the New York Times or by relayed NPR. An incredible amount of time, years, decades in some cases, could be spent doing one thing, than poof, it doesn't work out or research moves on.

Like all progress, science moves in fits and starts -- fits and starts of research progress, of funding, and of luck, layered with varying dispositions of the people who read the grants, support the researchers, and whose labs the funding ends up in. It has its share of unrewarded contributors. Prasher generously told the New York Times"They worked their butts off over their entire lives for science, and I haven't."

The Chalfie lab constructed GFP to be used as a reporter protein in C. elegans, a transparent roundworm used as a model organism for research. C. elegans were put to use as a model organism in 1974, long after the discovery of GFP. Because the worms are transparent, Chalfie saw the potential to use GFP, and to use it in place of other reporters like beta-lactamase which was used extensively at the time. Chalfie first noted his positive result in the October 1993 edition of the Worm Breeder's Gazette and went on to publish the research in Science.

In his 1998 review of GFP protein Tsien wrote:

"Unfortunately, Aequorea GFP genes are the only GFP genes that have been cloned... Painstaking research like that undertaken by the pioneers of Aequorea and Renilla GFP would be needed before cloning efforts could begin. It is unclear whether any investigators or granting agencies are still patient enough to undertake and fund such long-term groundwork."

Rewarding, But Only One Award

Many of the early scientists who worked on GFP could have never foreseen its current utility. GFP was became important as technology changed the nature of science research, as the questions that scientists asked changed over time, and as successive bench developments proved the protein's potential.

Tsien's lab wrote another review of the protein in 2002, and by that time at least 30 other fluorescent proteins had been cloned and sequenced. High throughput methods of sequencing and cloning accelerated work and allowed faster identification than in Prasher's day, or that anyone could have fathomed 40 years ago. Early researchers couldn't have imagined what an impact GFP would have on developmental and cellular biology. In 2005 Tsien wrote another review advising researchers how to choose the most appropriate fluorescent proteins among all that were available. Uses for the protein are now only limited, as Martin Chalfie put it, by scientists imaginations of what they want to do.

----------------------------------------------------

¹Osamu Shimomura, Frank Johnson, and Yo Saiga."Extraction, Purification and Properties of Aequorin, a Bioluminescent Protein from the Luminous Hydromedusan, Aequorea'", Journal of Cellular and Comparative Physiology October, 1962

² Tsien, R. "Green Fluorescent Protein" Annual Review of Biochemistry Vol. 67: 509-544 July 1998.

³ Tsien, R. "A guide to choosing fluorescent proteins Nature Methods" 906 Vol. 2 No. 12, 905 - 909 (2005)

Charles Gelman, retired from Gelman Sciences, now donates his wealth through the Gelman Educational Foundation. Gelman is a vocal critic of chemical regulation and supporter of free-market organizations that fight regulation. The foundation gave a 5 million dollar gift to the University of Michigan School of Public Health Risk Science and Communication Center, which Gelman has called his "legacy". That center is directed by the head of the FDA panel which will review the safety of bisphenol A (BPA). Will the decision of the FDA committee be compromised?

BPA Appears to Confer Conflict of Interest in Government Researchers

Canada just announced its plan to place BPA on its toxic or hazardous chemical list, which will give the government unprecedented authority to ban the sale of bisphenol A containing polycarbonate baby bottles and to demand bisphenol-A-free packaging from baby formula makers.

The US lags behind Canada in the regulation of bisphenol A for a number of reasons, like the different politics and economics of BPA in each country; therefore the US moves ahead on regulating BPA more slowly, in a sort of two step forward, one step back pattern.

Last week, the Attorneys General from Connecticut, Delaware, and New Jersey asked 11 manufacturers of baby bottles and infant formula to stop using bisphenol A. Yet the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) steadfastly maintains that Bisphenol A poses little risk for humans. The agency contends that the estrogen related chemical is not dangerous in the doses the FDA predicts people will ingest, despite research showing otherwise.

In the FDA's last review, issued last April, the agency used industry sponsored studies to make its decision. People tend to jump to conclusions about the validity of industry data, using a study's funding source as a proxy for trustworthiness rather than examining the data. But their correct to be concerned about industry research in the case of BPA because hundreds of government and university studies show very different, more alarming results.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee plans to interview FDA Commissioner Andrew von Eschenbach to question him about the agency's procedure for rating the safety of BPA. While the first FDA results are under congressional investigation, a second committee chaired by Martin Philbert was also set up to review the first FDA decision.

Last week, in the continuing saga of bisphenol A policy, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel revealed that the University of Michigan center that Martin Philbert heads received a $5 million dollar gift coincident to his appointment to the FDA BPA review committee. (The FDA would not be the first government agency to have a conflict of interest on BPA, recently an NIH subcommittee studying BPA was also found to have controversial links to industry.)

The donation was given to the University of Michigan's School of Public Health (SPH) Center for Risk Science and Communication by Charles Gelman, a retired manufacturer with strong views on regulation and chemical safety. The Sentinel reports that Gelman told them in an interview that bisphenol A was perfectly safe, despite the opinions of - in his words - "mothers' groups and others who don't know the science." According to the Sentinel's report, Gelman passed his opinions about bisphenol A on to Philbert, who claims to have refused to discuss the issue with his benefactor. Philbert's conflict of interest statement for the FDA did not list the donation.

Industry Secret: Can't Beat the Law? Make The Law.

Acronym Required dug around a little more. Charles Gelman is a well known figure in Michigan. He made his fortune founding and running Gelman Sciences, a maker of plastic filtration devices. For several decades the company polluted groundwater and aquifers in Michigan with 1,4-dioxane, (PDF!) listed in California as a known cancer causing chemical. The pollution was discovered in wells near the plant in the mid-eighties and the state's Department of Natural Resources (DNR) rated the Gelman Sciences site the second worst industrial waste site in the state. The DNR then took regulatory steps to ensure that the company cleaned up the waste. In response, Charles Gelman launched an offensive that included everything from suing one of its main customers, Dow Chemical for 'falsely advertising' that it stewarded its chemicals "cradle to grave" (dismissed in court); to staging a boisterous parade through town with local business leaders when the DNR was scheduled to meet.

While settling homeowners lawsuits against the company, Gelman Sciences staged an epic fight with the state documented extensively by the local media. The company commissioned its own $50,000 study from the University of Michigan to show that other commercial products also contained the chemical. Gelman Sciences installed their own copier at the DNR while it tried to dredge up evidence against the state. The company also ran smear campaigns against people and non-profits involved with any actions against the company. Several years into the battle, the company had spent more on lawsuits against the state than it would if it had cleaned up its pollution, according to a September, 1991 article in Corporate Detroit (Waldsmith, L.,The revenge of Charles Gelman.; Gelman Sciences' legal battle with the Department of Natural Resources).

Then Gelman began pouring efforts into public policy, as he told the Corporate Detroit reporter:

"One thing I've learned is that business has some responsibility to participate in drafting legislation and being active in the legislative process, rather than paying no attention to it at all. That's the way bad laws are written."

Charles Gelman has stuck to his belief that he was wrongly accused, in his experience with the state set a course for his future actions. In 1994 while criticizing the state's lack of science knowledge, Charles Gelman told a state hearing on natural resources that 1,4-dioxane is not harmful, and no scientific evidence proved it was. When Charles Gelman's Foundation gave the $5 million dollar gift to the university last summer, Gelman noted that his gift was driven by his experience with the state on 1,4-dioxane.

I have Five Million Dollars. Would you Like some Job Security?

In gifting his millions to the university center, according to announcements the University published, Gelman noted that chemicals are complicated, and "our vision is to help inform industry, government and the public about how to properly assess the benefits and hazards posed by technology (and chemicals in particular) in our society." His wife Rita added that they were particularly interested in assessing the risks versus benefits of chemicals.

The gift establishes an endowed professorship for the UMRSC Director (Philbert is now the acting director), and will pay for two new faculty, scholarship support for students, and the Risk Science Master's in Public Health curriculum.

The gift from Gelman Education Foundation to the Risk Center certainly wasn't an out of the blue. The U. Michigan risk center was originally established with a $2.9 million dollar grant from the Gelmans, which David Garabrant, the director at the time called, "the foundation upon which the center will be built". The Gelmans also make frequent smaller (hundred thousand dollar) donations. According to Gelman, the center is his "important legacy", something that "will make a difference" as the Gelmans noted when they gave the initial 2.9 million dollar grant.

It would be a quandary. If you were a professor, in times when grants are tight, and someone offered to give you that amount of money what would you do? Perhaps you'd open the center too, while promising on your home page that your work "adheres to the highest standards of academic and professional integrity", and secure your employment security. Would the money change your politics? Even a little? One can suspect that a five million dollar donation might sway a recipient, but there's no real proof. Furthermore, it's not clear what sort of FDA opinion the $5 million dollars to the center could buy. But distrust seems warranted in this case.

Spreading the Wealth Around

Gelman's education foundation gives hundreds of thousands of dollars yearly to various religious, education, medical and political organizations. Aside from the Risk Center, his science and political donations are a nominal slice of the pie, a thousand dollars here or there which amounts to a nod to a cause or ideology. But do these donations portend an agenda that belies a neutral mission for the Risk Center? Gelman's only political donations are predictable neoconservative organizations dedicated to free-market proliferation and opposed to regulation. These are the organizations listed on the Gelman Foundation's 2007 990:¹

• The CATO institute
• The Competitive Enterprise Institute
• CFACT
• The Heartland Institute
• George Mason's Tyler Cowen, who runs the Mercatus Foundation, the Center for Public Choice, and the James Buchanon Center for Political Economy.
• The Mackinaw Center for Public Policy
• The Manhattan Institute for Public Policy
• Reason Foundation
• American Counsel on Science and Health
• The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) (Fred Singer's Global Warming Skeptism organization)
• Capital Research Center
• The Independent Institute

Incidentally, FDAreview.org is also a project of the Independent Institute. FDAreview.org advocates that "FDA control over drugs and devices has large and overlooked cost that almost certainly exceed the benefits." FDAreview.org "favors adult freedom and hence the repeal of all forms of premarket approval."

Gelman is clear about his mission to fund the Risk Science and Communication and as he says, to provide the Risk Center with contacts that will help its mission. When Gelman gave the originating grant to the center he referred to Gelman Science's protracted fight with the state's Department of Natural Resources "a case in public confusion", which would have benefited from the center's 'neutral' science.

But is an organization really "neutral" towards public policy if one person with a very clear agenda establishes it, funds the director, the professors, the students and the post-docs, and provides the contacts to help define the mission? If you're a professor doing science and didn't share Gelman's strong ideological stance, could you endure the pressure? Would Gelman endow with his legacy an organization that didn't share his views? What say does the founding funder have in the backgrounds of the professors whom he funds?

Congress is asking whether this donation will sway the the FDA's bisphenol A committee chair. Members of the Energy and Commerce committee plan to investigate the donation, and House Appropriations agriculture subcommittee members are calling on Philbert to recuse himself from the committee. If Philbert remains on the FDA committee, and then goes on to OK BPA, can that decision be trusted by US citizens? Can the University of Michigan's School of Public Health Risk Science and Communication be trusted?

¹ Acronym Required has previously written about a number of these organizations and you can find more information at Sourcewatch, ExxonSecrets.org and other websites.

-------------------------------------

Acronym Required has written numerous articles on BPA, starting with the 2005 article "Plastic Bottles: Protecting Your Baby, by the ACC"

Barack Obama and John McCain square off for their third debate. Sarah Palin draws predominantly males at "dude rallies". Obama surges ahead, but people are a little nervous, nervous about another GOP October surprise that's not an unlicensed plumber with a chip on his shoulder who doesn't pay all his taxes, a surprise that's not voter fraud accusations drummed up by the DOJ. On and on it goes. Here's news that's not about the election campaign.

• US Department of Justice eases up on Ranbaxy:

  A couple of weeks ago the FDA banned 31 Ranbaxy drugs imported by the Indian company after an unfavorable inspection. The Department of Justice became involved, and last time we reported, Ranbaxy had just hired Rudolph Giuliani to help them appeal to the regulators. This week the Department of Justice has decided not to pursue legal action against the company, causing Ranbaxy's shares to increase by 10%. The New Delhi Business Week reports that India's commerce department and chemicals ministry are saying the curbs weren't justified but the work of US drug lobbies. Typical international politics?

• Greening Your Lawn in Global Warming:
  

  In the US, many cities and towns have responded to global warming and water shortages by instituting voluntary water bans, especially on lawn watering. But this doesn't please everyone. Realtors chide people for not keeping their lawns watered, green, sellable. Global warming be damned. According to My Fox Tampa Bay, the man jailed for not keeping his sod attractive enough now faces court charges and fines, although he's out of jail. A home association in Florida had the man jailed because he didn't resod his lawn according to their specifications.

  The man, distracted from sod-care when his family was beset by hard times, spent his punishment time at the correction facility called Land O' Lakes (LOL) [this blog author adds the acronym, although its one I already intensely disliked]. The jail's homepage features a picture of prisoners sporting black and white striped prison-wear, bent over cultivating hydroponic lettuce. As LOL puts it: "This program joins the inmate garden and the aquaculture program, all designed to both reduce taxpayer's costs of funding the jail and to teach marketable skills to the inmates." There you go. Marketable skills to keep you eating in LOL and on the right correct side of your homeowners' association outside of jail.

  On the bright side, as with every problem faced by man LOL;) -- there's a promising technical alternative to back-breaking sod cultivation. In this case, LOL, a company that spray paints dead lawns green. Their business niche is foreclosed homes. LOL.

• Economics Nobel Laureate:
  

  Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his "analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity". In first year economics or political economics class most students learn the benefits of trade from comparative advantage. If one country sells bicycles, and the other cars, each will benefit from trade even if it intuitively seems like the car producing company could easily whip out a couple of bicycles. Students learn the simple math that proves this. However in real life sometimes countries with similar goods tend to trade a lot with each other, so one country that makes Volvos will trade a lot with one that makes Audis. Europe and the US trade extensively. Krugman's model from 20 years ago refined trade theory to explain why this apparent disparity occurs. He showed that there are economies of scale in industries that will make one city or country the best source of a particular specialized product and that these areas with similar capital and labor resources will preferentially trade. He extended this theory to explain how certain cities will become geographic centers of growth.

  Krugman's name didn't appear on the lists economist betting pools set up to predict the winner, but after all, leading economists sometimes make bad predictions. Greg Mankiw, for instance, detailed in Fortune, November 13, 2000 how Bush is a Leader The Economy Can Trust".

  Some reporters and economists took exception to Krugman's award in light of his vocal criticism on his "liberal" blog and newspaper column. However Krugman's economics practice and philosophy, people overlook, are quite "liberal", in the free trade - open market sense. Some commentators would like to see him change his work balance. For instance the Financial Times wrote last week:

  "It is not too late for Paul Krugman to return to what he does best: explaining how the economy works, why it matters, and what wrong-headed policies can do to it. In fact, that change may soon come. If so, it will not be because of the Nobel prize, but because the Republicans no longer hold the White House."

  But, but, but....isn't that what Professor Krugman is doing?

Science and Math by Armies of Uncertified Teachers, My Friends

I would have liked to see more science and technology issues discussed at the presidential debates, things like funding, education, and public policies. However, as we all know, the debates are not aimed at scientists, they're aimed at plumbers.¹ So Acronym Required had low expectations for meaningful science discussions in the debates and rightly so. In the first two debates "science" only got fleeting mention, inevitably paired with "research" and "scientists", and "important". Obama said "science" 3 times in the second debate!

Republican John McCain also spewed science key words, while managing to appeal as well to the science haters in his base. He trashed "bear research" as we discussed here, and he ripped into the money wasted on "an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois", not just in one debate, but in two. "My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?", he repeated Wednesday night, despite the constellation of criticism from scientists who already disproved his planetarium misrepresentations in the second debate -- here, and here and here and elsewhere.

The word "science" got another incidental airing last night when Bob Schieffer posed this question:

"The U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world. The implications of this are clearly obvious. Some even say it poses a threat to our national security. Do you feel that way and what do you intend to do about it?

Obama noted: "I think it's going to be critically important for us to recruit a generation of new teachers, an army of new teachers, especially in math and science...

And Have I a Job for You....

Continued Barack Obama:

"I meet young people all across the country who either have decided not to go to college or if they're going to college, they are taking on $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $60,000 worth of debt, and it's very difficult for them to go into some fields, like basic research in science, for example, thinking to themselves that they're going to have a mortgage before they even buy a house..."

Times are tough if you're a scientist trying to find a job, or if you're trying to fund your lab. To Obama's point, if you scan available research jobs the pay offered often looks like a misprint. Here's one of many examples, this one from a recent Chronicle of Higher Education:

"Chief Architect of the Genome Commons: Lead design, engineering, and deployment of the Genome Commons and Navigator. Develop and articulate a vision for using personal genomes to enhance human wellbeing.

Qualifications::

• Outstanding software architecture and development skills; proven ability to independently carry out a complex software engineering project.
• Understanding of human genetics.
• Commitment to open access and open source development.
• Savvy to medical, legal, and sociological influences in this project. Exceptional communication skills.
• Keen scientific acumen, intense technical ability, and broad social awareness.
• M.D. or Ph.D. in biological sciences highly desirable.
• Appointment: 1 year, renewal contingent on performance and funding.

Range: $48,372-$55,464."

Perhaps if your parents paid your tuition or subsidized your expenses this would be tenable position. Otherwise, despite college presidents who implore graduates to follow their bliss -- no doubt irritating endowment fund managers -- why not consulting or banking? Don't even start about "wishlists" of hiring criteria. It's basically a postdoc job at UC Berkeley for that person who's an MD, a research scientist, an accomplished software architect, and an "intense" techie, but paradoxically, who is also socially aware, astute about legal and sociological issues, and an excellent communicator. Someone who despite such incredible accomplishments, wants to work as a developer for at least half the money that either an MD, an accomplished developer, communicator, or technical architect anywhere in the Bay Area could earn.

If you're an MD or god, the top end of this position is $55,000. Remove $10,000 for federal tax, and $3,000 for state taxes gives you $42,000 to live on in one of the most expensive areas of the country. Sales tax is about 8-9%, health insurance will set you back more, and the balance will cover your dependents, car, gas, food, and housing, movies, books, etc.

A recent search of Berkeley houses on MDLS gives you a better idea of how far that $3,500 will go. A few examples from the range: a very modest 1,170 square foot house priced at $589,000; a 1,451 square foot house priced at $769,000, and a 1,583 square foot house for $899,000. You get the drift -- bungalows on tiny lots in a temperate climate. The $589,000 house, which may need some work from the looks of it, can be had at a fixed rate 6.25% 30 year loan that will require a monthly payment of over $3600 per month. So you'll be renting.

Obama voices an understanding of the difficulty of this when he says: "I've proposed a $4,000 tuition credit, every student, every year..."

Plumbers Get Lots of Appreciation....

McCain answered Schieffer's question on math and science education like this:

"Well, it's the civil rights issue of the 21st century...There's no doubt that we have achieved equal access to schools in America after a long and difficult and terrible struggle. We need to encourage programs such as...Troops to Teachers where people, after having served in the military, can go right to teaching and not have to take these examinations which -- or have the certification...

As far as college education is concerned, we need to make those student loans available."

McCain continued:

"I'm sure you're aware, Senator Obama, of the program in the Washington, D.C., school system where vouchers are provided...That was vouchers. That was voucher, Senator Obama. And I'm frankly surprised you didn't pay more attention to that example...³

And more: "town hall meeting after town hall meeting, parents come with kids, children -- precious children who have autism. Sarah Palin knows about that better than most. And we'll find and we'll spend the money, research, to find the cause of autism."³

Plumbers make $250,000 a year? Maybe we should be plumbers.

----------------------------------

¹ And about that plumber and the "spread the wealth around" remark. It wasn't Obama's best moment -- although, really, how much campaigning can one do and still keep standing? If it was a conspiracy, they were brilliant about making Obama say those words. Leave it to Joe the plumber and Fox News cherry-pick the whole 5 minute Obama response for that one phrase.

I do admire the self reliance of those who don't want to pay taxes, who blithely scoff at the need of policemen, fire stations and social security -- who complain mightily about taxes and government, but are first to yell when public spending cuts effect them. But how many miles does Joe drive everyday on the job, house to house to house via Ohio's deteriorating roads? Has he ever tested his truck axles out on a road that's really in disrepair? What about Ohio's building booms, supplemented with state funded roads, water and sewer -- new developments and houses that in turn assure plumbers business?

² Obama has paid attention to vouchers I'm sure. The book "Nudge", which includes a chapter on vouchers, was written by Cass Sunstein, an advocate of "paternal libertarianism" who is an advisor to Obama. The book illustrates the gist of "paternal libertarianism" by explaining that cafeterias can position carrots in a more conspicuous place than pizza to encourage healthy eating. It uses this innocuous example to "nudge" you to its conclusions that this paternalism would be a good for bringing government public policy to fruition -- healthcare, education, and retirement benefits. The Freakonomics blog explains it like this "it is a lot easier to trick them into doing what you want than to try to educate them or incentivize them to change their behavior. There are many ways to trick people, but one of the easiest is simply by giving thought to the way choices are arrayed to them, or what they call "choice architecture." Like it? The Nudge authors would like the government to entice people to accept vouchers, heathcare plans, and other government crafted choices.

Some interesting recent research by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank and Princeton concluded that achievement levels of students using vouchers were "not significantly different than zero", and that "very little evidence about the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers also suggests that one should remain wary that large-scale improvements would result from a comprehensive system." The work, "School vouchers: Recent findings and unanswered questions", was published in 3Q/2008, Economic Perspectives.

³ Autism research won't benefit from Sarah Palin's vow to tell the government to "get out of the way." Nor will it benefit from McCain's proposal in the first debate for a "spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs."

You watch me and I watch you and the government watches us and we watch the government. If everyone is in on the surveillance then the cameras all around us shouldn't make us paranoid right? Citizens can access the images as well as government, and through all this benevolent spying, we'll decrease crime and preserve liberty. Life will be good in a "transparent society", better than in the old fashioned privacy days, in fact some thought think this "transparency" was is the only way liberty would be preserved. Although I'm simplifying a bit, David Brin's article and book about his "Transparent Society" received laudatory attention when it was published ten years ago.

Even a couple of years ago, before cell phones with cameras were ubiquitous and before governments accelerated post-9-11 surveillance was still under wraps "technoprogressive" critics continued to argue the pros (often) and cons (sometimes) of the "transparent society". A couple of years ago the corner cameras didn't have quite the omnipresence they now have in the UK and it was easier to imagine what the technology could be before the technology was in our midst, fully realized.

I was a "Transparent Society" critic for many reasons which could be summed up by saying I thought the ideas naively utopian. However I marveled how the technology Brin predicted became commonplace and how cell-phone cameras, for one, offer citizens ready opportunities to document events. But no matter how many times people update their Facebook, despite how many times technology companies market their newest freedom enhancing device, citizens don't usually get the upper hand in the information arbitrage, regardless of the medium of exchange. One of the most compelling recent criticisms of the "transparent society" was written by Bruce Schneier last March in his column "Security Matters", published by Wired. He criticized the idea that "mutual disclosure" could stop the inevitable erosion of privacy via technology:

"...it doesn't work, because it ignores the crucial dissimilarity of power. You cannot evaluate the value of privacy and disclosure unless you account for the relative power levels of the discloser and the disclosee."

This seems more obvious now than it did in March, more obvious in March, 2008 than few years ago. Brin's ideas now seem as facile as John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. Barlow's 1996 piece told governments to stay out of Cyberspace, which he declared a "civilization" and promised a "more humane and fair than the world your governments have made."

Each year's technology evolutions make those original manifestos seem in hindsight, more nostagic, even quaint. China now monitors and archives Skype messages. Ah, but I don't live in China you say. Then for you the New York Times writes today about the newest book by James Bamford "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra- Secret NSA From 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America". The author's third book on the NSA focuses on "the agency's growing partnership with private companies to tap into the fiber-optic cables that now carry most telephone and Internet traffic." As he documents in the book, ABC reported that the NSA had been recently eavesdropping on ordinary citizens abroad.

What are citizens to do if it ends up they can't hold a candle to the state's spying? Get creative. Via BoingBoing, we're led to Open Rights Group's (ORG) 4 X 5 meter collage of photos of surveillance "ephemera" all over the UK. The group collected photos capturing what they call "UK's wholesale transformation into the surveillance society/database state". ORG then arranged the photos into a "Big-Brother-esque photo of Gordon Brown looking over Parliament Square against a background of barbed wire, handcuffs and double helice."

The (new) US government also has some ideas up its' sleeves. Like the so called "Google government" proposed by Obama in 2006 or Palin in 2008. Will that correct the imbalance of power by making more information available to citizens? Ease our minds?

What Environment?

In February 2007, the Navy initiated training exercises without filing the EIS required by the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 (NEPA) to document the possible environmental harm from the sonar training. Various groups challenged the Navy in court, and the case wound up in the Supreme Court yesterday, where the court heard arguments in "Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council" (NRDC). The counsel for the Navy, General Garre summarized for Justice David Souter the Navy's decision to go ahead without the EIS: "it doesn't specifically say what happens if they [the laws] are not followed".

The District Court originally found in favor of NRDC: The Navy had violated (NEPA). Instead of complying with the court injunction, however, in short the Navy wrote its own environmental assessment EA and presented this to an executive-branch administrative agency called the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The CEQ found that the Navy's mission constituted "emergency circumstances".

The Navy took this opinion back to the court, arguing that the court should dissolve its injunction. In more court reviews Los Angeles U.S. District Judge Florence Marie Cooper sifted through evidence and determined criteria for when the Navy should turn off sonar. According to the NRDC brief, the courts reviewed "thousands of pages of briefing and evidence over the course of many weeks, and tour[ed] a Navy destroyer--to assess the Navy's contention that the mitigation measures would risk the Navy's ability to train and certify its strike groups." The mitigations Cooper imposed were loosened in subsequent hearings.

In previous training exercises, the Navy had "trained and certified its strike groups using the two mitigation measures at issue in this appeal". Furthermore, following the lower court decisions. the Navy continued training exercises in the Pacific Ocean, "completing the last 13 of 14 training exercises, 8 of which were under the current rules", and did not appeal to the court for relief Kendall pointed out. But the Navy doesn't any more want to take steps to mitigate environmental damage.

Despite the fact that the Navy's training was not impeded by the mitigations, the Navy and the President appealed to the Supreme Court to overrule any measures imposed by the lower courts. Yesterday the Supreme Court question the two sides about whales, sonar, and impact statements. It considered issues of standing and equity, as well as the role of the executive branch in determining the fate of the environment and endangered species.

Sometimes the court seemed aloof to the information in the briefs. In balancing the possible harm to marine animals, Chief Justice Roberts suggested the possible harm on the other side was: "the potential that a North Korean diesel electric submarine will get within range of Pearl Harbor undetected". NRDC counsel Kendall corrected the Chief Justice: The case concerned only military training, not combat. Justice Breyer, also confused, elicited a laugh by suggesting that all military exercises were destructive: "You go on a bombing mission, do they have to prepare an environmental impact statement first?" Mr. Kendall again: "No."

Whales & Sonar: It's Not Pretty

Research shows that whales become disoriented, injured or die after sonar testing. Strandings and deaths that have been frequently documented; in North Carolina (2005); at Haro Strait off the coast of Washington State (2003); in the Canary Islands (2004, 2002, 1989, 1986, 1985); in Madeira (2000); the U.S. Virgin Islands (1999, 1998); Greece (1996), and the Bahamas (2000), and off the coast of Spain (2006), and more The coincidence of whale strandings or deaths and naval sonar testing exercises seems too obvious to ignore, but cause and effect scientific data on the whales are more difficult to compile. That said, recent research points to how the marine mammals become injured and die.

After the 2003 mass strandings in the Canary Islands, Nature published a report by Jepson et al, showing that beaked whales had gas filled cavities and emboli in their organs and tissues. The animals hemorrhage around their ears and brain. According to Jepson's theory the whales died from decompression sickness.¹ A subsequent study in Science, 2004 found the same effect in sperm whales. ². Jepson later reported that embolisms were also present in whales stranded off the coast of Spain in 2006. ³ More studies of strandings found similar evidence. ⁴

Common to the many reports, and consistent with observation, tagging, and later corpse analysis, whales seem to become disoriented when subjected to sonar, which leads to decompression sickness ⁵. Recent research by teams in the Ian Boyd lab at St Andrews University and in the Peter Tyack lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute suggest that the whales perceive the sonar as a predator. Tyack told Times Online published a story September 28, 2008, based in interviews with the two lead scientists. Said Tyack:

"[The Navy] uses pulses of similar frequency and duration to the pulses emitted by killer whales and is very loud. It seems to have a particularly strong effect on species, such as small beaked whales, of which killer whales are the primary predator."

This idea hasn't been completely vetted, but scientists are closing in on the mechanisms and possible mitigations. Beaked whales are most susceptible to harm because of their behavioral response of abnormal diving in the presence of sonar. Scientists suggest that the need to escape the sound causes the whales to dive frantically, breaking their usual feeding and breeding, and diving behavior which causes the bends, hemorrhaging and injuries.

Oh, This Won't Hurt at All, Says the Navy

The justices acknowledged they can't evaluate science. When presented with rationale by the Navy about needing to train at night because of thermal layers, Justice Breyer considered the Navy's stance: "Fine, they went on some exercises and they didn't run into these layered things. So obviously they couldn't have training." (Thermal layers and sonar are described here in the book, "How To Make War", by James Kunnigan, Chap. 10: Navy: Run Silent Run Deep.)

The court only anemically challenged General Garre's repeated assertions that the sonar caused no harm, and that the Respondents hadn't shown "irreparable harm". For instance General Garre referred the court to a Navy document listing "all the species of beaked whales and explained that the harms that are predicted in the environmental assessment are non-injurious, temporary harms". Alioto asked Garre to explain it in "lay terms". Garre led Alioto to conclude there wasn't "physical injury", rather the whales might just "swim in a different direction"? (As if your child was whining in the living room so you wandered into the kitchen to get yourself a snack, rather than, that you were suddenly subjected to unending earth-shatteringly loud, nerve-rattling noise that caused you to flee up to the attic window then cover your exploding ears and plunge from the roof.) Garre assured Alioto: "that's right".

Yet the NRDC presented significant evidence in the briefs. Kendall disputed General Garre's multiple assertions that sonar caused "no harm." He described the embolisms, gas filled pockets, and hemorrhaging, and presented this analogy to the court:

"In sound intensity, in this courtroom if we had a jet engine and you multiplied that noise by 2,000 times, correcting for water, that's the sound's intensity that would be going on in the water if you were a marine mammal near that source."

Loud?

What the Navy Doesn't Want Us Know?

People have long suspected the Navy knows more then they're letting on about how sonar effects marine life. According to the NRDC brief (PDF) the Navy predicted in their EA that the SOCAL sonar training would result in 170,000 incidents to marine mammals -- harassment, injuries, or deaths -- and 548 permanent injuries for beaked whales.

The Navy denied and backpedaled on harm during Supreme Court questioning, but there is plenty of evidence that militaries of the world understand sonar's effects. The science journal Nature obtained an unpublished 2007 report from the UK Military under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 documenting that sonar negatively effects whale behavior and can lead to death. ⁶ The UK military ran Operation Anglo-Saxon 06 in 2006 and reported on whale activity during the "submarine war-games". Using hydrophones, researchers found the number of whale recordings dropped by 75% over during sonar exercises. The whales stopped vocalizing and foraging for food, and the UK military predicted this would lead to '"second and third order effects on the animal and population as a whole"', including starvation and death, according to the report.

To the extent the research is sparse perhaps it's because the US Navy has tried to suppress its findings. Nature reported in "Panel quits in row over sonar damage" in 2006 that the US Navy pressured scientists to suppress evidence of harm from sonar. ⁷ The US Marine Mammal Commission (MMC) was convened by Congress in 2003 to advise Congress on a plan to research whales and sonar, however the commission broke apart, plan-less, after 2 years of meetings.

The journal spoke to members of the failed MNC who said that the science had been "highly politicized". According to one participant, "the Navy, as well as other groups that use sonar, including geophysical researchers and the oil and gas industry, blocked a consensus." Lindy Weilgart of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, told the journal: '"This process has been a travesty of fiscal responsibility, scientific integrity, and environmental stewardship."'

Environmental Law, by the Navy: "What He Said."

At first, the Supreme Court pursued the facts around the Navy's decision to ignore the law requiring the EIS, to simply make up its own environmental assessment (EA), with it's own criteria, unvetted by anyone but the Navy, not subject to public comment. Different justices questioned General Garre about the CEQ's authority as an office in the White House to override environmental law set out in NEPA. They suggested that perhaps the only "emergency" was that the Navy had ignored the legal requirement for the EIS before starting training. Then Justice Scalia proposed a different tactic for General Garre:

Scalia: "Look, the problem you face and maybe you're being whipsawed, is that you are effectively estopped from the argument that no EIS is necessary by the fact that you have agreed to these alternative arrangements. But you should not be estopped from arguing that at the time the EA was issued that was not a good faith completion of all the Navy's responsibilities....It assumes that the EA wasn't enough. And I'm not sure that we -- that that assumption is valid."

General Garre: "Well, that's right....the Navy believes that its EA was not only prepared in good faith, but was appropriate and reached the right conclusions...." Garre had repeatedly stated that the sonar training would cause little "likelihood of irreparable injury..." But Justice David Souter wondered whether: "without the EIS, the Navy is acting in -- in a state of -- of some degree of ignorance greater than would be the case if -- if it had done -- done the EIS."

Scalia addressed Garre again:

"The EA demonstrates in your view that the EIS would -- would very likely say that this -- this action by the Navy is okay. And since that is the case, there is -- there is no probability of irreparable harm; to the contrary, there is the probability of no irreparable harm because of the EA."

Said General Garre: "Well, we agree with that." (The Navy does agree with that, even though the EA predicted over 500 serious injuries and 170,000 incidents, it concludes no harm, no harm, again and again.)

Scalia later suggested:

"In all -- in all of these cases it is controverted, or in most of them, whether an EIS is either necessary -- is even necessary. So if the mere allegation that it was necessary gives rise to an allegation of irreparable harm, you are going to get a preliminary injunction in all cases?"

General Garre replied: "I think that's right."

However, earlier in the questioning, General Garre had assured the court that he recognized the Navy's original "duty to prepare the EIS". He had told the justices about the Navy's steadfast commitment to completing the tardy EIS document per previous legal agreements. Now, suddenly, Garre asserted he was "contesting" what he had before agreed to -- that the Navy needed to complete an EIS. This confused Justice Ginsburg, who remembered to the time 30 minutes earlier when Garre stated his commitment to "meet the goal" of producing the EIS by January, 2009 (although the training ends in 2008). Ginsburg said: "I thought you conceded that point". General Garre the quickly apologized "if I misspoke".

Who needs Scalia's book "Making Your Case Persuading Judges"? Just show up for the tutorial, let him argue your points, and nod. What Scalia said.

Good Stewards of The Environment

In the end, the Supreme Court justices puzzled over why the Navy was dragging its heels if the agency had completed the EA, was committed to completing the EIS, and if there was "no irreparable harm" to mammals. Garre, perhaps emboldened, suggested in closing that the NRDC did not even have standing if beaked whales were harmed. One justice queried the two parties about why they hadn't worked it out, as opposed to leaving it to the courts. Judges aren't experts on Naval exercises or marine biology, the justices pointed out. NRDC's Kendall replied that "the Navy is focused on having it its way or no way". Chief Justice John G. Roberts retorted, "that's not fair"; the Navy had continually compromised, he said, but "no good deed goes unpunished".

Scientists warn that the beach strandings may indicate an even larger problem -- not all animals may be washed ashore, many more may be dying and lost at the sea. In a review of research on whale injuries, causes, and mitigation by Marine Pollution Bulletin. ⁸, the authors write: "...the greatest user of military sonars in the world, the US Navy, appears to be in denial about the situation." While the US has taken significant action to weaken cetacean protection in national and international waters, especially with regard to sonar, the Navy continues to boast about its commitment to being "good stewards of the environment".

The Supreme Court will issue a decision later this session.

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¹Jepson et al, Gas-bubble lesions in stranded cetaceans: was sonar responsible for a spate of whale deaths after an Atlantic military exercise? Nature, 425, 575-57, 9 October 2003: doi:10.1038/425575a.
² Moore and Early; Cumulative sperm whale bone damage and the bends, Science 306, Vol. 306. no. 5705, p. 2215. 2004: doe: 10.1126/science.1105452
³ Dalton, Rex; More whale strandings are linked to sonar : Nature 440, 593 30 March 2006 doi :10.1038/440593a.
⁴ Fernandez, A. Gas and fat embolic syndrome" involving a mass stranding of beaked whales (family Ziphiidae) exposed to anthropogenic sonar signals.Veterinary Patholology 42:446-457 2005.
⁵ Tyak et al. Extreme diving of beaked whales. Journal of Experimental Biology 209, 4238-4253. 2006 doi: 10.1242/jeb.02505).
⁶ Cressey, Daniel; Sonar does affect whales, military report confirms. Nature, Aug 1, 2008. doi:10.1038/news.2008.997.
⁷ Dalton, Rex; Panel quits in row over sonar damage. Nature 439, 376-377 26 January 2006 doi :10.1038/439376a;doi:10.1038/439376a
⁸ Parsons et al., Navy sonar and cetaceans: Just how much does the gun need to smoke before we act? Marine Pollution Bulletin, July, 2008 doi:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2008.04.025

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Acronym Required previously wrote on this subject in "Whales In A Time of War", and "Whales in Court".

The The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. Montagnier is the director of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention in Paris. Barre-Sinoussi works in the virology department at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. The two scientists split the prize with Dr. Harald zur Hausen of the University of Dusseldorf who discovered the viruses that cause genital warts and cervical cancer.

The Nobel Prize committee commended the French scientists for their work identifying the virus that caused AIDS, work that established the foundation for further scientific characterization of HIV. In the 1980's Montangier and Barre-Sinoussi isolated and cultured cells from the lymph nodes of patients suspected to be infected with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In lab experiments they found the enzyme retroviral enzyme reverse transcriptase, which indicated the presence of a retrovirus in the lymph nodes. They then infected lymphocytes from donors with their retrovirus and found that the virus killed healthy lymphocytes which helped show that this virus was the infectious agent responsible for changing the immune response in the body and causing AIDS.

The discovery of the HIV virus was contentious, with US scientist Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier each saying that they were first to discover the virus. Some early news media reports on the discovery in the 1980's said that the French team discovered the virus, while others indicated it was Gallo who first identified the virus. The French and US teams published papers in 1983 and 1984, and each filed patent claims for their discovery. It got a little heated with both teams vying not only for recognition but for the profits associated with the development of the test for HIV. New Scientist called the long running dispute "the tackiest sagas in the history of medicine..." (albeit with a lot at stake)

The two governments led by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Jacques Chirac finally agre