Fact-Checking and Science Journalism

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If you’ve been paying attention to the United States Presidential elections, you’re probably quite familiar with the term “fact-checking”; that is, the verification of the statements and claims made by candidates. Why don’t we see more fact-checking in science? The general public seems to quickly latch on to “facts” that have been “proven” by scientific studies and then reported (and possibly mangled) by mainstream media. Is the population’s lack of skepticism and critical thinking because of our less-than-stellar STEM education? Is it because somehow, the letters attached to the end of your name are directly proportional to the amount of trust invested by the general public?

I believe it is an intertwined combination of all of the above, in addition to the fact that there is a disconnect in the pipeline from manuscript to media; and the adage “if it bleeds, it leads” holds true in the case of the ongoing controversy of Monsanto GMO corn and rats developing rather nasty cancerous tumors.

In this study, researchers claim (we’re grasping at straws here) that GM corn is a causative agent of cancer in the rats. The blogosphere ignited. Here you can have a glance at the ever-so-reputable blog “Natural News” and their handle on the study, using heavy hyperbole, and citing the Daily Mail as a source. This angered me — even when I managed to push aside the fact that naturalnews.com usually nauseates me — not only because they were incorrectly interpreting the study, but because the writing was laden with self-righteousness, and reeked of “we’re right, you’re wrong, hahahahaha”.

In a frantic attempt to get a fix of rational thinking and skepticism, I found this post by Discovery News journalist Emily Sohn. Her description of the study itself and its flaws (and why they are flaws) is incredibly succinct and, although wordier than the average blog post, easily understood by educated Americans in and outside of science. This type of pop science journalism, disseminated by major media outlets, is a necessity in bridging the gap between researchers and the general public — and the responsibility rests upon both the scientists and the journalists to clearly and truthfully communicate information.

There is no perfect solution to fact-checking mainstream media reporting science. Scientists, by nature, will always be cautious of implying direct links and causation. Journalists will always sniff out the bleeding lead. However, ethical and explicit reporting of results, and encouragement of writers such as Ms. Sohn, will keep the media from repeating this incredibly fantastic template ad nauseum.

Quality control

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Delicious looking health care (photo from Wikimedia Commons).

At CIDD lunch this week, we discussed this paper by Kumar et al (2005). It’s a compilation of data from randomized clinical trials of cancer treatments in children conducted between 1955 and 1997, and it shows that on average, new treatments are no better or worse than standard care.

Although scientists are not getting better at producing more effective treatments in comparison to standard care, the overall survival rate for children with cancer has been increasing since the 1950s, which suggests that standard care has changed for the better. During the CIDD lunch, someone referred to this improvement as “moving the goal posts” for cancer treatments. In my mind, this raises the question of how standard is standard care at any given time, for any given doctor, in any given hospital?

At the end of the discussion, Andrew touched on one of the problems with standard care, which is that ineffectual or even detrimental treatment regimes can become common because of misplaced confidence in anecdotal observation. An op-ed published last August in the New York Times suggested that the solution to this problem is to throw money at it – and of course, medical researchers to spend the money. More specifically, take some small fraction of health care spending and put it towards testing current treatments.

Yet even if all treatments were well supported by data, the widespread and timely implementation of best practices is not assured, as it is a long and leaky pipeline from the NEJM or the Lancet to your general practitioner’s office. Dr. Atul Gawande wrote about this problem in the New Yorker, also published this past August. As an example of the inconsistency in standard practices, Dr. Gawande wrote about his mother’s knee replacement and the extensive variation between surgeons in all aspects of the procedures, from anesthesia to physical therapy. A solution to this problem, according to Dr. Gawande, is strict and centralized quality control, just like in the Cheesecake Factory and other chain restaurants.

Which brings me to my final question: how important is standard care? For double blind, randomized clinical trials (i.e. science) it’s quite important to know that your control group is being treated consistently but for patient care (i.e. medicine), I can see some benefits, as well as costs, from multiple approaches.

NB: My experience with health care has been largely within the U.S., which certainly colors my perspectives.

Scientists to be jailed for failing to predict earthquake

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Yesterday, seven Italian scientists were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail for, as many headlines asserted, failing to predict an earthquake that killed just over 300 people in L’Aquila, Italy in April 2009.

The formal details of the case are a bit more nuanced than the sound bites suggest, but that ultimate outcome is still disturbing, as a scientist. An “unidentified woman on Sky television” thought it was “just a tiny bit of justice so that it doesn’t happen again” (NY Times). I found it upsetting, that individuals would feel comforted by dumping the burden of the deaths of hundreds of people on someone for not pinpointing a natural disaster, and ridiculous that they would think this would somehow get negligent scientists back on their game. What do people think that scientists can/should do?

These scientists populated the country’s National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks. Given that the scientific consensus on the possibility of earthquake prediction seems to be something like “certainly not within a timeframe very useful for informing short term evacuations,” what did these scientists say they could do?

There are many interesting discussion points surrounding this case, beyond just the fundamental, scientific question about the extent to which different aspects of the world and life are predictable; my mind swirls with them. But I guess I’ll ask this mini-blogosphere directly if you think that this conclusion is a worrying precedent? Do you think it is likely to help or hurt more people, and, if so, how?

Other articles: 1, 2

Tussey Mountainback 2012

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The Read Group and the Thomas Lab are normally one coherent functioning team. Last Sunday however, all coherence was thrown out of the window during the Tussey Mountainback 50 mile relay race. Fierce between-group and even some within-group (depending on the genotype) competition broke loose. I regret to say the Read Group did not come out athletically the strongest. Despite this however, we had a great time on this beautiful sunny autumn day.
junior vs senior scientist

junior vs senior scientist

Why is cancer so hard to eradicate?

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Many infectious diseases can be completely cured—that is, totally eradicated from an individual—even when the parasite responsible has spread throughout the body, but when cancer has spread throughout the body, eradication is a dim hope. People often cite the similarities between cancerous and normal cells as a reason the disease is so difficult to treat, and that is certainly a problem, but I think the ecology of cancer is also fundamentally different from that of invading pathogens.

As Sandy Liebhold brought up in a recent talk, sometimes the ecology of a pest can assist in eradication efforts. Most organisms are subject to Allee effects, meaning that population growth is stunted when only small numbers of organisms are around. Animals that hunt in packs struggle to survive when there are too few organisms to form packs; sexual organisms fail to produce offspring when numbers are so low that finding mates is difficult. These Allee effects help populations on their way to extinction.

Parasites have to contend with Allee effects just like other organisms. Recent work suggests that malaria parasites have to face Allee effects in the form of early, non-specific immune measures. These immune measures appear to be overwhelmed when large numbers of parasites are injected into mice, but small numbers of parasites have a hard time of it. To use drugs to cure a patient of malaria, it is not necessary to kill every last parasite—just to kill enough parasites that immunity can mop up the rest. Cancer cells may not face the same limitations. As cells derived from the host, they are not likely to be vulnerable to non-specific immune measures. Small numbers of cancer cells might even do better, as they face less competition from other cancer cells and may fly under the radar of specific immune measures, which may tend to scale up with numbers. Therefore we may not be able to count on much help from the within-host ecology when we attempt to eradicate cancer from a person.

The situation is not hopeless—sometimes pests spread so far that eradication is deemed impractical. Aside from the economic limitations, it may be that the amount of chemical warfare required to eliminate the pest would decimate the ecosystem just as surely as the pest population would if it were allowed to grow out of control. People instead turn to monitoring the pest populations and treating so as to keep pest damage below a certain level. These ideas form the basis for adaptive therapy of cancer, which attempts to keep metastasized cancer at manageable levels instead of eradicating it altogether. Eradication may not be necessary to maintain individual patient health—managing the problem with a solid understanding of the ecology could be good enough.

A proposition for recognition by the Olympic Movement

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A lady with hair suspiciously like mine, running

Science should be recognized as a sport.

The parallels are undeniable. I accept that ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Haul Lab Worker’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it but the repetition; the solitary hours spent at the bench or before the screen; all motivated by one goal – surely not unlike weights workouts; miles pounded.

This isn’t an original thought by any means, indeed it doesn’t take much to realize that members of the two fields are united by similar personality traits. Yesterday, Becky joked that scientists could be contained under the ‘masochist’ umbrella. Isn’t this also a term regularly applied to athletes and what our friends will say when we line up on Sunday to run fifty miles of hilly road at the Tussey MountainbackTM? What unites these activities is the quest for highs – unchartered ground, the answer, the win.

Of course with massive highs come lows. The first time I ran an experiment to test a novel ecologically-rooted theory of drug resistance management, all the signs of success were there. Yet, after analysis, the results revealed only failure. Blame fell on ‘Stochasticity’, scientists’ chance. But this morning, I sat down with ‘Coach’ (alright, the metaphor’s gone too far but did I just find a sufficiently annoying nickname for Andrew?!) after round two and showed him that this time we’d performed, the work had paid off.

There was a long silence.

“Blimey”, he said.

Gold.

The point of it.

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The mentoring issue Matt Thomas and I worry about most is writing. To produce papers that have impact, and to be successful in the brutal competition that is the modern grant system — in other words, to have a career in science — you just have to be able to communicate effectively. No matter how brilliant you are, no matter how fantastic your data or how earth-shattering your new idea, if you can’t sell it, you might as well not exist.

Yet good writing is one of the hardest skills to acquire. It is relatively straight forward to learn the latest lab techniques, and even statistics, reasoning, experimental design and knowledge of the literature. It’s even relatively easy to have good ideas. But writing well is hard. I have a theory that’s because scientists don’t practice telling stories, so when it comes time to write, they have no natural narrative or rhetorical skills. Rightly focussed on trying to get the science correct, trainee scientists can not tell the story in an elegant or simple way.

I think it helps to practice writing in a context which does not define a career. Hence this blog. My hope is that freed of the necessary discipline of writing a scientific paper, our people can practice engaging writing. A good thing about this blog is the potential audience: my mum, others in the group, academic colleagues, competitors – and future employers. Hopefully, the challenge of that diversity will enforce a professional discipline but also allow a bit of individualized spirit. It’s an experiment. Let’s see.

Meanwhile, here we all are on my 50th Birthday in September. Courtney was on holiday. Penny is on computer from England. Apart from Matt, a good looking bunch I reckon. Certainly a lot of brain power and energy. And for the PSU police, those bottles of bubbly on the table are non-alcoholic.