Culture Dish

Culture Dish Move Complete - New Feed Now Live

2009-01-02T13:32:00.005-05:00

Please update your RSS feeds ... as mentioned below, Culture Dish has moved. You can subscribe to the new Culture Dish RSS feed here. You can also subscribe to have Culture Dish delivered to you via email here.

Assistance Monkeys, Ducks, Parrots, Pigs and Ducks ... Should the law protect them? My Latest New York Times Magazine Story

2008-12-31T19:38:00.005-05:00

Update: The Culture Dish move is now complete, and the new Culture Dish feed is now live. Please update your subscription and we'll see you over on the new site!

I know, I told you Culture Dish was moving, and it did. But I've been having problems with the new site (hard-to-read font, plus its feed isn't activated yet, alas), so I wanted to post a quick note here to let folks know about my latest New York Times Magazine story, Creature Comforts, which just went online today. It's about the use of nontraditional service animals -- including monkeys, miniature horses, parrots, snakes, goats, even ducks -- and the legal battles surrounding them. The print version will hit the stands this Sunday. I've posted about the story in detail on my new blog, along with photos of the animals I wrote about, video footage of Panda the guide miniature horse, and much more. So come check it out.

Photo caption: Skloot interviewing Richard the agoraphobia service monkey ...

Culture Dish Has Moved

2008-12-30T16:19:00.005-05:00

That's right, today is moving day. Please update your links or RSS feeds or whatever it is that you use, and come check out Culture Dish at its new home on ScienceBlogs, complete with an inaugural post. I'll be keeping my archives here for a while until I figure out how to move them over to the new server, but eventually I'll transfer them and close down this site entirely.

See you at the new diggs ...

Dusting Off The Cobwebs

2008-10-07T15:54:00.004-04:00

Yes, it's true: Culture Dish is still alive under all the dust and cobwebs that have accumulated since my last post. The good news: My book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, is finished and headed toward publication (which is why Culture Dish went on hiatus), and I'll be back to blogging soon. I'll also be launching a new website at rebeccaskloot.com as well as giving Culture Dish a serious makeover. First step: It's moving to ScienceBlogs. Stay tuned for more information, including a link to the new blog location once it's up and running ...

Blog Down Time

2008-04-17T14:45:00.005-04:00

As anyone who's visited this blog in the last many months has noticed: Culture Dish has been sleeping. Teaching, freelancing, column writing, book work, travel and blogging over at Critical Mass have left little time for personal blogging lately. But I'll be starting up a pets blog for Prevention Magazine soon -- a companion blog for my monthly column there -- so stay tuned for more information about that. And once my book hits stores, I'll be back blogging on my own as well.

In the meantime, those interested in following my freelance work can find stories on my website. Those interested in reading my pets column can do so on this page, which I update monthly. And poke around here on Culture Dish -- there's lots to see.

Catalona Appeal Ruling: Patients Don't Control Their Tissues

2007-06-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

Some time ago, I wrote this story for the New York Times Magazine titled, "Taking the Least of You: Those blood and tissue samples you routinely give - where are they? Who owns them? What are they being used for? And how come you don't know?" Since that story ran, I've been publishing updates here on the Washington University vs. William Catalona trial that I covered -- it was a potentially landmark court case that questioned whether patients can control the use of their tissues in research, and whether they retain any property rights in their excised body parts (in this case, Washington University claimed ownership of 6,000 tissue samples from patients who asked that their samples be removed from the university's prostate cancer bank, which is worth millions of dollars).

Well, here's another update: Initially, the court ruled in favor of Washington University, saying individuals don't own their tissues. Catalona and his patients appealed. This morning, the 8th District Court finally ruled on that appeal: Their decision states, "We affirm the well-reasoned opinion and judgment of the district court." In other words, they ruled against Catalona and his patients, saying that they don't own their prostate cancer tissues, Washington University does. You can read the full decision here.

This ruling is a serious blow to the patients' rights advocates who've spent decades fighting for people to have control how researchers use their their bodily tissues (and the DNA inside them). This ruling reaffirms the precadent set by the famous John Moore case. But the Catalona case isn't over yet, I'm sure. More on this decision, and the case, soon.

Having a Good Pet Death

2007-06-06T10:46:00.001-04:00

My latest pets column, The Good Good-Bye , has just hit the stands in the July issue of Prevention Magazine. As you'll see, it's about something near and dear: Dealing with the loss of a pet both emotionally, and logistically.

In my 10 years as a veterinary technician, I helped euthanize many animals, including one of my own, so I understand that side of the death experience all too well. What I didn't know until I set out to write this column was what an enormous industry pet death has become: You can get an incredible variety of pet urns and coffins (including lifesized ones), you can have your pet's hair or ashes turned into a diamond, you can cryopreserve your pet in case science catches up with science fiction to make cloning possible (don't count on that one), you can even have your pet freeze dried in a variety of natural positions, so you can keep it with you at home looking frighteningly lifelike. Okay, yeah: Some of it is definitely bizarre. But hey, like I said in my column, if this stuff helps people recover from losing pets, who cares it seems weird to others.

On another note: I've finally arrived in Memphis, where I'm surrounded by boxes and lacking an Internet connection at home. So this blog will continue to be pretty quiet for a while. But more news from The South soon ...

On The Road Again

2007-05-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

For those wondering why my blog has been so quiet lately, here's why: I've accepted a faculty position at The University of Memphis, where I'm moving in exactly two weeks (which explains why I've had this great song stuck in my head for months). I'm really excited about the move (the food! the music! the Reverend Al Green! Elvis! the mississippi delta! huge fenced-in backyard for the dogs! kool-aid pickles!?), and about working with such great writers in the MFA program there, where I'll teach creative nonfiction. The plan at this point: Live in Memphis during the academic year, and spend the rest of the year back in NYC and in my native Portland, Oregon.

The hiring process, combined with deadlines, teaching at NYU, and my work with the National Book Critics Circle have left this poor blog a little quiet. That will likely continue through the summer as I settle and get my book ready to go out into the world. But stay tuned for all kinds of interesting Memphis stories ...

New Pets Column Now Live

2007-05-12T15:52:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report that I am now writing a monthly column about Pets for Prevention magazine. An editor at the magazine contacted me after reading this article I wrote about my dog Bonny plus several animal-related posts on this blog -- she suggested I combine my love of animal stories with my decade of experience as a veterinary technician to write a regular series for Prevention (which I thought was a fabulous idea).

My first column just hit stands in their June issue (now available in grocery stores everywhere) -- it's called "Feeding Disorders," and it was inspired by this post about pet obesity, which I wrote when the FDA approved a crazy new diet drug for dogs (interestingly, that is one of my most widely read posts, perhaps in part because of the amazing photograph I posted with it).

Stay tuned for more columns, which I'll post here each month as they run. And feel free to email me any tips or suggestions for future columns.

Messiness Linked to Creativity

2007-04-30T22:25:00.000-04:00

Hallelujah ... that's all I can say about this. Hall-e-freakin-lujah:

From Prevention Magazine: "People who inhabit moderately messy spaces are more creative than those who work in very organized ones, says Columbia University management professor Eric Abrahamson, coauthor of A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder. Amid clutter, many famous thinkers have made serendipitous connections between seemingly unrelated documents that led to great success."

I would post a photo of the way my office looks this very second to illustrate why I find this news so exciting. But I can't find my camera.

The Dangers of Emailing, IMing, Texting, Calling ...

2007-03-25T10:36:00.000-04:00

New studies show, yet again, that technology makes us stupid. Or at least less effective. And that the best way to accomplish something successfully -- whether it's driving a car, crossing a street, standing in a train station, or writing a book -- is to turn off the tech. I've blogged about the problems that come with constant emailing several times in the past. Now, today's New York Times reports on the newest studies into how multitasking messes with your brain:

"The human brain, with its hundred billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections, is a cognitive powerhouse in many ways. “But a core limitation is an inability to concentrate on two things at once,” said René Marois, a neuroscientist and director of the Human Information Processing Laboratory at Vanderbilt University.

"Mr. Marois and three other Vanderbilt researchers reported in an article last December in the journal Neuron that they used magnetic resonance imaging to pinpoint the bottleneck in the brain and to measure how much efficiency is lost when trying to handle two tasks at once. Study participants were given two tasks and were asked to respond to sounds and images. The first was to press the correct key on a computer keyboard after hearing one of eight sounds. The other task was to speak the correct vowel after seeing one of eight images."

There was no delay when participants did the tasks one at a time, but when researchers asked them to do tasks two at a time, both tasks were completed slower. This isn't surprising. What's interesting to me is that they actually pinpointed the area in the brain where this bottleneck takes place, and showed that this delay happens regardless of what multitasking you're doing, and which senses it involves. So listening to something (say, music with lyrics, or a television) while reading something causes the same bottleneck effect in the brain as trying to read two things at once. Which is very interesting. The solution, according to the Times:

"These experts have some basic advice. Check e-mail messages once an hour, at most. Listening to soothing background music while studying may improve concentration. But other distractions — most songs with lyrics, instant messaging, television shows — hamper performance. Driving while talking on a cellphone, even with a hands-free headset, is a bad idea."

No big surprise there. But still, very interesting.

Zzzzzzzzzzz

2007-03-18T12:35:00.000-04:00

Okay, so Culture Dish has been sleeping -- sorry about that. But it will wake up soon, with plenty of news and developments (which will explain the blog silence). So stay tuned ...

Bush Pushes Genetic Privacy Legislation

2007-01-19T11:13:00.000-05:00

Here's a newsflash I never thought I'd hear: Yesterday, with Frances Collins by his side, Bush began lobbying for Congress to pass the long-stalled Genetic Privacy Bill, which could help protect patients from genetic discrimination. This bill, in one form or another, has been in the works for about a decade, but has repeatedly been pushed aside over fears that it might inhibit research and industry. I'm very interested to see the version of the bill they're working with now, how it's changed since its last incarnation, and whether/how it will protect patients against insurance and other discrimination. If it does, passing it would be a huge step forward for the world of tissue research, one patients rights advocates have been fighting for endlessly.

Tsunami Victims Selling Their Kidneys Instead of Fish

2007-01-19T10:07:00.000-05:00

Police in India have found still more evidence of a black market in human organs: kidneys being sold illegally by fishermen and their families whose villages, boats, and incomes were destroyed by the 2004 tsunami. The AP reports on what one police officer describes as "a big racket":

"Community leaders in Eranavoor village, just north of Chennai, admitted that about 100 people, mostly women, have sold their kidneys for 40,000-60,000 rupees ($900-$1,350) since the December 26, 2004, disaster." Including: "Thilakavathy Agatheesh, 30, who said she sold a kidney in May 2005 for 40,000 rupees in the hope of setting up a small restaurant -- only to see her alcoholic former fisherman husband waste the money." She told the AP, "I used to earn some money selling fish, but now the post-surgery stomach cramps prevent me from going to work." Which has to make you wonder: Who's removing those organs? Do they know what they're doing? Are they competent surgeons (doubtful)?

I recently did a lengthy Q&A with Amy Friedman (which will appear in the next issue of Proto Magazine). Not long ago, Friedman published a controversial editorial (co-written with her father; they're both kidney experts) titled, "Payment for Living Organ Donation Should be Legalized." Her argument: Living organ donations could solve the massive organ shortage. People are going to sell their organs whether we like it or not, so instead of having a growing and very dangerous black market, we should have a legal market that's closely regulated, where quality is controlled and operations are performed by quality physicians.

Friedman is certainly not alone in her efforts. Just check out Organselling.com. And Gregory Pence, bioethicist and author of "Re-Creating Medicine," which includes a chapter called "Re-Creating Organ Donation." Though plenty of people disagree with him, he's been arguing his position for a long time. He says: "The question is not whether any risk of harm exists from commercialization -- it does -- but whether such risk justifies the sacrifice of thousands of dying patients. It doesn't."

Study Shows Patients Have Issues With Tissue Research

2007-01-11T09:42:00.000-05:00

In my ongoing coverage of all things human tissue related, I came across this article about a recent study examining public attitudes toward tissue banks: "Tissue banking raises cloning fears." Interestingly, there was absolutely no coverage of this study in the U.S., where tissue research is a huge issue. The study, conducted by the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney, shows that Australians have many concerns over how their tissues are being used.

They're worried, for one, that scientists could clone them using stored tissue samples. There are many reasons people should question how their tissues are being used in research, but at this point, fear of being cloned isn't one of them (cloning humans isn't possible yet). But the study also found that people were opposed to tissues from their diagnostic samples -- like biopsies and blood tests -- being used "as a source of stem cells or by drug companies." to develop products. That is a very current and real issue worldwide: In the US, most people have their tissues in storage at this point, and the laws surrounding their use are unsettled and confused.

According to lead researcher Bronwen Morrell, this study shows exactly what I reported in my recent New York Times Magazine article: People want some level of control over how their tissues are being used in research and whether they'll be commercialized; they also want laws laying out requirements for consent, because at the very least, they want to know what's being done with their tissues.

Morrell also found that, when it came to the sticky issue of money, patients wanted to see profits funneled back into research, not into scientists' pockets (which is not standard practice now). Many said they trust the public sector more with their tissue than private companies: "As long as research was being done in a public hospital they would feel comfortable with that," she said. "But if it was a private company doing the research, especially drug companies, they wouldn't be that happy." This is interesting, in part because it indicates that the public isn't aware of how fuzzy the division between public hospitals and private companies can be these days.

A Sad Day: FDA Approves First Dog Obesity Drug

2007-01-09T19:04:00.001-05:00

The FDA just announced that they've just approved the first-ever obesity drug for dogs, which really makes me cringe. Why? Because dogs don't have eating disorders -- their owners have feeding disorders.

This summer, I adopted a new dog after she ran in front of my car on an interstate. She was starved, so I took her home and fed her. And fed her. And fed her. She weighed 20 pounds and could eat a heaping cup of food in 28 seconds (yes, I timed her). But that was fine, because she needed all the extra calories she could get. Then, about three months later, during a good wrestling match, I realized I couldn't feel her ribs anymore. Suddenly, she'd gone from being emaciated to being pudgy. So I did exactly what everyone else with a pudgy dog should do: I started feeding her less. Instead of getting a heaping cup at each meal, she got 2/3 of a cup. Three weeks later, she wasn't pudgy anymore. That's the amazing thing about dogs and weight: Humans control their calorie intake, and there's nothing dogs can do about it. If your dog needs to lose weight, you feed it less food.

It's true that there's an epidemic of canine (and feline) obesity right now, just like there's an epidemic of human obesity. Which is no coincidence: People don't exercise, which means their dogs don't exercise. When people eat, they feed their dogs scraps, so the dogs gain weight right along with their owners. And don't even get me started on the ingredients in dog food.

But there are other less obvious problems: Owners often have no idea how much they should feed their dogs, and if they follow the guidelines on most dog food bags, they're probably going to have obese dogs, because pet food companies encourage overfeeding. I had a 125 pound dog who lived to be 16 and was never an ounce over or under weight. If I'd followed the guidelines for his food, he'd have eaten 2 1/2 times what I actually fed him, and surely become obese. My very healthy 17 year old dog Bonny eats 1/4 the recommended amount, always has.

During my years as a veterinary technician, I saw many dogs die or become paralyzed from obesity. Today, when I see an obese dog on the street, I want to walk up to its owner and say, You love your dog, right? Then why are you killing it?

If it's come down to this, and people are unable to control themselves when it comes to feeding their dogs, I'd rather see dogs medicated than dead. But I hope vets who prescribe this stuff paste a sticker on every bottle that says, Dogs don't need obesity drugs. They need owners who will feed them the right amount, cut back when necessary, and make sure they get exercise. (Perhaps the FDA should consider a self-control drug for humans with dog feeding disorders.)

Cuteoverload

2007-01-07T00:21:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's true ... I, like thousands of other sensible people out there, am completely addicted to Cuteoverload. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

But it's not like I haven't gone very public with animal obsession several times already ... sometimes quite aggressively.

Why is it So Damn Hard to Change?

2007-01-04T20:24:00.000-05:00

This month's O, Oprah Magazine just hit the stands with my article, "Why is it So Damn Hard to Change," which looks at the neurology behind why it's so friggin hard to break old habits and pick up new ones (just in time for all those New Year's Resolutions). The story explores the workings of the human brain when it comes to exercising and dieting, quitting smoking, drinking, drugs, gambling ... you name it. I had a great time with it.

If you've read the story and came looking for a follow up ... well ... let's just say, it hasn't exactly been rollerblading weather in New York City lately. But I'm about to join a gym ... stay tuned for progress reports on what my dopamine system thinks of that idea.

How to Teach Kids About Puberty

2006-12-30T11:42:00.000-05:00

This is fabulous: a video from the NEMO Science Center's "Teen Facts" exhibit ... it is, as the website says, an "animated educative film showing a scientific experiment. For three minutes two kids are exposed to ten years of puberty." The narrator is a riot. The thing I find most interesting, culturally speaking, is that this video openly embraces the sexuality of teenagers. Naturally, it's from the Netherlands, not America, where many teaching teens about puberty like to pretend the sex portion of the lesson is optional. (Thanks once again, Marc)

Study Shows Female Comic Book Characters Too Skinny

2006-12-22T00:50:00.000-05:00

In a wonderful study titled, "Comparative Sex-Specific Body Mass Index in the Marvel Universe and the 'Real' World," a group of scientists has calculated the Body Mass Index (BMI) of Marvel comic strip characters and compared them to actual people, to see how comics stood up.

Their findings: 28% of Marvel women are underweight (funny, I would have guessed a higher percent from looking at their site). On average, female comic characters had BMI's on the low end of average. "This result is surprising, " the authors wrote, "considering that many of the women sampled are martial artists or extremely capable physically and should, if anything, have a BMI that indicates a higher body fat level than is actually present." Clearly, it takes a little more than a model's body mass to run at supersonic speeds or jump a 10 story building from a standstill.

The authors stress that their data is not conclusive, due to small sample size and "the physical and biological vagaries of the Marvel Universe." But, they say, "advance data indicates that Marvel women are portrayed as having a disturbingly low BMI compared to the healthy BMI range of their male counterparts ... The average Marvel female is approaching underweight despite a presumably active lifestyle. This may corroborate sociological and literary observations that in the Marvel Universe, women must fulfil criteria for being attractive by Western standards before fulfilling the criteria of biological realism." Though clearly, there is at least one exception to that rule.

Thanks for the link, Marc.

2006 Year in Ideas

2006-12-10T01:29:00.000-05:00

Today's New York Times Magazine published four stories of mine as part of their annual Year in Ideas issue -- a catalogue of interesting ideas from 2006. The stories are short, but oh so much fun:

Celebrity Narcissism: A new study, by Drew Pinsky (of LoveLine fame) and Mark Young, found that celebrities are nearly 20% more narcissistic than the general public, which probably doesn't mean what you think it means.

Tushology: A scientist named David Holmes has developed an equation to examine how perfect (or not) a person's rearend is (the story ran with the above illustration, which I think is brilliant -- in case you can't tell, each of those colored lines in the drawing is a strip of measuring tape)

The Ballot That's Also a Lottery Ticket: Mark Osterloh wants to increase voter turnout by offering a million dollar incentive to show up at the polls.

Publication Probity: Creating the Journal of Spurious Correlations, the first social science journal devoted entirely to publishing negative results.

The assignments I get for the Year in Ideas issue are always some of my favorites -- they're light, fun, and totally fascinating. In previous years, I've covered Why Yawns are Contagious, Celebrity Teeth, Why Some Popcorn Kernels Don't Pop, Creating a Singable National Anthom, and Eyeball Jewelery.

Best Science Books

2006-12-03T09:41:00.000-05:00

I posted about this earlier today on Critical Mass, but had to post it here too, because it's a subject near to my heart: Discover Magazine has just published their list of the 25 Greatest Science Books of All Time. They picked Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Origin of Species as number one. If you disagree with them, go vote on a different one ... you can choose one from their list, or add one you think they missed. (I can't believe Lewis Thomas didn't make the top 25!)

Clearly, their list is more about scientific umph than readability (with a couple exceptions, like The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). If we're talking about books that made great scientific contributions, I'd say their top 25 is right on, but if we're talking literary contributions, that's another story. Because unfortunately, so many important science books are unreadable. For their next list, I'd love to see Discover do the 25 best science reads of all time, because I think the best science writing conveys important and complicated information to the general public through storytelling. But unfortunately, those books can be hard to find.

I'd start with this Lewis Thomas book and Randy Shilts, an under-read writer responsible for one of the best and most important science books ever. Then off the top of my head, I'd turn to NBCC winner Jonathan Weiner, Oliver Sacks, Deborah Blum, Tracy Kidder, NBCC winner Anne Fadiman, Richard Rhodes, Paul Hoffman, Michael Pollan. I loved Gay and Laney Salisbury's The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race Against an Epidemic, but I'm a sucker for a dog story. Burkhard Bilger is doing some of the best new science writing at the New Yorker, while Ted Conover's eerie essay Trucking Through the AIDS Belt has stuck with me for more than a decade. I think all science writers should read John McPhee's Travels in Georgia, then spend several days thinking about its structure, and several more thinking about its character development.

I'm curious to hear what others might add ...

China to Tighten Organ Transplant Rules

2006-11-27T11:41:00.000-05:00

Here's some breaking news in the it's-about-time department: China has finally agreed to create organ transplant rules that will, as the AP says, "prevent unqualified doctors and profit-hungry hospitals from abusing patients." This comes in the wake of reports finally documenting what's been clear anecdotally for years: It's common practice in China to harvest organs from executed prisoners, often without consent.

(AP) "The draft regulation, which has been sent to the State Council for review, would require a new organization under the Ministry of Health to be in charge of registering and allocating all donated organs, the official Xinhua News Agency said. It said the regulations were expected to be passed soon, but gave no specific timetable.

Little information about China's transplant business is publicly available, and critics contend it is profit-driven with little regard for medical ethics. China has long defended the practice as legal ... Xinhua said that China's lack of clear organ transplant laws had led to transplants being carried out by "unqualified doctors with substandard medical equipment" which had caused deaths among patients. It also said there was a popular perception that Chinese hospitals were sacrificing quality care in order to perform many costly transplants." Full story here.

I just want to know, what took so long?

Unnecessary Dog and Cat Killing in S. Korea

2006-11-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is absolutely awful: South Korea has just announced that they're going to begin slaughtering about 600 dogs and "an unspecified number of cats" because of fears over bird flu. There's a big outbreak of it there in chickens, so the South Korean government has been slaughtering those the thousands to prevent the virus's spread, which is what they're supposed to do, according to the WHO. Fine. But now they're going to slaughter all the dogs and cats in the area?! This is insane. There has never been a single case of dogs or cats catching bird flu and passing it on to humans. There is, in fact, no scientific evidence that such a thing is possible. Several Asian countries have been criticized for not taking the risk of avian flu seriously, so it's good South Korea isn't doing that ... but this is ridiculous.

More Talking Dogs

2006-11-24T17:52:00.000-05:00

For those who were properly impressed by the singing basenji I posted about last week, I give you Gibson (pictured left) the world's tallest dog (honest), who happens to be able to say "I love you." Really, check out his site and click on the paw under his picture. If you're like me, you'll click it compulsively about 20 times to hear it over and over again ... (thanks for that tip, Sarah!)

The other thing you'll do if you're like me: After verifying that Gibson is indeed the world's tallest dog, you'll waste far too much time looking at lots of other amazing things ... the world's longest rabbit ears, for example, or my personal favorites: Most tennis balls held in the mouth (pictured right) and fastest car window opened by a dog. Good stuff.

Catching Up

2006-11-23T00:22:00.000-05:00

I just got back from several weeks of writing stories in hotel rooms and speaking at the 412 festival in Pittsburgh (pictured left, with Michael Rosenwald and Daniel Nester, talking about freelancing) and the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction conference in Boston, where I spoke about freelancing, writer/editor relationships, and narrative science journalism (including a panel with the wonderful Michael Pollan). The highlight of Nieman for me: hanging with Joe Sacco and Stacy Sullivan and finally getting to meet Marc Abrahams (I must hear the end of that story, Marc!)

Because of all my travels, the blog has been a bit quiet. To catch up a bit, here's a quick round-up of things I've been wanting to post about:

* A doctor in New York got the go-ahead to do the first ever womb transplant, which I find amazing: Elective organ transplantation for a non life-saving organ? No thank you.

* After a few scandals and a congressional investigation, the National Institutes of Health has finally tightened their ethics rules to restrict researchers' abilities to earn money from outside sources. As a result, a new survey says, though 73% of NIH researchers believe those new rules will increase the credibility of the organization, almost 40% say they're looking for new jobs because of the tighter restrictions.

* A group of children born as part of "Font of Life," -- the project Hitler developed to create a breed of people that fit his idea of the perfect human (blond hair, blue eyes, non-Jewish, etc) -- met for the first time as adults recently, to talk about the trauma they've experienced over their origins.

* The Chinese have admitted what experts have known for some time but haven't been able to prove: That they take organs from prisoners for transplantation, and Americans buy them on the black market.

* And a study found that elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror. How scientists figured this out is pretty fascinating, though it always frustrates me when researchers seem shocked to find that animals are just as intelligent/feeling/whatever as we are...

Michael Lemonick on Science Writing

2006-11-23T00:04:00.000-05:00

The Kenyon Review blog has an great two part interview with Michael Lemonick, a senior science writer for Time magazine and author of several science books. They talk with him about everything from his background and writing style to developing story ideas, making science sexy, and more. Check it out: Part I and Part II. Lots of good stuff there.

Patent on DNA Sequencing Technique Disputed

2006-11-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

This could get interesting: A tiny biotech company called Enzo Biochem has just stepped forward claiming that they invented the technique for sequencing DNA, though the patent on it was awarded to some scientists at Caltech nearly 25 years ago. According to today's New York Times: "the government says it will consider, nearly a quarter-century after the invention was made, whether it awarded the patent to the wrong party." It will be fascinating to see how this turns out, and what they'll do if the patent is reversed and granted to Enzo, how they'll deal with the massive amounts of money Caltech and Applied Biosystems -- the company that licenses the patent from them -- have made from it. And we're talking about a lot of money: This is the technique used to sequence the human genome.

Singing Basenjis

2006-11-15T20:39:00.000-05:00

I absolutely love this: Basenjis are always billed as barkless dogs, which most people take to mean they're quiet dogs. Not so. They, like malamutes, can't bark, but they can do all kinds of other things with their voices and often do. Much to the surprise of many new basenji and malamute owners, they're two of the most vocal breeds out there. Having had a malamute for 16 years, there's nothing I love more than the sound of a non-barking dog making noise ... it's melodic, nearly verbal, and totally hilarious. So I was very pleased to see that someone has recorded this wonderful duet for Basenji and flute. I laugh very hard and very loud every time I listen to it. Thanks to Marc over at Improbable Research for posting it.

Biojewellery: With This Bone I Thee Wed ...

2006-11-03T12:04:00.000-05:00

Given my ongoing obsession with human tissues, here's a new development I can't help posting about: Through a company in the UK, it's now possible to get "biojewellery" -- a personalized wedding band made from the cultured bone cells of your future spouse.

From their website: "The project is seeking couples who want to donate their bone cells - a couple having their wisdom teeth removed would be ideal. Their cells will be prepared and seeded onto a bioactive scaffold [which eventually] disappears and is replaced by living bone tissue." This produces a bone ring, like the one pictured above. They then take the ring to an art studio at the Royal College of Art, where they combine the bone with "traditional precious metals" and shaped into a wedding band that can be "personalized and shaped."

Donors have their wisdom teeth removed in an hour-long surgery so bone cells can be extracted from their jawbones (!). And people are lining up to do it: The company recently selected four couples out of hundreds of applicants wanting to be part of an upcoming art exhibit, which will display couples' bone rings, their stories and photos.

Best Science Book Ever

2006-10-28T10:58:00.000-04:00

The Imperial College London has taken the very bold move of naming Primo Levi's "The Periodic Table" as the best science book ever, right up there with surprising front-runners like Norman Mailer's "A Fire on the Moon," and Jonathan Lethem's "As She Climbed Across the Table." I can't imagine picking one science book as best ever -- even if it was written by Levi -- but I absolutely love these folks for branching out from the predictable by focusing on narrative and including fiction in the running. This world needs more books that combine good narrative and science. Make sure to read through the science books blog by Jon Turney -- the professor behind the project -- is a wonderful resource for finding unexpected or forgotten science books.

Seriously Creepy Research: The Neurology of the Feeling That Someone's Watching You

2006-09-22T16:35:00.000-04:00

Here's some crazy brain research for you: Most people, at some point or another, have had that creepy feeling that somebody's nearby. That they're being watched. Well, a group of scientists just figured out that they can stimulate that disturbing feeling by applying electric stimulation to a specific area in a patient's brain. But they didn't do it on purpose:

"Doctors unintentionally produced the delusion while evaluating a 22-year-old epileptic woman for possible surgery. Though the woman had no history of psychological problems, she repeatedly perceived a "shadow person" hovering behind her when doctors electrically stimulated an area of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction. "Our data most importantly show that paranoia might be related to disturbed processing of one's own body, [which] in some instances may become misrecognized as the body of somebody else," said Olaf Blanke, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. The hallucinatory condition was temporary and ended when stimulations were stopped.

"During her ordeal, the patient described sensing an unknown person standing just behind her, mimicking her body positions. "He is behind me, almost at my body, but I do not feel it," she told doctors, who report their discovery in this week's issue of the journal Nature. When asked to lean forward and grasp her knees, the patient reported that she felt as if the shadow person were embracing herÂa sensation she described as disturbing. When performing assigned activities, such as a language-testing card game, she said that the shadow tried to interfere. "He wants to take the card," she told doctors. "He doesn't want me to read."

The photo above is a computerized drawing -- she shadow behind the woman illustrates where she felt this man (and interesting that it was a man, not a woman). What's perhaps most creepy is, the patient -- who had no history of delusions -- thought this was real. She had no idea she was experiencing some kind of hallucination. The researchers think the electronic stimulation temporarily confused her brain's ability to comprehend its own body. Which could make sense, since the part of the brain they zapped is connected to self-perception, distinguishing self from non-self, and understanding where your body is in space.

Of course, this doesn't actually tell us much in the end, since it only happened to one patient, but it's totally fascinating. Perhaps someday it will lead to a larger study that looks at this phenomena ... Finding volunteers for that one might be tricky though. I sure wouldn't do it. Tooooo creepy.

Study Finds Egg In The Face Can Be Dangerous

2006-09-21T09:44:00.000-04:00

Here's some good solid (and useful) science for you: Researchers in Liverpool have just announced that "being pelted by a raw egg may result in eye injury." How they know: They examined the medical records of 18,651 patients who'd gone to one eye unit over the course of 14 months. Thirteen turned out to be egg attack victims. As the BBC reported:

"The researchers warn that egg hurling, sometimes used as a form of protest or prank, is far from harmless. They point out, in the Emergency Medical Journal, that an egg has the same dimensions as a squash ball but carries even more weight when lobbed. Jon Durnian, lead author of the paper from the Royal Liverpool University Hospital, said: "The shape and weight of an egg makes it a perfect instrument to cause quite a lot of damage it it is thrown accurately ... Mr Durnian said the public should be made aware of the damage an egg can cause and that throwing eggs should definitely not be encouraged."

Durnian has a special beef with companies who sell eggs specifically designed for lobbing, like "Mischief Eggs," which are apparently sold during Halloween. Who knew?

Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, Who throws eggs anymore? I haven't heard of anyone throwing eggs in years! Well, I must say, if I'd known about those Mischief Eggs, I may have gotten some. Because the truth is, in the last few years, I've actually thrown a few eggs:

My apartment is directly above the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan, which means the streets below my windows turn into a huge parking lot during rush hour. And several times a week, people stuck in that traffic decide to lean on their horns endlessly, as if their blaring will help move cars that are stopped from here to New Jersey. This does not bring out the best in people: Some people roll down windows and shout obscenities at the honkers, others get out of their cars and puff up their chests and actually pound on the windows of honkers. And I have -- twice in three years -- opened my window and hurled eggs at honkers. Fortunately for them, they're in cars with their eyes not pointed toward the eggs. And my aim is terrible, so I couldn't hit a person if I tried. But I can apparently hit the hood of a car.

Six Degrees of Fabricated Research Findings

2006-09-20T11:55:00.000-04:00

At this point, pretty much everyone knows the theory of Six Degrees of Separation: That everyone in the world somehow connected through a chain of six people. Well, it turns out, the results from the study that supposedly proved the theory were actually fabricated.

The phrase "Six Degrees of Separation" was coined by Stanley Milgram -- the famous and largely controversial social psychologist who conducted studies examining people's obedience to authority by testing how many would administer potentially lethal electric shocks to screaming victims. As the official Milgram website explains it, "He found, surprisingly, that 65% of his subjects, ordinary residents of New Haven, were willing to give apparently harmful electric shocks-up to 450 volts-to a pitifully protesting victim, simply because a scientific authority commanded them to, and in spite of the fact that the victim did not do anything to deserve such punishment. The victim was, in reality, a good actor who did not actually receive shocks, and this fact was revealed to the subjects at the end of the experiment. But, during the experiment itself, the experience was a powerfully real and gripping one for most participants."

For his famous Six Degrees of Separation study, Milgram asked people to give a letter to other people they knew by name, then he tracked how long it took for each letter to end up in the hands of a person the original sender didn't know in another city. He reported that the average number of people it took to get from the sender to an unknown person was six. Hence, the phrase "six degrees of separation." But apparently no one ever bothered to look into his data, until now:

Judith Kleinfeld, a professor psychology at Alaska Fairbanks University, went back to Milgram's original research notes and found something surprising. It turned out, she told us, that 95% of the letters sent out had failed to reach the target. Not only did they fail to get there in six steps, they failed to get there at all. Milgram was a giant figure in his world of research, but here was evidence that the claim he was famously associated with was not supported by his experiments.

Which means the whole Six Degrees of Separation thing is more science-fiction than actual statistics, much to the dismay of the many the films, plays and books written using Six Degrees as their driving force.

Kleinfeld wasn't exactly happy to discover this: "I was shocked. I was horrified." Apparently other studies were done after his that claimed to find similar results:

none of those matched up to the claim either. In the most recent, two years ago, only 3% of letters reached their target. "If 95 or 97 letters out of 100 never reached their target, would you say it was proof of six degrees of separation? So why do we want to believe this?" "The pleasing idea that we live in a 'small world' where people are connected by 'six degrees of separation' may be the academic equivalent of an urban myth," she says.

Speaking of Dr. Seuss ...

2006-09-18T23:05:00.000-04:00

In an earlier post, I mentioned that tomorrow is the anniversary of Dr. Seuss's death. Well ... Thanks to Boing Boing, I just came across another Dr. Seuss fact very worth mentioning: The Dr. Seuss Taxidermy Collection (!), which is an absolutely fabulous thing. From the gallery's website:

"Seuss embarked on an ingenious project in the early 1930s as he evolved from two-dimensional artworks to three-dimensional sculptures. What was most unusual for these mixed-media sculptures was the use of real animal parts including beaks, antlers and horns from deceased Forest Park Zoo animals where Seuss’s father was superintendent. Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy was born in a cramped New York apartment and included a menagerie of inventive creatures with names like the “Two Horned Drouberhannis,” “Andulovian Grackler,” and “Semi-Normal Green-Lidded Fawn.” Shortly after Seuss created this unique collection of artworks, Look Magazine dubbed Seuss “The World’s Most Eminent Authority on Unheard-Of Animals.” To this day, Seuss’s Unorthodox Collection of Taxidermy remains as some of the finest examples of his inventive and multi-dimensional creativity."

In case anyone is feeling generous, I thought I should mention: I would like any or all of the taxidermy collection for my birthday , which also happens to be tomorrow. ;-)

His secret art collection is quite wonderful too. Given my current status as a writer actively worrying about her book, my personal favorite is certainly, "Self Portrait of an Artist Worrying About His Next Book," pictured right, which really nails it. The book he was worrying about when he painted this: "Green Eggs and Ham."

International Talk Like A Pirate Day

2006-09-18T14:38:00.000-04:00

It's that time again: Tomorrow, September 19th, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, Japanese Respect for the Aged day ... and my birthday. It also happens to be the day Giles Corey was "pressed" to death by villagers who stacked increasingly large rocks on him because he'd been declared a wich in the famous Salem Witch Trials (1692). It was the day women were finally allowed to vote (1893) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid committed their first robbery (1900). It's the anniversary of the first underground nuclear bomb test and the Dodgers last game at Ebbets Field (1957), where they beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 2-0 (fortunately, my father was watching the Dodgers game that day, not the nuclear bomb test). Khruschev was banned from Disneyland on September 19 (1959), 155 people died when a Boeing 747 collided with a mountain in Turkey (1976) and 171 died when their DC-10 was decimated by a terrorist's bomb over the Tunuru Desert in Niger (1989), which probably explains my life-long fear of flying.

September 19th is the day Twiggy was born, which has always made me happy, and the day Red Fox died, which has always made me sad. This may explain why the Sanford and Son theme is one of my all time favorite songs. It's also the day Scott Fahlman posted the first recorded emoticon :-) to the internet (1982), which I like, and an earthquake in Mexico killed thousands (1985), which I don't like. Hurricaine Hugo hit South Carolina (1980), the Guelb El-Kebir massacre hit Algeria (1997), a couple of German tourists discovered Otzi the Iceman, and hours later, death took Dr. Seuss (1991), otherwise known as Theodor Seuss Geisel, who drew animated insects for a bug spray company before he became Dr. Seuss the childrens book author. He also penned many a brilliant and bizarre political cartoon. And September 19th isn't our only connection: Dr. Seuss was born in Springfield, MA; I was born in Springfield, IL. And, as many people have pointed out over the years, my last name sounds very much like the name of a Dr. Seuss character.

Organizing Bookshelves

2006-09-18T14:32:00.000-04:00

I just posted this at Critical Mass, but had to post it here too, in part to explain why this blog has been quiet lately: Jay Parini has a fun essay in the current Chronicle of Education about his obsession with other people's bookshelves, and the secrets that lurk behind them: "A personal library is an X-ray of the owner's soul. It offers keys to a particular temperament, an intellectual disposition, a way of being in the world. Even how the books are arranged on the shelves deserves notice, even reflection. There is probably no such thing as complete chaos in such arrangements."

Reading that made me laugh: Over the years, my father and I have had endless discussions about the organization of our bookshelves, which we change all the time, usually when we're supposed to be doing something else, like finishing a story for a presssing deadline. Currently, mine is organized by genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, with trinkets separating each genre -- a stone gargoyle, a picture of my nephew, a small rubber brain), then by category within genre (science, general nonfiction, memoir, etc, which gets tricky when books fall in more than one category), then alphabetical by author within each category. Those books stand one next to the other on the shelf, but I have special categories within each category for subjects I plan to write about someday -- those books lie flat, stacked one on top of the other, also alphabetized by author.

So I read Parini's essay and thought, someone looking at my bookshelves will immediately learn three things about me: I'm a science nerd, I'll someday write about Appalachia and memory and tattoos, and I probably have a borderline case of OCD, which I clearly inherited from my father, whose shelves are even more intricately organized than mine.

Parini's essay was quite timely for me, because this week I start putting all my books in boxes (alphabetically and categorized) because I'm moving and leaving my wall of built-in shelves behind (that, combined with a big story deadline, explains the quiet blog). This is exciting, because it means I have to buy new bookshelves, which means I have to re-organize my books by shelf as well as category and author ... It's all about perfectly organized chaos.

Is She Vegetative or Conscious?

2006-09-09T14:11:00.000-04:00

I've gotten several emails in response to yesterday's post about scientists finding brain activity in a vegetative patient ... everyone wants to know, What does it mean? Is this woman aware? Are people euthanizing conscious beings when they cut off life support for vegetative patients? The answer: No one knows. Over at "Brains," a blog run by my friend Gualtiero Piccinini, there's this interesting post by a philosopher named Pete Mandik who specializes in consciousness. He suggests what sounds like the next logical step toward understanding what these findings mean in terms of the consciousness of vegetative patients: See if anesthetized patients have similar responses. If the brains of anesthetized patients respond in the same way this vegetative woman's brain responded, Mandik says, that brain activity doesn't = consciousness. But if this woman responds in ways anesthetized patients don't, well ... that's a different story.

'Vegetative' Woman's Brain Not So Vegetative

2006-09-08T11:37:00.000-04:00

Wow, this is pretty stunning: Researchers have just done brain scans on a woman who's in a vegetative state and found that her brain responds to certain verbal cues like a healthy person's brain would. From the Washington Post:

"According to all the tests, the young woman was deep in a 'vegetative state' -- completely unresponsive and unaware of her surroundings. But then a team of scientists decided to do an unprecedented experiment, employing sophisticated technology to try to peer behind the veil of her brain injury for any signs of conscious awareness.

"Without any hint that she might have a sense of what was happening, the researchers put the woman in a scanner that detects brain activity and told her that in a few minutes they would say the word "tennis," signaling her to imagine she was serving, volleying and chasing down balls. When they did, the neurologists were shocked to see her brain "light up" exactly as an uninjured person's would. It happened again and again. And the doctors got the same result when they repeatedly cued her to picture herself wandering, room to room, through her own home.

'I was absolutely stunned,' said Adrian M. Owen, a British neurologist who led the team reporting the case in today's issue of the journal Science. 'We had no idea whether she would understand our instructions. But this showed that she is aware.'

This is amazing stuff -- no question this is going to take us back to Terry Schiavo (sigh) and launch the whole how-do-you-define-brain-death debate into a whole new realm.

Blackberry Addiction 'Similar to Drugs'

2006-08-23T10:05:00.000-04:00

They don't call them crackberries for nothin: A study just out from Rutgers University says those Blackberry email devices you see attached to everyone's hips (including mine) "can be so addictive that owners may need to be weaned off them with treatment similar to that given to drug users," and that Blackberries are "fuelling a rise in email and internet addiction, with sufferers able to survive only a few minutes without checking for new mail." Reports on the study call Blackberries "seriously damaging to mental health," and offer this as a diagnostic aid: "One key sign of a user being addicted is if they focus on their Blackberry ignoring those around them." Professor Gayle Porter, the scientist who lead the study, says becoming Blackberry addicted can be "devastating." And they say someday soon, we may start seeing lawsuits over this.

It's certainly true that our culture has become email-obsessed to a pathological degree. But I don't think Blackberries are the problem. I actually think they can be part of the solution. I spend far far far (far) too much time dealing with email. It's safe to say I get several hundred emails a day. For years, many of the messages I've written started with the sentence, Sorry for my slow response, but [insert excuse here, usually it's I was out of town and my inbox is now filled with hundreds of unanswered messages I'm wading through]. Because of all this, I was worried about getting my new Blackberry. I knew it might take over my life. But in fact, it's liberated me: I now don't have to wade through hundreds of unanswered emails when I come home from traveling, because I can respond to them while I'm away. Before I got a Blackberry, I spent about half of each day responding to emails, but now sometimes I go all day without even turning on my email program (because I can see if any important emails arrive with my Blackberry and ignore the rest), which allows me to focus on my writing when I'm at my computer instead of my emailing. Plus, the Blackberry forces me to keep my responses short and fast, because you can only type so much on those tiny keyboards. So honestly, I feel like the Blackberry has helped fix my email problem.

It's true, some people might find it strange that I email while dog-walking, or that I often exchange 20 or more emails a day with one particular friend -- who shall remain nameless -- and that we've been known to do this when we're both sitting in the same room. People might find it suspicious that, after this same friend convinced me to buy my Blackberry and helped me pick it out via telephone from hundreds of miles away, he started sending regular emails saying things like, "how is your berry?" and "don't you just love your blackberry," to which I always responded, "yes" within seconds. Recently, on a particularly Blackberry-heavy day, we both noted that we seemed to be developing tendonitis in our thumbs. But we've agreed: We're not addicted. Our Blackberries have helped us get our lives back (we've been emailing like this for years, now we just spend less time at our desks doing so). This morning, another good friend -- who shall also remain nameless, but who I'll call "Dinty" -- forwarded this article with a note saying he's, "consumed by guilt" over over the fact that he and our other friends have become "classic 'enablers" by not taking our blackberries and locking them away. But he has nothing to worry about: He sent that email nearly an hour ago and I have even replied yet. I'm so not Blackberry addicted! What more proof could a person possibly need?!

A Glass of Wine and a Bullet to Bite: Surgery Before Anesthesia

2006-08-22T20:45:00.000-04:00

Thomas Dormandy's just published an amazing sounding book called The Worst of Evils, about surgery before the era of modern anesthetics. I love this sort of history of medicine book. Can't wait to get my hands on it -- just reading this review of it nearly made me pass out from imagining the pain:

"The horror of surgery before anaesthetics is scarcely imaginable today. A patient who had his foot amputated without it recalled 'suffering so great that it cannot be expressed in words.' As well as the pain, he was overwhelmed by a 'sense of desertion by God and man.' Novelist Fanny Burney endured her mastectomy in 1810 with nothing more than a glass of 'wine cordial' to deaden the pain. Afterwards she described the 'terrible cutting' of the initial incision and the sickening feeling of 'the knife rackling against the breast bone, scraping it.' She remained conscious throughout. If patients didn't die of shock during the operation, many would later succumb to infection. 'In terms of survival, men were safer on the battlefield of Waterloo than on admission to a surgical ward in any of London's teaching hospitals,' writes chemical pathologist Thomas Dormandy in his remarkable cultural history of pain."

Check out the full review here.

Bogus Rabbit Flu Spreading Fast

2006-08-21T21:58:00.000-04:00

The bogusness of the deadly Rabbit Flu I reported on earlier today is getting worse as misinformation spreads to more species: Media outlets are now warning people that "Pet owners bitten by cats or dogs could be at risk of contracting a fatal animal flu strain." But it's totally bogus -- there is no new fatal animal flu. Somebody stop them before they cause mass hysteria!

Rabbit Flu and Bogus Headlines

2006-08-21T16:07:00.000-04:00

Today papers around the world reported that a young British man named John Freeman died suddenly after contracting the rare and terrifying Rabbit Flu, which he got from handling an infected rabbit. They called it the "First Case of Rabbit Flu," as if this marked the beginning of a long-feared epidemic. But, um, it wasn't Rabbit Flu: Freeman died from pasteurella, a bacterium that infects many different animals, and has been causing rarely-deadly problems in humans for centuries (think cat scratch fever). No big new epidemic, no cause for alarm, just bad headlines. I hate it when that happens.

Time to Toss the BMI

2006-08-20T15:07:00.000-04:00

One of the most widely reported science stories yesterday was about a group of scientists who've just shown that the standard measurement of obesity -- the Body Mass Index (BMI) -- is completely flawed. All the media coverage made it sound like this was a new and surprising finding, but in fact, the BMI has been known to be flawed for years.

I wrote about this last June, when a study from the CDC was widely misreported as saying that people who were slightly overweight lived longer than those who weren't overweight. People went nuts. In a column I was writing for Popular Science at the time, I explored the problems with that study, and the way it was being interpreted by the media (and therefore the public). The biggest problem, I wrote, was the BMI:

"The study’s most obvious limitation is its use of the unreliable “body mass index” (BMI)—a number determined by a person’s height and weight—to define “normal” and “overweight.” A BMI of between 18.5 and 24.9 is “normal,” between 25 and 29.9 “overweight,” and 30 or more “obese.” But BMI doesn’t take into account many important factors: physical activity, fat versus muscle, gender, diet. This means George W. Bush—a nearly-six-foot-tall 200-pound guy who eats well and works out regularly—has the same BMI as a six-foot-tall 200-pound guy who sits on the couch all day eating junk. With a BMI of 27.1, they’re both “overweight.” But President Bush has precisely the right amount of body fat for his age, and he’s in great cardiovascular health. I’d like to see the same study use some kind of body fat index. Bush’s percentage of body fat is 18.3, which is considered excellent for his age. Not the case for that out-of-shape guy on the couch."

When you scrap the BMI and determine obesity by looking at hip-to-waist ratio instead, which is what these authors did, you actually triple the number of people who qualify as being at risk for heart disease. Many will argue against this, but the way I see it, this Lancet study (free registration required), has finally proven that BMI is not the way to go. That always seemed pretty obvious via common sense. But common sense doesn't always apply when dealing with obesity, so apparently we need hard stats to back it up.

More Focusing Strategies from the Pros

2006-08-19T11:50:00.000-04:00

Last week, I posted a list of strange things writers do to get themselves writing. Well, this morning, I ran across a few more for the list (subscription required for full story, scroll down to "Why I Write"):

"Emile Zola pulled the shades and composed by artificial light. Francis Bacon, we are told, knelt each day before creating his greatest works. Martin Luther could not write unless his dog was lying at his feet, while Ben Jonson needed to hear his cat purring. Marcel Proust sealed out the world by lining the walls of his study with cork. Gertrude Stein and Raymond Carver wrote in their cars, while Edmond Rostand preferred to write in his bathtub. Emily Dickinson hardly ever left her home and garden. Wallace Stevens composed poetry while walking to and from work each day at a Hartford insurance company. Alexander Pope and Jean Racine could not write without first declaiming at the top of their voices. Jack Kerouac began each night of writing by kneeling in prayer and composing by candlelight."

The Immortal Dog?

2006-08-16T12:37:00.000-04:00

Carl Zimmer has a great post over at The Loom about an incredible phenomena going on in dogs right now: Sticker's Sarcoma -- a tumor that's actually transmissible from dog-to-dog through licking and mating.

The amazing thing is this: A group of scientists just conducted a study to figure out what's going on with this tumor, and they found that all of these tumor cells -- regardless of which dog the tumor is from -- have the same genetic markers. Which means they all came from the same dog. Scientists have now traced this cancer back to its roots and found that it's most likely the remnant of one Asian dog or wolf who died 200 years ago, or more. A dog who has achieved an immortality similar to that of Henrietta Lacks, the woman I'm writing my book about.

Carl invoked Henrietta in his post, which does a great job explaining this phenomena and the paper just published on it:

"So here's the big question which the authors [of the scientific paper] don't tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? If so, then it resembles HeLa cells, a line of cancer cells isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951. After her death, scientists have propagated her cells, and in that time they have adapted to their new ecological niche of Petri dishes, acquiring mutations that make it grow aggressively in the lab. One biologist even suggested that the cells should be consider a new species.

Scientists put Henrietta's cells into a petri dish to grow them in the 50s, and they're still alive today. The seriously freaky thing about this dog-thing is, no scientist took a sample from some dog and helped it live in culture. This whole thing happened naturally. Which is seriously freaky. Though this cancer isn't usually fatal -- it appears to vanish a few months after it appears -- this is yet another reminder that all those scientists of the 50s who were ridiculed for thinking viruses caused cancer were right. And they knew it: Decades ago, they actually injected HeLa cells into people to prove their point, and the result was similar to the dog cancer: small tumors grew, but soon vanished.

Tissue Update: Skin Art

2006-08-15T22:21:00.000-04:00

Oh boy would I love to go to the University of Tasmania to check out this woman's art ... or at least to Melbourne, to see the opening of her exhibit tomorrow. I love this stuff: The artist, Alicia King, has taken cultured skin cells -- her own, and the cells of some volunteers -- and allowed them to grow into a sheet over a glass form, which she fixes and dyes (the end result is pictured on the left). As she describes it:

"I basically drip the cells over the glass and they stick to the surface and they slowly start to grow and spread out until there is a thin membrane ... It's quite hard to see with the naked eye so I dye it with a tissue culture dye."

When my story about the afterlife of tissue samples ran in the NY Times Magazine, they gave it this tagline: "Those blood and tissue samples you routinely give - where are they? Who owns them? What are they being used for? And how come you don't know?" Well, if you live in Tasmania and you go to the Royal Hobart Hospital, this art project is one thing your tissues may be used for someday. But for now, there's a bit of a hold up: The University of Tasmania's Human Research and Ethics Board approved the artist's request to use skin cells for this project, but the hospital is refusing, saying it's "inappropriate." It took the ethics board six months to give artist permission to use her own cells for the project -- I'm guessing it'll take much longer to settle the question of using other people's cells. As the artist said in a wonderful understatement: "It's much more clear-cut with ethics if I am using my own."

Fortunately using her own skin cells is fine by King -- at least for now -- because she has some interesting personal motives:

“I'm really interested to see if it changes my relationship to my own body, my perspective on self," she says. "… When I was 17 I had an operation, I had my top jaw moved forward. I remember after I came out of the intensive care I looked in the mirror for the first time and didn’t recognise myself at all and just completely flipped out. But it changed the relationship with my body completely. So I wonder if this will be another change.”

Focusing Techniques: Learn From The Pros

2006-08-14T14:27:00.000-04:00

I just posted about this over at Critical Mass, but had to post here too, because I love this so much: In a fit of procrastination the other day, while I was supposed to be writing, I was (as usual) rearranging my bookshelves. I stumbled on Diane Ackerman's wonderful A Natural History of the Senses, and suddenly remembered that in it, Ackerman wrote about the many bizarre things writers do to get themselves writing. For those looking for focusing strategies, I thought I'd post a few highlights:

"Dame Edith Sitwell used to lie in an open coffin for a while before she began her day's writing. [When Ackerman told a poet friend this, he said: "If only someone had thought to shut it."] ...

"The poet Schiller used to keep rotten apples under the lid of his desk and inhale their pungent bouquet when he needed to find the right word ...

Amy Lowell, "enjoyed smoking cigars while writing, and in 1915 went so far as to buy 10,000 of her favorite Manila stogies to make sure she could keep her creative fires kindled ... "

George Sands shared Lowell's cigar fetish, but also had another stragegy: "she went directly from lovemaking to her writing desk ...

"Voltaire ... used his lover's naked back as a writing desk ...

"Both Dr. Samuel Johnson and the poet W.H. Auden drank colossal amounts of tea -- Johnson was reported to have frequently drunk twenty-five cups at one sitting. Johnson did die of a stroke, but it's not clear if this was related to his marathon tea drinking.

"Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin, and many others felt that they did their best work if they wrote in the nude. D.H. Lawrence once even confessed that he liked to climb naked up mulberry trees -- a fetish of long limbs and rough bark that stimulated his thoughts.

"Colette used to begin her day's writing by first picking fleas from her cat ...

"Hart Crane craved boisterous parties, in the middle of which he would disappear, rush to a typewriter, put on a record of a Cuban rumba, then Ravel's Bolero, then a torch song, after which he would return, 'his face brick-red, his eyes burning, his already iron-gray hair straight up from his skull. He would be chewing a five-cent cigar which he had forgotten to light. In his hands would be two or three sheets of typewritten manuscript ... "Read that," he would say, "isn't that the grrreatest poem ever written!"'...

"Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on The Charterhouse of Parma -- 'in order' he said, 'to acquire the correct tone.' "Willa Cather read the bible. ...

"Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and Truman Capote all used to lie down when they wrote, with Capote going so far as to declare himself 'a completely horizontal writer' ... "Thomas Wolfe, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis Carroll were all standers ... "Benjamin Franklin, Edmond Rostand, and others wrote while soaking in a bathtub ...

T.S. Eliot "preferred writing when he had a head cold. The rustling of his head, as if full of petticoats, shattered the usual logical links between things and allowed his mind to roam ...

"Mary Lee Settle tumbles out of bed and heads straight for her typewriter, before the dream state disappears ... [so does Adrian Nicole LeBlanc]

"Aldous Huxley 'often wrote with his nose.' In The Art of Seeing, Huxley says that 'a little nose writing will result in a perceptible temporary improvement of defective vision.'"

Totally Nailed: Home DNA Tests Ruled a Scam

2006-08-02T10:42:00.000-04:00

The senate hearing I posted about recently turned out to be quite interesting: The Government Accountability Office released the results of a year long investigation into at-home DNA test kits, which have minimal federal oversight or quality control, but offer actual medical advice to consumers. Their investigation showed -- beyond any doubt in my book -- that these companies are bogu s:

"GAO investigators bought tests from four genetic testing Web sites, including Market America, Genelex, Sciona and Suracell. After collecting cheek swabs from an unrelated man and woman, they used the DNA samples to create profiles of 12 fictitious consumers with different age and lifestyle descriptions.

But the Web sites found different results for each profile.

'If the recommendations were truly based on genetic analysis, then the nine fictitious consumers that GAO created for these sites using the female DNA should have received the same recommendations because their DNA came from the same source. Instead, they received a variety of different recommendations, depending on their fictitious lifestyles,' the GAO report said."

These companies sent massive packets (like, 75-pages worth) of detailed information showing extensive genetic differences between each of the 12 people they thought they tested
(though there actually only tested 2), including diseases they'd be pre-disposed to, custom vitamin regimens they should take (which the companies happen to sell). The results claimed to have found "damaged genes" that would cause heart disease, diabetes, etc. Of course, at this point, there are no such gene defects: Scientists have isolated certain genes that may be connected to these diseases, but they don't know if and how these genes actually cause these problems.

You can read all the statements and see a video of the hearing here; the committee's entire massive report is here; Kathy Hudson's testimony is here, and you can check out the Federal Trade Commission's advisory against these tests here.

Since this investigation was done by a committee with no actual enforcement power, the end result of all this is a recommendation to the federal government that they require oversight of DNA testing, and a warning to consumers saying "a healthy dose of skepticism may be the best prescription," when dealing with these test results. May be? They've essentially been caught falsifying DNA results -- I'd say that warrants more than potential skepticism. I'm thinking that's grounds for full-fledged rejection. Good to keep in mind, since the companies are still operating in full force.

At Home DNA Tests: Marketing Scam or Medical Breakthrough?

2006-07-25T20:13:00.000-04:00

For those who are into this sort of thing (like me), here's some interesting news: This Thursday, July 27th, there's going to be a Senate hearing on the lack of oversight of genetic testing. It comes at the end of a year-long investigation into the safety and reliability of genetic tests offered to consumers via the Internet. The hearing is called: “At Home DNA Tests: Marketing Scam or Medical Breakthrough?” It will be at 10 a.m., July 27, in 106 Dirksen Senate Office Building. I encourage all to go (especially you journalists out there -- this is a great story I'd be all over if I weren't on a writing retreat in the middle of nowhere).

Kathy Huson, director of The Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins, who's been a source for several of my stories, will be testifying that a lack of oversight of genetic testing has created a situation where, “there is no way for a consumer to distinguish between the dubious and the decent” when it comes to the tests, and the labs offering them. “At best," she says, "consumers may be wasting their money” At worst, “they may be foregoing medically appropriate treatment or undertaking medically dubious treatment.”

The event will also include testimony from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Food and Drug Administration. And the Government Accountability Office will be releasing the results of their year-long investigation at the hearing. Should be a good time. I'll post details when they're available.

Update on the Catalona Case

2006-07-13T21:25:00.000-04:00

A quick update on the tissue ownership case of William Catalona v. Washington University, which I wrote about in detail for the New York Times Magazine, and in several posts on my blog:

Catalona and the patients, who lost the original suit, just filed their appeal. I got the documents late last night -- the patients' brief (68 pages), makes a very strong argument for overturning the ruling. I'll be posting on that in more detail -- and on Washington University's response when it comes -- very soon.

As I said in my Times article, regardless of the first ruling, this case is far from over ... I look forward to seeing what happens next.

A Bit of Teaching News

2006-07-13T21:00:00.000-04:00

I'm very excited to report that I've just taken a position teaching in NYU's graduate Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, otherwise known as SHERP. So starting in January, I'll be teaching their Writing and Reporting Workshop, (it's one class that's offered every-other semester).

And speaking of teaching, I'll also be teaching and speaking at several conferences in the coming months: The Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference at Goucher College in August, the Penn Writers Conference and the beautiful writers' house at Washington College in October, then the Nieman Narrative Nonfiction Conference in Boston and the 412 Creative Nonfiction Festival in Pittsburgh in November. I look forward to them all.

DNA Testing and Racial Profiling

2006-07-13T19:03:00.000-04:00

A while ago, I posted about my wariness of using DNA testing for genealogy research --– specifically my frustration with the fact that these tests are over-hyped by the media and sold as being able to say things like, you are or aren't African-American, which simply isn't scientifically possible at this point. It's just not that simple.

Well, I just read an interesting article by Sheri Fink --a physician and journalist -- in the current issue of Discover: "“Reasonable Doubt: Questions about the forensic infallibility of DNA emerge even as police begin to use it to profile suspects by race."” Toward the end of the article, she mentions that police departments are now using the exact tests (and companies) I wrote about in my earlier post and my Popular Science article to predict the race of potential suspects based on DNA samples.

One company, DNAPrint, takes DNA samples from crime scenes and creates a hereditary profile: 60% sub-Saharan African, 37% European, and 3% Native American, for example, then sends photos of people with similar genetic makeups, so the police can have something to go by when it comes to, among other things, skin-color. Fink writes:

"DNAPrint's senior scientist Matthew Thomas rejects the charge that the company'’s test, known as DNAWitness, is itself a form of racial profiling. '‘DNAWitness will hold up to scientific scrutiny whereas personal feelings and biases won't,'’ he said."”

DNA stands up to scientific scrutiny when comparing a crime-scene sample to the DNA of an actual suspect, but using it to predict a suspect's skin color is a different story (the genetics of skin color, and the genetics of race, are far more complex than that). Apparently this doesn't matter:

"“The company has handled about 100 criminal and victim identification cases. '‘The technology can aid pretty much any case where you don'’t have a suspect but you have a biological sample,'’ Thomas says. DNAPrint has received a $50,000 subcontract to provide raw data to a National Institute of Justice grantee. "

Here's what I'm interested in (of course): When they send out those profiles of people with genetic makeups similar to the criminals, they'’re using information they've collected in a database from testing many people. I wonder if this includes the DNAPrint database, which houses genetic information from thousands of people who submitted their samples for genealogy testing. I'’d like to see the consent forms they're using for whatever databases are involved in DNAWitness: My bet is they don'’t say anything that resembles, "“Can we use your genetic information for racial profiling?"” Which is an important point: Many people wouldn't want their DNA contributing to this project, whether the science were questionable or not.

Imagine all the African Americans who've submitted DNA to the database: How would they feel about their samples being used to get black men into a line up?

A Blow to the Fight Against Biological Patents: Labcorp V. Metabolite Dismissed

2006-07-07T18:42:00.000-04:00

The other day, the Supreme Court dismissed a case I’ve been watching closely, which could have set some limits on how far patenting of genes and other bodily products will go in the future.

Several years ago, a company now called Metabolite patented the fact that an increased level of the amino acid homocysteine in your blood means you have a deficiency of certain B vitamins. So they own that diagnosis. Technically, if you test for, treat, research, write about or (in theory) even think about this disorder without paying a (steep) licensing fee to Metabolite, you're guilty of patent infringement (which I'm now guilty of for writing this).

Metabolite enforces their patent aggressively: A company called LabCorp developed a test for this deficiency and began offering it to doctors. So Metabolite sued them (in LabCorp v. Metabolite Laboratories) and won $7.8 million. LabCorp appealed right up to the Supreme Court, and quickly had scientists, patient advocacy groups, lawyers and ethicists fighting on their behalf with a flood of briefs. Their argument: Naturally occurring phenomena aren’t patentable; the relationship between homocysteine and B vitamins is as much a natural phenomena as gravity, therefore the patent should be invalidated. Sounds like a no-brainer. But it’s not, because there’s too much at stake.

For LabCorp, this is clearly about money – they don’t want to pay the $7.8 million, and they want to offer the test without paying future royalties. But for many others who wrote court briefs, this was their first big shot at limiting body-related patents – patents on diagnoses, proteins, even genes. Historically speaking, they had good reason to think they might win: Nearly a decade ago, patents on surgical procedures were common and strictly enforced, which meant if you went to the hospital with, say, a certain type of appendicitis and your doctor hadn't licensed the surgical procedure to fix it, he couldn't operate without risking a lawsuit. The practice of restrictive surgical patents stopped in the 90s because of a lawsuit similar to LabCorp v. Metabolite, where a court ruled that doctors weren't required to license surgical patents for treating patients.

The implications of LabCorp v. Metabolite could have been huge: If the court invalidated the patent, it would have called thousands of patents on medical tests and genes (worth potential billions) into question, because if a diagnosis gets ruled a natural phenomena, genes couldn't be far behind.

The court's only comment on dismissing the case was to say it shouldn’t have agreed to hear it in the first place. Which is odd. Three justices dissented, saying the court should decide the case because biotechnology patents (and similar patents in other businesses) are being granted too liberally and should be rolled back. They also said they would have invalidated the Metabolite patent.

Dismissing the case, the dissenting judges said, "threatens to leave the medical profession subject to the restrictions imposed by this individual patent and others of its kind," which could "raise the cost of health care while inhibiting its effective delivery."

Given my obsession with tissue research and consent issues, I can't help but point out that research participants probably had no idea this might happen: Hundreds of people donated the samples used to uncover this connection between homosysteine and B vitamins. Many gave spinal fluid samples (an invasive, painful procedure that isn't without risk), because they wanted to help people with this disorder get treatment. Their consent forms, like most, surely didn't say that Metabolite could use their samples to file for a patent that could actually restrict research and treatment for the disorder they were trying to help.

On The Road Again

2006-07-07T16:42:00.000-04:00

I’m back at my West Virginia writing retreat putting finishing touches on my book, so my blog will be a little quiet for a while: I can get email on my Blackberry, but I don’t have internet access unless I drive into the nearby town and go online at Baristas or the local library (which is the whole point of being here – distraction free writing time!). I won’t be back in New York and posting regularly again until mid-August. But I will be posting periodically until then.

Tips for Successful Book Reviewing

2006-06-29T15:59:00.000-04:00

When I launched Critical Mass, one of my fellow bloggers asked what topics or questions people wanted see us address on the site. In response to people's responses -- and the steady stream of emails the NBCC gets asking for tips on becoming a professional book critic -- Elaine Vitone and I just put together and posted a document called, "Tips for Successful Book Reviewing: Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in." It covers a range of topics: getting started as a critic, building a reviewing portfolio, going national, keeping editors happy, ethics, and more.

I posted it on Critical Mass but thought I'd post it here as well, since many readers of this blog are writers who might be interested in this sort of thing. The document is a work-in-progress: I'd love to hear thoughts, including other people's tips, and and additional questions/issues we haven't addressed but should. So please, post them here in the comments section, or on the Critical Mass post about it.

And stay tuned for more similar projects: We're now doing a series of Q&As with professional critics and review editors, where we'll tackle questions like, how does a critic pick which book to review, what's with the shrinking review sections, and more. In the meantime, check out this first installment, let us know what you think, and have a great long weekend!

##

Big News on the Tissue Research Front: A Congressional Investigation Into Researchers Profiting Off Tissues Without Consent

2006-06-14T13:31:00.000-04:00

Finally, Congress weighs in on the lax regulation of human tissue research, tissue ownership, and the practice of scientists profiting off tissues donated exclusively for research -- something I reported on at length in my recent New York Times Magazine story, Taking The Least of You (which I've been posting regular updates on here and here and here).

A Congressional report was released yesterday detailing an investigation they launched into NIH's practices after they found out that a scientist at NIH had been providing tissue samples (obtained with federal tax-dollars) to a pharmaceutical company and pocketing large profits in return:

"A senior government scientist pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars as a drug company consultant in exchange for human tissue samples that cost the federal government millions to acquire, congressional investigators said yesterday ... the National Institutes of Health's Dr. Trey Sunderland ... chief of the geriatric psychiatry branch of the National Institute for Mental Health, sent Pfizer 3,200 tubes of spinal fluid and 388 tubes of plasma collected for Alzheimer's research.

The government spent $6.4 million to obtain the 3,500 samples that showed how Alzheimer's disease progressed in 538 subjects. Pfizer paid Sunderland $285,000 in consulting fees related to the samples, investigators said. In total, Pfizer paid him more than $600,000 from 1998 to 2004 for outside consulting and speaking fees."

This is nothing new -- there's a long history of scientists doing this sort of thing. As a Pfizer representative said, ``The payments over a six-year period were reasonable and customary for an expert of Dr. Sunderland's stature, and reflect the fair-market value of his consulting services." Perhaps, but it doesn't make it right.

The problem is that common practices outpaced regulation a long long time ago. Because they were established long before tissues became the huge commodity they are today, the regulations currently governing tissue research are minimal and don't address big ethical issues. As a result, the enormous tissue repositories scientists have built up over the decades aren't set up for regulation: There's no uniformity in the way tissues are collected, stored, consented, or monitored. It's a mess that isn't going to be easy to clean up.

``NIH tells us it has no centralized inventory system that could tell the NIH director how many vials of tissues are in freezers at a particular institute," said Representative Joe Barton, Republican of Texas and House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman . ``It would really be a shame if we find out that the National Institutes of Health has more control over its paper clips and trash cans than it has over its human tissue samples."

The committee's senior Democrat, Rep. John D. Dingell, said: "NIH lacks adequate controls for human tissue samples, human subject protection and the scientific conduct of many of its senior employees. Accountability must be restored to NIH's own research programs."

This is absolutely true, but it doesn't only apply to the NIH. This is essentially universal. There is no established system for monitoring the widespread use of tissues throughout science, and there must be. It has to be set up in a way that doesn't inhibit science, but does protect the public against having their tissues and tax dollars used in ways they haven't consented to (including -- but not limited to -- personal profits for reseserchers). This is something scientists and ethicists and policy makers have been arguing about for decades.

The NIH has issued a statement saying, "We agree we need to improve the tracking of tissue samples ... We are in the process of determining the best way of doing that now." I'll be interested to see what they come up with. A while ago, their cancer institute created the Office of Biorepositories and Biospecimens to establish uniformity in the way samples are collect, consented, stored, regulated and distributed. If it's applied to the whole of NIH instead of just the cancer institute, and if it gains any enforcement power, that could help sort this problem out. But at this point, all of their guidelines are voluntary -- researchers don't have to comply with any of them -- and they're not given to all NIH investigators.

Not surprisingly, the researchers at the center of this case aren't talking, and high up officials at NIH have recommended that Sunderland (the main researcher) be fired. Clearly, what he's done is ethically wrong, and a system needs to be put in place so this common practice stops. But this isn't just about Sunderland -- this is about the overall lack of regulation and guidelines in tissues research.

In working on my article and book about this issue, I've talked to countless researchers about the ethics of tissue research. On the whole, I'm absolutely convinced that most researchers want to use tissues ethically, and that they work very hard to follow the existing guidelines. But the guidelines are incomplete, often confusing and sometimes contradictory, so researchers are left to figure this out for themselves. Hopefully this investigation will help solve this problem, though if history tells us anything, it might not.

The Bogus-ness of DNA Testing for Genealogy Research

2006-06-12T10:38:00.000-04:00

At this point, pretty much everyone knows, there are many companies out there promising to unlock the secrets of your ancestry and heredity through DNA analysis (a.k.a. genetealogy). If you send them some DNA from a simple swab of your cheek -- and a good-sized chunk of money -- they'll test your DNA and tell you, among other things, what stock you came from: European, East Asian, African, etc.

Several years ago, when these companies first started surfacing, I looked at some of their claims and thought, That sounds sketchy. From what I knew about DNA testing, it seemed like these tests were a scam. So I wrote an article for Popular Science investigating whether this technology, and therefore the companies offering it, were legit. I put together a panel of experts in genealogy and DNA testing, including one of the scientists who first discovered some of the technology many of these companies base their tests on. I had my DNA tested along with the DNA of six of my family members to see if the tests could uncover something you'd never know from looking at me: My grandfather's great great grandmother was black. The companies offering the tests assured me, if that were true, their tests would find it. So I ran the tests. I had my panel of experts investigate the results, then wrote the story, explaining the science of these tests, what they did and didn't find in my family tree, and what the experts say about the legitimacy of it all.

Their conclusion and mine: These tests can be fun, and they have some definite use in medical research, but they simply can't tell you anything definitive about your heredity unless you're testing your DNA and comparing it to someone else's to find out if you're related. These tests most certainly can't tell you what you're not -- as in, you're not African-American.

But the general public doesn't know this, and no one seems to be telling them. More and more of these companies are popping up, the popularity of these tests has soared, and every month or so, a journalist (like this guy today) writes yet another story about how people are using this technology to unlock family secrets and "debunk family tales," even though it simply doesn't work that way. The upshot of so many of these stories is that people are being confused or traumatized by results from these tests. People with dark skin who came from black families and identified themselves as African-American are suddenly being told that they aren't African-American at all. People have sought psychotherapy over these results and questioned their families. But this is all based on a science that can't actually say you're not African American, (and most certainly can't say you're not Caucasian and therefore should qualify for minority scholarships and affirmative action).

There have been a few good stories about the realities of DNA testing for genealogy research, but unfortunately, the ones people see (and hold on to) are the ones that tell them what they want to hear. It's maddening.

Don't get me wrong, I'm completely in favor of DNA tests showing that deep down, we're all the same -- that black, white or tan, we're all a mish-mash of genes and race is a "social construct," not a genetic one. What I'm not in favor of is this: Companies using that fact -- along with the public's undying curiosity about ancestry -- to make promises they can't keep (like, we'll help you find long-lost relatives), while turning a good-sized profit off delivering results that cause mass confusion. And journalists helping them do it.

Alien Found (then lost) Inside of a Duck

2006-06-04T14:35:00.000-04:00

I've always had a thing for animal x-rays. I had a huge collection from my days as a veterinary technician: An x-ray of a dog who swallowed a dozen fish hooks; another who'd swallowed pounds of stones; an entire Burmese python; a cat that swallowed a snake whole -- it curled up in the cat's stomach so it looked like the cat was actually pregnant with a snake. But like a moron, I lent my beloved x-ray collection to an artist for a project, then she ran off with them (the evil artist: Her name was Linda Sasso -- if you run into her, tell her I want my x-rays back).

All of this is to say, I was quite pleased to hear that a group in California recently x-rayed a duck and found nothing less than the head of an alien in the duck's stomach. The San Francisco Chronicle covered the finding well:

"As if crop circles weren't proof enough that extraterrestrials are among us, an alien has now been found in the stomach of a duck. That, at least, is the conclusion reached by workers at the International Bird Rescue Research Center in Cordelia (Solano County) when they viewed an X-ray image they took of a sick mallard. Right there, in the duck's ventriculus, or gizzard, is the shocking image of a grimacing, bald-headed being. How it got there, nobody knows, but when an autopsy was performed after the bird died of unrelated causes, the alien had mysteriously disappeared."

Here, in case you missed it in the big x-ray, is a close-up of said alien. Fortunately, it doen't look particularly mean. The executive director of the bird rescue center said, "We're a 35-year-old organization, and we've seen a lot of things -- bullets, fish hooks -- but this is the first time anything like this has shown up. I don't know my aliens well, but it looks like one of those with the big eyes and the long fingers."

I've seen this sort of things many times ... in my x-ray collection, I actually had several images of aliens inside of animals. Like this duck, in the end, they're not really aliens -- it's food mixed with air (artistic indigestion, that's what I always called it). But you've gotta love the images.

Cuteness, Funny Mugshots, and Print-on-Demand Marriage Proposal Books

2006-05-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

Okay, since I've been spending a lot of time sitting by the hospital bed of a good friend, I'm big on things that make me laugh right now (actually, I'm always big on things that make me laugh). And I'll tell you, goofy as it may sound, Cuteoverload gets lots of points. Just look at this picture, or this one (!!), or this one (I could go on and on, but I'll stop now).

So, in keeping with my current quest for humor, I have to post these two things: First, The Smoking Gun has this hilarious feature on people who do it up for their mugshots -- some of them are great. I mean, really, if you're busted, you're busted. May as well make the best of it, right?

Then there's this, which I posted on Critical Mass today, but wanted to include here too: A man has proposed to his girlfriend by creating and giving her a 105-page print-on-demand book called, "50 Reasons Why You Should Marry Me and 51 Reasons Why I should Marry You," by Cameron Kelly. The book is available for sale through Lulu, where you can read the entire thing as a sample PDF (thought I would think you were very strange if you did that -- skimming it for voyeurism's sake is one thing, but reading it all is completely different).

A press release announcing the sale of the book listed some of the reasons she should say yes, including: "Because I clean the bathroom every week. Because I cut my hair. Because I love the way you say 'crayons.'" And, as the book-description notes, there are "FULL COLOR photographs throughout."

At this point, the book has a 4 star customer rating (out of a possible 6 stars), but its target audience seemed pleased: She said yes. How could you not? Come on: The guy's a riot. And making that book took serious balls. (Thanks Clive!)

On A Personal Note: Why My Blog Will Be Quiet For a While

2006-05-19T11:56:00.000-04:00

In my post last week, I mentioned that my grandmother died recently (thanks to all who sent condolences). I just got back from her funeral and learned that one of my best friends has fallen into a coma-like state at the age of 41-- doctors originally thought it was from encephalitis, but now have no idea what's causing it. So I'm headed out of town again, this time to the intensive care unit to be with my friend -- a wonderful writer, teacher, and friend (that's us in the photo; she's on the left).

This is why my posts have been so brief (instead of my usual more detailed ones listed under recent favorites below and to the right). It also explains why I'll be offline for a while again. More when I return ...

Why I Don't Live Near Alligators

2006-05-19T11:38:00.000-04:00

In the past, I've mentioned that I like living in a city like NYC because it means I don't have to deal with things like quicksand and crocodile-eating pythons. Well, add this to the list of reasons I'll never live in Florida with the alligators.

Multi-Vitamin Confusion: To Use or Not To Use

2006-05-19T11:36:00.000-04:00

Scientists behind a large federal research study on multi-vitamins have concluded that they have no idea what to tell you about using multi-vitamins, because there's not enough evidence for or against using them.

Cell Phones and Cancer, and Cell Phones and Children

2006-05-19T11:35:00.000-04:00

If you've ever doubted whether you should bother using your headset when you talk on a cell phone, perhaps this news will sway you: The top two floors of a Melbourne building were closed a few days ago after seven office workers were diagnosed with brain tumors (four were diagnosed within two weeks of each other). Their offices were directly below the mobile phone transmitters on the roof. The cell phone companies say the towers are fine, but are investigating any connection.

Meanwhile, the mayor of NYC has banned cell phones in schools, and parents don't like it one bit.

Screening Embryos for Cancer Genes, Anonymous Disease Donors, and Cervical Cancer Vaccine Update

2006-05-19T11:32:00.000-04:00

Genetic testing and the controversy surrounding it got ratcheted to a new level with the news that people can now screen embryos for cancer genes. This means they can decide to abort based on the fact that their child will have an increased risk of perhaps get breast or colon or somesuch cancer someday ... Meanwhile, on the lack-of-genetic-testing front: an anonymous sperm donor passed on a rare genetic disorder to several children in Michigan

But the good news is, the cervical cancer vaccine will be approved by the FDA any minute

Ancient Tattooed Women and Humans Mating with Primates

2006-05-19T11:29:00.000-04:00

I've got a backlog of posts since I've been offline for more than a week -- I originally posted them as one long post, but realized they'd get lost in the archives quickly, so I'm re-posting them individually. They're all going to be short for reasons that will quickly become clear, but I'll come back and comment on some of these in future posts. Here's the first:

In the ancient history department: Archeologists found a 1,500-year old female mummy covered in tattoos in a Peruvian pyramid, and DNA analysis showed that humans and chimps mated at some point, and we may be their offspring.

A Personal Update and Interesting Stuff

2006-05-10T10:53:00.000-04:00

My blog has been a bit quite for the last few days because my 95 year-old grandmother died, and I've been busying myself with her funeral and lots of time with family. My grandmother (who my father has written about in several books) was theatrical, and she loved Broadway like nothing else, so we memorialized her by seeing a smashing performance of Spamalot. And now, as I head out of town for a few days with the family, I leave you with these thoughts:

It's finally legal to get a tattoo in Oklahoma (I had no idea it was illegal!)

Mixologists are throwing science at alcohol with some crazy (and surely expensive) results

Abstinence only advocates are causing problems again

A non-profit organization has launched a website that assigns grades to health stories that appear in the press -- I have to check it out more when I get back to town. I'm curious about who runs the place ...

And the New York Times ran a creepy story that introduces a new extreme strategy for protecting yourself and your family from genetic discrimination -- stealing your own medical records. It'd be much safer and more effective to enact those laws people keep talking about that would make genetic discrimination illegal.

That's all for now, our regularly scheduled blogging will return next week ...

Rinxiety: The science of hallucinated cell phone rings

2006-05-04T13:30:00.000-04:00

My friend Clive is haunted by hallucinated cell phone rings. Apparently, he isn't going mad, he's just suffering from "ringxiety," and there's actually science to explain it ... check out his fascinating post about it.

Good News for the Future of Obesity

2006-05-04T11:11:00.000-04:00

A stunning piece of news: The nation's three biggest soft-drink companies announced that they're removing Coke, Pepsi, sweet iced teas and other such drinks from school cafeterias and vending machines. Have they finally come to their senses and realized they're on one of the top causes of the current obesity epidemic among children and record rates of diabetes, heart disease and the like? Nope: They're worried about lawsuits. Which is great news. (Thanks to Ben for pointing this out!)

Worst Science Headline Ever

2006-05-03T14:40:00.000-04:00

This has to be the strangest pairing of headline and story I've ever read:

The headline: "X-Men May Be Closer Than You Think."

The story: A group of Japanese geneticists have found small damages in genetic sequences that cause evolutionary changes in our DNA. Not only is that a bit of a duh story (things change in the genome, we pass them on for generations, evolution happens), but of course, those changes (unfortunately) have nothing to do with us gaining supernatural powers (though I've longed for some since childhood).

The funniest thing is that the article itself is highly technical. An example: "8-oxoG is one of the main causes of frequent recombinations and SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) in the human genome." Maybe it was so technical that the headline writer just didn't understand it. This is one of the strange things about writing for publications -- the writers almost never chose titles. We suggest them all the time, but they never stick (in my case, I think the only title I've ever written for a feature story that wasn't changed was Fixing Nemo for my goldfish surgery article -- I was so proud of that!).

(Thanks to Carl Zimmer for pointing this out!)

Time for the VA to Slow Down on Launching Their Biobank

2006-05-02T09:42:00.000-04:00

For my ongoing follow up to my New York Times Magazine article: The Oregonian ran an editorial today saying that the Department of Veterans Affairs is about to launch a veterans' DNA bank without taking decades worth of patients rights debates into account or looking seriously at the well-known ethical issues involved in creating a bank like this (for more on these ethical issues, see my NY Times Magazine story). The VA wants to start collecting samples from veterans as early as this October -- it has an ethical advisory committee of 7 people with advanced degrees, an army dentist, and one disabled American Veteran. But it just signed them up last month. As the editorial says:

"The committee has a lot to discuss in just a few months. Little questions such as: If genetic research detects a hidden, undesirable trait, such as a predilection for alcoholism, can that information be shared with third parties? Should it be disclosed to the donor?

When future researchers study a tissue or blood sample, should they be able to trace it back to its donor?
If the agency sells a set of samples to a pharmaceutical company, which uses them to create a new drug, should donors be compensated?

Will donors really give informed consent to the use of their samples, since so much about the future research is unknown?

Can the Department of Veterans Affairs really guarantee privacy of the donors and security of the DNA specimens?
Many veterans have developed a healthy skepticism about the government that sent them to war. Those who have bumped into bureaucratic frustrations with the Department of Veterans Affairs -- and their names are legion -- are unlikely to believe that the same agency can effectively manage such a sensitive matter as DNA research ... a DNA repository of the blood and tissue of military veterans isn't something to be constructed hastily. The questions surrounding the matter are profoundly important, and the answers are by no means clear."

I'm very interested to see how this one unfolds ...

Critical Mass: My Other Blog Life

2006-04-30T12:07:00.000-04:00

About a week ago, I launched Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, where I'm on the board of directors. It's been a serious labor of love, so I'm excited to see it alive and thriving (we're already getting thousands of hits a day). I'll be posting at Critical Mass with a team of other bloggers, all fellow NBCC board members -- we're all professional writers, critics and book review editors, and judges of the yearly NBCC awards. Critical Mass will feature publishing and criticism news and commentary, noteworthy book reviews, tips, useful products, and anything else that catches our attention.

I won't be posting any less here -- I'll just be posting there too, as will several great writers. So check it out, spread the word (and look at how cute our new mascot is!) ...

Vet Clinic Faked Dog's Death

2006-04-30T09:37:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, a couple in Allentown, PA took their German shepherd Annie to the vet for euthanasia -- the dog was two years old and severely epileptic. But instead of putting Annie down, the vet faked her death, then found her a new home. Annie's owners found out and sued:

"Dana and Gary Ganyer said they cried while watching what they thought was the death of Annie ... But Annie was not euthanized ... Instead, the lawsuit says, the dog was given a sedative to make it appear she was dead. The clinic then gave Annie to a new owner, Gene Rizzo of northeast Philadelphia, who cared for the dog until he had her euthanized Nov. 2, the lawsuit says. "When I heard she was still alive I literally screamed and went into hysterics," Dana Ganyer said. The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, accuses Mill Pond Veterinary Clinic, Mill Pond Kennels and three of its employees of fraud, negligence and defamation" (AP).

I completely understand the temptation to fake a dog's death. I was a veterinary technician for more than ten years -- I worked in regular clinics, emergency rooms and animal morgues. I've euthanized many many animals. In most cases, this was actually a beautiful thing -- a peaceful end to suffering. But every once in a while, people turn to euthanasia for wrong reasons ... the dog is too much work, it sheds too much, they don't have time for it. When that happened, we'd try to convince owners not to do it. If we had kennels in the clinic, we'd take it and find it a home. If we didn't have kennels, we'd call an animal rescue group to take it. If the owner insisted on euthanasia, we simply refused to do it. No vet I worked for would ever fake a dogs death, but we talked about doing it every time.

This case doesn't actually sound like wrongful euthanasia: "On June 30, the Ganyers received a call from the former clinic employee, who told them Annie was still alive, and a few days later they drove to Rizzo's home. According to the Ganyers, Annie could barely walk and was ''bloated, her coat was grey, her eyes bulged and it appeared she had hip ataxia, all side effects of phenobarbital.'' A few days later, she lapsed into a coma after a seizure and was actually euthanized. It's hard to fathom how this vet could have thought keeping this dog alive was the right thing to do under any circumstances.

This isn't the only case of its kind: A similar lawsuit was filed in March by woman whose vet agreed to euthanize and cremate her cat, but didn't. I'm not surprised to hear that vets are doing this -- I've always assumed this happened, but few cases have actually been documented. To me, this doesn't mean it isn't happening, it just means some vets get away with it (and when it's wrongful euthanasia, it's hard not to say, more power to them).

A Sad Day for Science Writers: Laura Van Dam's Obituary

2006-04-28T12:50:00.000-04:00

Laura Van Dam was amazing; a tireless advocate of science writing and science writers, a brilliant woman -- she died this week after fighting lymphoma for years. This is a huge loss to science writing, and the many people like me who counted her as a friend. I just visited the website for the National Association of Science Writers -- which Laura was president of until her death. NASW members have posted incredible comments about Laura that really show the amazing impact she's had ... so many wonderful writers and reporters (Laurie Garrett, Joe Palca, Deborah Blum, Natalie Angier, Robin Marantz Henig, and on and on) credit Laura for encouraging -- and in some cases discovering -- them and their work. As do I. Laura and I spent many hours talking about my articles and my book over the years: She encouraged me when I hit hard spots, pushed me to write the best book I could, believed in it and me even when others didn't. The tragedy of young death robbing everyone of such a bright future applies to Laura in spades.

Her approach to the end was amazing and thoughtful. About two months ago, she called me to talk about her death. She hoped it wouldn't come for a few more years, because she desperately wanted to see her son off to college. Laura's own mother died after Laura went away to school; she knew that would probably be easier for him than the alternative. But she also knew the end might happen sooner than that. We talked for almost two hours about life and death, about living with brain damage (my father has written quite a bit about his own experience with brain damage, and Laura's illness caused extensive brain damage). All I can say is, Laura was one amazing woman many many people will miss -- those who knew her will miss her energy, her excitement and brilliance. Those who didn't know her will miss everything she did behind the scenes for the science writers of the world.

If you're an NASW member, I urge you to read the tributes to her on the NASW site. Her obituary and the many responses to it are there:

"An independent book editor, Laura spent many years as a senior editor with Houghton-Mifflin, where she specialized in books related to science, technology, medicine, and health. She worked with authors including Natalie Angier (Woman: An Intimate Geography), Daniel Schacter (The Seven Sins of Memory), J. Richard Gott (Time Travel Through Einstein's Universe), and Steve Olson (Mapping Human History, a National Book Award finalist) ... Laura served as a senior editor with the MIT publication Technology Review and as a newspaper reporter.

She is survived by her husband, Howard Saxner, and son, David Saxner. A memorial service is planned for Sunday, April 30, at 2 p.m. at the First Parish Unitarian Church, Harvard Square, Cambridge, Mass. Donations may be made in Laura's name to the Pappas Center for Neuro-Oncology c/o Massachusetts General Hospital, Development Office, 165 Cambridge St., Suite 600, Boston, MA 02114."

There's also a wonderful detailed obituary in the Boston Globe.

Happy travels, Laura ... we'll miss you.

Big News For All Women of the World: HPV Vaccine May Prevent Cervical Cancer in Already-Infected Women

2006-04-26T21:00:00.000-04:00

This is pretty stunning news ... so stunning, in fact, that I have nothing to say about it other than: Whoa! And hallelujah: For women infected with one of four cancer-causing strains of HPV, Merck's new vaccine appears to prevent 88% of all cervical cancer, 91% of all "external genital lesions" (aka: warts, cancerous and non), and 100% of all high-grade cervical pre-cancer and high-grade vulvar or vaginal pre-cancer.

This is huge news, since cervical cancer kills millions of women each year. In what may be the greatest understatement of the year, Marc Steben, a doctor involved in the study, says: "These strong results against serious illness will definitely interest sexually active women."

Moleskine Mania

2006-04-26T13:28:00.000-04:00

Oh no!! I, like many writers (including, at one point, Hemingway) am addicted to Moleskine notebooks. I carry several at all times: One for story ideas, another for my to-do lists and calendar type things. Plus I have one next to my bed for writing thoughts in the middle of the night, and another on my desk for taking notes during phone conversations (even with my family -- it's a hazard of my profession). They're slick, not-too-expensive, perfectly sized, sturdy ... they've gained nearly cult status among writers (and everyone else, apparently).

The owner of the company that makes Moleskines, who is now 69 years old, just announced that he's put Moleskine up for sale. He said: "Moleskine is growing very quickly and it is becoming too big for us. We do not have the capacity to follow it through."

At this point, the Moleskine is so successful, surely someone will snatch it up. That someone just better not change a damn thing about those notebooks! Just the thought of that makes me want to pull a Bruce Chatwin -- when the company that produced Moleskines went bankrupt in the 80s, Chatwin, a travel writer, ran out and bought 100 of them. Right about now, I'm tempted to do the same. My only question is, Why just 100?

Another Tissue Ownership Update: The Catalona Ruling Documents

2006-04-24T15:20:00.000-04:00

A few people have emailed asking where they can find the judge's ruling in the Catalona trial, so I thought I'd post links: You can find the Judge's opinion here, and the Judge's order here.

Since no one has put the patients' briefs online, I'm going to get an electronic version to post (my copy is the print version), so folks can read both sides of the case.

Gay Talese: Writing is Hard

2006-04-24T14:50:00.000-04:00

There was a great little profile of Gay Talese in the NYTimes yesterday -- it nails his personality better than any profile of him I've seen. Talese is considered one of the founders of creative nonfiction (or literary journalism or narrative nonfiction or whatever you want to call it), right up there with Joseph Mitchell, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, and others.

It's always good to be reminded that greats like Talese are just as tortured by writing as everybody else: It usually takes him 10 - 12 years to publish a book (which makes me right on track at year 9):

"Mr. Talese, who has compared writing both to passing a kidney stone and to 'driving a truck at night without headlights, losing your way along the road and spending a decade in a ditch,' is a painfully slow worker - a tinkerer and reviser, an obsessive typer and re-typer."

All I can say is: Me too. But Talese goes much further than me in that department: "He keeps track of his progress, or lack of it, with memos and exhortations to himself that he posts on white foam panels on the wall." Things like: ""GT, what other stories - and when are you going to get back into print!?????????" Or "Where am I going???" A long time ago, I blogged about his bizarre revision practices, which sometimes involve scraps of paper and binoculars.

Talese struggles with false starts, killed magazine stories, delusions about deadline ... things any writer can relate to. About writing books, the profile quotes him saying, "The funny thing is that I never think they're going to be difficult. The Times book I thought I could do in about six months and it took me years. And maybe I should have, but I never thought this one would be so hard." Amen.

[The New York Observer had an interesting profile of him too, as does the LA Times]

And Now For Something Completely Different: Man Survives 12 nails to the Head

2006-04-22T12:19:00.000-04:00

The headline really says it all: This man shot 12 nails into his head in a suicide attempt and suffered no lasting damage. The brain is such an amazing and baffling organ. If I was a religious person, I'd say God was messing with this guy. Like, Go ahead, shoot another one ...

A bit of the story, from the AP:

"The man ... went to an Oregon hospital complaining of a headache. Doctors were surprised when they took X-rays and found the nails - six clustered between his right eye and ear, two below his right ear and four on the left side of his head ... He became short-tempered and hostile when OHSU staff asked him how the injury occurred ... The man at first told doctors he had had a "nail gun accident." It wasn't until later that the patient admitted he'd used meth and the injury was a suicide attempt ... Surgeons were able to remove the nails with needle-nosed pliers and a drill because the nail heads did not penetrate the skull."

Apparently, there's a study looking at this sort of thing: This man is the first to survive "intentionally fired so many foreign objects into the head," but nail gun injuries aren't unheard of: "Nail gun injuries are often accidental. But more than 65 percent of the time, a nail gun injury to the head is associated with an intentional discharge, a psychiatric disorder or both, the study said."

Tissue Ownership Update III: AP on Catalona

2006-04-18T13:13:00.000-04:00

The AP just ran a story on the ruling. It cites the usual info, and includes a statement from William Catalona, who plans to appeal: "he regrets that Limbaugh made it 'a fairly narrow case of property law,' when a higher issue, 'patient autonomy' and the need to respect the wishes of research subjects, is at stake."

The story cites David Korn, senior vice president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, making an analogy I wanted to include in my story, but it was cut for space: He sees tissue collections as research libraries. "If, at any time, book donors or their heirs could walk into the library and take out volumes, it would be awfully hard to maintain a library of any scholarship value." Korn always does an excellent job of showing why this issue is complex from both sides.

It is possible to maintain a top-of-the-line tissue library while getting consent -- the National Cancer Institute is on their way to becoming the model for doing so.

Tissue Ownership Update, II: More on Catalona

2006-04-18T10:39:00.000-04:00

I'm getting a lot of requests for continued follow up on my NYTimes Magazine article and my last two posts (here and here), so I'll write as things happen. There will be plenty, since several news organizations are starting to cover the decision.

In a news story today Lori Andrews, director of the IIT Institute for Science, Law and Technology, raises a key point: The judge ruled that Washington University owned the samples in part because the consent forms were printed on Washington University letterhead, despite the fact that those forms said the patients were giving the tissues to Catalona [or in some cases, Catalona and his colleagues]. She calls the ruling, "a big setback for patients' rights," because it means universities can use samples for research "even over patients' objections. "

Washington University suggests that if patients control their tissues, it will have "horrible implications," because donors could refuse to donate to certain recipients. This is something the judge mentioned in his ruling. He said:

"Allowing [a research participant] to choose who can have the sample, where the sample will be storied, and/or how the sample can be used is tantamount to a blood donor being able to dictate that his/her blood can only be transfused into a person of a certain ethnic background, or a donated kidney being transplanted only into a woman or man."

I find that absurd: Giving patients the right to determine what's done with their tissues and which scientist does research on them does not equal discrimination and determining who receives the benefit of that research. Preventing patients from controling their tissues doesn't change the fact that someone decides who gets the sample, how its stored and used, and who benefits from it -- it just leaves those decisions to scientists, universities and biotech companies instead of patients. And there's no evidence that they'll make better decisions about tissues use than patients who, on the whole, want to see medicine advance (in fact, there's plenty of evidence that patient involvement can help advance science, just look at Ted Slavin, or the story of Sharon Terry -- how and why she became a co-patent holder on the gene found in her childrens' tissues, and the positive impact that had on research).

But regardless, at this point people have the right, legally and ethically, to determine who gets their tissues and organs (just read The National Organ Transplant Act). I'm extremely sensitive to the issue of race and medicine (I am writing a book that deals with it). But this feels like a case of playing the discrimination card inappropriately: By this judge's logic, if I want to give my kidney to my mother, and I sign a form saying so on Washington University letter head, then Washington University owns my kidney, doesn't have to give it to my mother, and I'm wrong for trying to give it to her? That's crazy talk.

Tissue Ownership Update: William Catalona v. Washington University, the ruling

2006-04-17T16:58:00.000-04:00

This just in: Judge Rules People Don't Own Their Tissues (again). In my last post, I described my story in this week's New York Times Magazine about tissue ownership and promised an update, so here it is: [Please note: Before reading further, you should read my article, otherwise this post won't make much sense, because it follows up on the story's final section and assumes readers of this post have read the entire story.]

In the story, among other things, I wrote about the potentially landmark court case between Washington University and Dr. William Catalona, which questioned whether patients can control the use of their tissues in research, and whether they retain any property rights in their excised body parts. (The case where Washington University claimed ownership of 6,000 tissue samples from patients who asked that their samples be removed from the university's prostate cancer bank, which is worth millions of dollars). After more than a year of deliberating, the judge finally ruled on Friday (4/14/06), which was interesting timing for me, since my article had already gone to press for publication the next day. It was too late to include his ruling in my story, where I would have covered it in detail and given experts the chance to comment on it. Since I couldn't do that, please pardon the long post while I'll give some details here as a follow-up:

Judge Stephen Limbaugh ruled in favor of Washington University on all counts saying, "Washington University owns all biological materials, including but not limited to blood, tissue, and DNA samples, in the GU Repository." (The GU Repository stands for Genito-Urinary Repository, otherwise known as the prostate collection.) "Neither Dr. William Catalona nor any research participant," he wrote, "... has any ownership or proprietary interest in the biological samples."

In the end, when it came to property rights, the judge didn't do anything new: He simply went along with the Moore and Greenberg rulings (explained in my story), which said, "the property right in blood and tissue samples ... evaporates once the sample is voluntarily given to a third party," regardless of whether you've been informed about what your tissue will be used for. So nothing changes there: You don't own or control your tissues once they're removed from your body, unless you (like Ted Slavin) negotiate terms on the front end.

At points, the Catalona ruling is a bit circular: The judge said that having possession of something can establish ownership, and since Washington University had possession of these tissues samples (though patients asked for them to be transferred elsewhere and W.U. refused), they were acting as owners, and therefore they own it. Which is what the patients were disputing in the first place. The patients argued several other points, including that they didn't want their tissues and DNA distributed to scientists for research they didn't consent to. But the judge discounted all patient testimony saying, "these gentlemen all had a deep personal connection to Dr. Catalona, and believed that they owed their lives to him. " Because of this, he called their testimony "suspect."

The judge pointed to several ambiguities in the case: The consent forms didn't say whether patients gave their tissues to Catalona exclusively. They did said patients could withdraw from the research at any time, but didn't say what that meant regarding tissues. The judge wrote, "There is nothing stated in the governing federal regulations which equates a right to discontinue participation with a right to control the disposition and use of the excised biological materials." Contract law says that in the case of ambiguities in written agreements (like consent forms), the ambiguity goes against the writer of the contract -- if you don't specify it in the form, you don't get it. But that's not how this judge ruled. Instead, he said, "The Court finds that the right to discontinue participation in a research project means nothing more than that the [research participant] has chosen not to provide any more biological materials ... Nothing more can or should be read into this right." In other words, you can't ask scientists to stop doing research on your tissue. This ruling could have a far-reaching impact, since it's the first to define the federal right to withdraw in terms of tissue research. (See story for details).

In the end, the judge surprisingly discounted all arguments regarding the consent forms, calling these tissues a "gift," and saying -- in a disturbing statement -- that "the existence of the informed consent forms is inconsequential." He didn't mention one important thing: The law says if there is consent in writing, you must honor it, which means those forms aren't "inconsequential" at all.

In a statement that parrots the Moore ruling, this judge said, "Medical research can only advance if access to these materials to the scientific community is not thwarted by private agendas. If left unregulated and to the whims of a [research participant], these highly-prized biological materials would become nothing more than chattel going to the highest bidder. It would no longer be a question of the importance of the research protocol to public health, but rather who can pay the most." This is ironic, given that many experts argue (and several studies have supported this) that access to these materials is already being "thwarted by private agendas" in an area of science where materials are no longer shared freely because of a focus on proprietary information and profits instead of public health. People have been arguing for years that profits and competition in science have created precisely the situation this judge says he hopes to prevent. The one thing he's done is cut patients off from having a say in this -- these patients weren't after profits of any kind. They wanted their tissues used for the research they intended it for -- the university was the party raising the issue of profits.

I'm very interested to see what happens from here -- many interesting debates will follow, and an appeal. This case isn't over, so the saga continues ...

I'll be live on the air discussing my story and the Catalona ruling tomorrow on NPR affiliate KPCC in Los Angeles from 11:00 to 11:40 (west coast time). So tune in.

Who owns your tissues? What are they being used for? And how come you don't know?

2006-04-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

My article about the little-known world of tissue research ("Taking the Least of You"), is on the cover of this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Be sure to pick up an actual copy so you can see Marcel Dzama's incredible artwork illustrating it (left). In the meantime, you can read it online. (After this story went to press, there was an interesting development in one of the cases I cover -- check back Sunday for a detailed post updating the story.)

The gist: Today, most Americans have their tissues on file somewhere. These tissues come from routine medical tests, operations, clincal trials and research donations -- they're often used in research without our knowledge, and can be worth vast sums of money. Some experts believe this violates people's rights, skews how tissues are used in research, and jacks up the cost of drugs and diagnostics (patients supply the tissues and tax dollars that make the research possible, they don't share in profits, then pay steep fees for the products derived from their contributions). But at this point, the law isn't clear on whether you have the right to own or control your tissues. When they're part of your body, they're clearly yours. Once they're excised, things get murky.

Scientists, ethicists and policy makers are in the midst of a heated debate over (a) whether scientists should have to ask permission to do research on your tissues or turn them into commercial products, (b) whether you should have any control over your tissues once they're removed from your body, and (c) whether you deserve a cut of the financial action in the form of payments or affordable heath care. My latest article tells the story of this debate -- of cells worth billions, of patients who've fought the system and won, others who've lost, and the important science that comes from all of it.

This story is part of a larger project: For nearly nine years, I've been working on a book about the history and ethics of cell and tissue culture research. It's called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, about the first human cell line ever grown in culture. Those cells (called HeLa) were taken from a woman named Henrietta Lacks in the 1950s without her knowledge. They became one of the most important tools in medicine, and are still used in laboratories around the world. Those cells have done wonders for science, but they've also had dramatic and troubling consequences for her family. You can read excerpts of their story on my website; the book will be published by Crown in 2007.

Pharma Funded Studies Show Funder's Drug to be Superior!

2006-04-13T13:09:00.000-04:00

The folks over at the Bioethics.net have a great post today reporting: "Stunning news to anyone without a brain: industry funding affects research." Check out their site for the full story.

The Science and Business of DNA Diagnostic Testing

2006-04-13T11:05:00.000-04:00

Andrew Pollack has an good story in today's New York Times that covers advances in DNA testing for diagnostic purposes -- it's becoming more and more widespread, and profitable (this is related to my cover story in this Sunday's NY Times Magazine). His story raises, once again, questions about patents, profits and science, and the impact this has on the cost and quality of the healthcare people get in exchange for their money and genetic samples (which this science depends on).

Pollack says the industry of genetic testing is now estimated at $5 billion and growing by 25 percent annually, and that the FDA is starting to wonder whether it should regulate these tests (took them long enough!). Pollack's piece opens with a woman who paid $3500 for a genetic test that found that "her cancer probably would not come back even if she skipped chemotherapy. "

"Traditionally regarded as a low-profit, poor cousin of prescription drugs, diagnostic tests are emerging as high-profit products in their own right ... the new tests are expensive, often patent-protected and are marketed directly to doctors or in some cases patients instead of to medical laboratories ... But the trend toward such high-priced tests, many of them not yet covered by insurance, is raising concerns in some quarters that diagnostics could become a new contributor to rising health care costs — while increasing the gap between people who can afford good health care and those who cannot ... Such tests are either now available or being developed for purposes like detecting cancer early, monitoring heart transplants and choosing which drugs might work best to treat cancer, AIDS, or heart disease."

Some makers of these tests are making the argument that regulation of their products would "make it uneconomical to develop many tests, which have smaller sales than drugs. " But when there's this kind of money involved, and people are relying on these tests to decide whether they should bypass chemotherapy, somebody better make sure those tests actually do what they claim to do.

Scientists As Entrepreneurs: Your Tax Dollars at Work

2006-04-11T14:28:00.000-04:00

As you'll see in the cover story I have coming out in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, I spend a lot of time talking to researchers about the commercialization of science. Most downplay the role of the market in science and say it's rare that researchers start companies and turn profits. So I was very interested to see the results of the first study to actually look at the role of the market in science, which found "an astonishingly high rate of entrepreneurship."

"A study of university scientists who received financing from the U.S. National Cancer Institute ... found that the scientists generated patents at a rapid pace and started companies in surprisingly high numbers. The study, the authors say, suggests that the commercial payoff for the government's support for basic research and development in the life sciences is greater than was previously thought."

I'm all for commercialization of research results, because without it, biotech and pharmaceutical companies wouldn't turn research results into the therapeutics and diagnostics we need. But the cost of those products are becoming increasingly prohibitive. Especially given the fact that tax dollars fund much of the research. Which means the public is paying twice: Once to help fund the research, then again (at riduculous rates) to reap the benefit of that research when they go to the doctor. (The public also provides everything from DNA samples to drug test subjects to help make that research possible.) There's something problematic with that picture.

I've talked to Anna Barker, the deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, about this stuff in the past. In my eyes, she couldn't be more right when says this: "At the end of the day, without commercialization, these ideas don't find their way to people ... What we have to do is intelligently balance two considerations - to smooth the path to commercialization but also guard against conflicts of interest that could undermine science." (Disputes over patents, like the recent Metabolite case now in the Supreme Court, can tie up research materials and important research for decades.)

Doctors Vindicated Over Baby Experiment?

2006-04-03T09:56:00.000-04:00

Eight years ago, two UK doctors were suspended from their posts for using an experimental treatment on babies in respiratory distress. Instead of intubating the infants (which is standard practice but can cause damage), they used something called Continuous Negative Extrathoracic Pressure (CNEP), which involved putting a box over the baby's chest to create a vacuum that helps the child expand it's lungs and draw in air. In 1998, two years after they published their research, the doctors became the focus of a governmental inquiry because parents complained that they hadn't consented to the use of experimental treatments on their children. The doctors were suspended, the investigation took years -- it uncovered problems with the trial, but the hospital challenged the parents' complaints, saying they couldn't prove they hadn't been told. Then the whole thing seemed to fade away ...

Now, according to an article in today's Independent, suddenly these doctors are "vindicated" because a study has shown that children treated with CNEP during respiratory distress do no worse -- and in some cases do better -- than children who are intubated: "Now aged 9 to 15, the children treated with CNEP had 'substantially higher' language and visual/spatial skills than those given conventional ventilation, the researchers say." The article quotes Professor Sir Alan Craft, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics, saying that this "'pioneering' research has been subjected to 'unprecedented scrutiny ... many lives have undoubtedly been saved by his research.'"

The fact that CNEP works is great news. But saying that this means the researchers are off the hook is risky logic that raises an old issue: The advance of medicine depends on doing research on humans. If you do unethical research that leads to useful results, does it excuse the research practices? Of course not. There was a huge debate about this surrounding the Tuskegee studies (pictured above) -- Tuskegee researchers uncovered a lot of potentially useful information about the clinical course of syphilis, but they did so at a terrible cost. When the trial ended and the ethical problems were uncovered, those results still existed -- some people believed the results shouldn't be cited in future syphilis research because of how the information was obtained. Others said that was silly -- we can't simply ignore the facts they uncovered. There's a huge literature on this. In the case of Tuskegee, no one talked about the researchers being vindicated because some of their results could be medically useful.

I'm not saying this CNEP study is another Tuskegee: I have no idea what really went on with this research, whether the doctors behaved ethically, or whether parent claims about lack of informed consent are accurate. I'm just sayin, it's dangerous to dismiss ethical issues because of scientific results. The only thing that settles ethical questions is further investigation into the research practices, not positive research results.

Science Meets Religion: The follow up

2006-03-30T17:24:00.000-05:00

An update: Perhaps not coincidentally, moments after I got the press release I mentioned in my previous post, I got a second press release announcing the results of a multi-institutional study (of more than 1800 heart bypass patients), which failed to prove that prayers have healing power. A group of Catholics and Protestants did the study's praying -- they received the names of patients, and specific prayers to say for them immediately before surgery and for two weeks post-op.

In contrast to Sauvage's study, this study was "never intended to address the existence of God or the presence or absence of intelligent design in the universe." They were simply looking at the healing power of prayer (though, as they pointed out, it is difficult to distinguish "study prayer" from the "background prayer" of family and friends). As reported by Reuters, the results were perplexing: "some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for -- though those who did the study said they could not explain why."

Surely Sauvage knows why ... they should text him and ask.

Science Meets The Bio-Cosmic Druid

2006-03-30T11:33:00.000-05:00

This morning, I got a press release I find disturbing. It claims that a recent research project has succeeded in, "Proving for the first time the existence of a higher power by scientific means." Here's what it says:

"Catharsis, the non-profit California corporation inspired by the work of Philip Sauvage, begins ground-breaking, scientific tests worldwide, on victims of severe fire burns from flaming cars and homes, wildfires and terrorist bombings, to prove, once and for all, the existence of a 'higher reality.'" Here's the protocol: "Sauvage requires four details of the victims within 30 minutes of them being severely burned – name, date of birth, place of birth, and a photo taken on a mobile phone – all of which must be texted to his team on (0041) 78686-1842 ... Results are immediate, clearly observable, absolutely incontrovertible, and quickly reproducible in hundreds of cases."

The man behind this, Philip Sauvage, is a palentologist with a cult-like following who claims to be able to heal people of pretty much anything -- AIDS, cancer, cystic fibrosis, Alzheimer's -- through prayer. Sauvage's titles include "criminologist, paleontologist, Father of Subliminal Influentiality [a.k.a. subliminal mind control], Chairman of Scientific Skeptics Board, Author and Bio-Cosmic Justice Enforcer." He was deported to France, where he was charged with defrauding followers whose conditions worsened after his "treatments." Sauvage is also a Druid. Here's a taste of how he explains himself in his memoir: "I grew up inside an immemorial 'super-shamanistic' tribe (the very real thing), whose 'powers' and 'wisdom' date back to the dawn of your Neolithic age. My clan has been serving the Earth, the Forests, the Animals and our ethnos without interruption or adulteration since then." You get the point.

Seeing this kind of stuff masquerading as science bothers me, and I hate to encourage them by posting this (apparently by doing so, I'm helping to advance the study: "The broader the media alert," his press release says, "the better and faster the test results come in"), but I couldn't help myself: The story of this guy Sauvage is so weirdly fascinating. Perhaps we should all test his abillities by texting our information to the cell phone number in his press release (see above) ...

Tips on Freelancing and Getting Published

2006-03-18T12:26:00.000-05:00

People often contact me asking for advice on getting published, breaking in as a freelancer, coming up with story ideas, you name it. I've often told myself I'd come up with a FAQ page, or maybe even write a short book on the topic, but I've never had time. So I'm very pleased to say that Elaine Vitone, an MFA student in the University of Pittsburgh's nonfiction writing program (where I went to grad school, and where I was a visiting teacher last semester) has taken several handouts I wrote, combined them with a lengthy phone interview she did with me, and turned them into a great sort of Conversation With Rebecca Skloot. The document will be available soon as part of a guidebook for writing students in Pitt's graduate program. I'm posting it here with hopes that it will provide useful information for those who contact me seeking tips. Many thanks to Elaine for putting it together.

More on Fake Blood and Research Ethics

2006-03-15T13:25:00.000-05:00

A few days ago, I posted about some sketchy ethical practices in a clinical trial that's been testing fake blood without people's consent in 18 states. Well, it looks like things may get more interesting with that soon: Senator Charles Grassley has called on the FDA to tell the public (a) what's happening with this study and (b) how potential benefits of this blood substitute could outweigh the risks ... He called the trial unethical and said it never should have been approved. Grassley is accusing the FDA of disregarding their responsibility to "protect the public health," and saying the burden of opting-out shouldn't be on the public. "Equally outrageous," he said, "is the FDA's apparent failure to ensure that communities are fully aware of the risks, benefits, and nature of this experiment." I'm eager to hear their response.

For more information on all of this, see two publications from the ever-impressive American Journal of Bioethics -- their recent open letter to IRBs and their piece about race and Polyheme launched the media coverage of this issue and finally brought these questions to the public's attention. Bravo to them.

On The Line - A New Play

2006-03-14T00:28:00.001-05:00

I'm very excited to say that my boyfriend David Prete and our good friends Joe Roland and John Zibell have just launched a website for their new and fabulous Off-Broadway play, On The Line, which will be at the historic Cherry Lane Theater this April. As they describe it, "The play explores what happens when three lifelong friends take on management, the union and ultimately each other when a strike wreaks havoc on their working class town. Along the way they have to negotiate mobs of angry first graders, bat wielding bartenders, no-neck coroporate shills, and the North American Free Trade Agreement."

It's being put on by Mike Nichols (academy award winning director of The Graduate, Angels in America, Closer, Spamalot) and produced by Bill Haber and Bob Boyette (producers of Spamalot and many other amazing things). So check out the website, go see the play ... it'll be amazing: www.onthelinetheplay.com

Fake Blood and Research Ethics

2006-03-12T11:35:00.000-05:00

For some time now, I've been following the debate over clinical trials of a blood substitute called Polyheme, which was designed by a company called Northfield to use in trauma cases instead of human blood. To get this product out to market, it has to be tested on humans to see if it's safe and effective. The problem is, getting informed consent for that is impossible: When a person shows up hemorrhaging in an emergency room, they're in no condition to understand and consent to the potential risks of a study like this. But since the mid-90s, the FDA has allowed clinical trials of various things (including antidotes to potential biological warfare) without informed consent, if informed consent is "unfeasable" to get.

So, for the last two years -- without consent -- patients in emergency rooms around the country (including Chicago, Denver, San Diego) have been getting this blood substitute instead of real blood to test the product's effectiveness. Technically, patients can say they don't want this research done on them, but to do so they have to get and wear an opt-out bracelet, which tells people in emergency rooms that they want real blood instead. The problem is, if you want one of these bracelets, you have to know the study is happening before you go to the emergency room. Today, a Chicago Tribune article lays out some of the ethical concerns well:

"Medical ethicists and community leaders in some areas of the country where Northfield has been testing its product for the last year have said the process does not allow for enough community input. In some cases, ethicists have complained those running the trials have placed tiny legal ads in newspapers that resulted in town meetings attended by only a few people ... some critics of Northfield's trial have gone so far as to say the research protocol is racist because the testing is done in and around inner-city hospitals, and potential test subjects would have little way of knowing they could become part of a clinical trial. The San Diego Reader, a weekly newspaper, in July reported that Polyheme was being tested only on trauma patients too ill to consent in downtown San Diego and three minority neighborhoods.

In a January letter to Illinois congressional leaders, a Chicago-area surgeon involved in clinical trials, Dr. Raymond Pollak, compared Northfield's trial to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment--a 40-year clinical study in which African-American men with syphilis went untreated by government doctors. "The Tuskegee experiment ... is a painful reminder of the potential for the harm that can come from the unethical conduct of human experimental clinical trials," said Pollak, a former University of Illinois professor and current head of clinical trials at Edward Hospital in Naperville. "I believe that similar concerns have now emerged in regard to an ongoing clinical trial being conducted by Northfield Laboratories, with the tacit approval of the FDA.

The makers of Polyheme were, not surprisingly, unhappy about the recent bad press (They make a point in their press release to say that Polyheme is a promising treatment for people with sickle cell anemia, which African Americans suffer from disproportionatly -- surely an oblique (and inadequate) response to the accusations of racism and comparisons to Tuskegee?).

This case is disturbing on many levels. Of course, it's very important for science to advance, and for new therapeutics like this to be developed -- Polyheme could solve blood shortage problems and eliminate the need for blood-type-matching -- but we have endless historical examples illustrating precisely why this should only happen with full consent and disclosure to the public. There are ways to inform the communities surrounding the hospital so they (a) know this trial is happening, and (b) can exercise their legal right to opt-out if they don't want to participate (federal law mandates that all people be given that right). At this point, this doesn't seem to be happening. [It's also not clear that it will be enough if it does happen] This is precisely how we end up with Tuskegee-like problems in the first place. Which is why the researchers involved in this trial (and the FDA) should take the issue of consent very seriously and devise ways to move forward without violating people's right to not be used as research subjects.

[A side note: I've been off line lately because every waking moment (and most sleeping moments) have been consumed by a big story I just finished for the New York Times Magazine (it will be on the cover of the magazine in a few weeks -- I'll post more about it then). In the meantime, I have a huge backlog of things to post about ...]

On Science: Million Pound Manuscript Found in Cupboard

2006-02-13T00:13:00.001-05:00

This is amazing: Some historians in the UK just found A 520-page handwritten manuscript (see photo, left) written by Robert Hooke, one of the most important scientists of the 17th century. My favorite part of the story: The manuscript was sitting (for who-knows-how-long) it in the bottom of a cupboard in a house in the countryside. The couple who lived there figured it was junk. In fact, it's worth several million dollars.

Hooke was an uber-scientist, right up there with with Newton -- his arch rival. He was a physicist, a chemist, a cosmologist, a biologist, a horologist and a mechanic. He's the Hooke in Hooke's Law, which essentially says the elasticity of anything springy is directly related to how much you strech it -- thankfully, this explains why we can snap rubber bands at people. He also invented the universal joints we use in car driveshafts and created the first artificial respirator. And my favorite, given my obsession with cells: He discovered tiny compartments inside plants and animals and named them "cells."

On top of documenting Hooke's science, this "lost volume," which is now the "found volume," lets his biographers read lots of grumblings about scientists plagerizing his work (rumor has it Hooke went mad because no one appreciated his contributions to science, maybe this will shed light on that too) . I can only imagine how insanely excited his biographers must be ... I'd drop to my knees and cry if I found even a postcard from the woman I'm writing my book about. And they just found a huge tome ... I'm outrageously jealous.

Historically speaking, the whole thing is amazing. As a man named Felix Pryor with the auction house that found the document says:

“Even a non-scientist must be moved to read in Hooke's own handwriting of how he peered at bacteria through a microscope for practically the first time in history, or how he debated with Isaac Newton about the nature of gravity and the movement of the planets. Even though Hooke and Newton were to become bitter rivals, it was to Hooke that Newton addressed the famous words, ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’ ... this manuscript encapsulates the revolution in scientific understanding that marks the beginning of the modern world. "

Secretly, my favorite part of the press release about this was the title: "Million pound manuscript charting the birth of modern science found in a cupboard" ... that must have been a really big cupboard to hold such a heavy manuscript. (I'm sorry, couldn't help it.)

On Science: The Faulty Logic of Religious Meningitis

2006-02-11T10:38:00.000-05:00

According to a new study, teenagers who French kiss multiple partners nearly quadruple their risk of getting meningitis. Fine. This makes scientific sense: You can get meningitis by kissing people, you kiss more people, you increase you risk of getting it. But they also found that attending religious ceremonies decreases the risk of getting meningitis. Come now: Religious ceremonies don't protect them. What protects them is (a) meningitis vaccines and (b) kissing fewer (or healthier) people. Saying church has anything to do with it reads like a perfectly incorrect answer on an SAT test: Bacterium is to Brain Infection as Atheism is to ... Meningitis?? I don't think so.

Of Note: Fish Tricks

2006-01-24T15:18:00.000-05:00

Today's Pittsburgh Post Gazette ran a story about a local man and his son who've trained their goldfish to do the limbo, play football and shoot a soccer ball into a net. The fish's owner, Dean Pomerleau, has written an e-book (called "Fish School Manual"), which he's selling through his website for the low price of $5.95, which means that you too can teach your fish to do tricks ("Money Back Guarantee"). His website is a must-see: It's got videos of fish playing soccer, dancing, you name it.

The website says, in big bold letters, "This is NOT a joke." That's right. Truth is, teaching fish to do tricks is nothing new. People have been training their goldfish for years: The first book on the subject was published in 1995, but people have been doing it far longer than that. When I was working on my story about fish medicine (and interviewing people who spend thousands of dollars taking their pet fish to the doctor), I met several people who'd taught their fish to dance, swim through hoops, swim little flips on command. As one of my favorite fish vets always says, "Fish are a lot smarter than we give them credit for."

Of Note: The Economics of Obesity

2006-01-23T15:03:00.000-05:00

My friend Mike Rosenwald just published a very creepy story called Why America Has to be Fat, about the economics of obesity:

"I am fat," he writes. "Sixty pounds too hefty, in my doctor's opinion. Probably 80 pounds, in my fiancee's view. Being fat makes me a lot of things -- a top contender for type II diabetes, for instance, or a heart attack, or stroke, maybe even a replacement knee or hip. My girth also puts me in familiar company, with about two-thirds of the U.S. population now considered overweight. But in many ways, my being fat also makes me pretty good for the economy."

His story makes the case that the boom in the US economy following the Depression helped cause our current obesity epidemic, and that obesity now actually helps fuel our economy:

"The obesity problem is really a side effect of things that are good for the economy," said Tomas J. Philipson, an economics professor who studies obesity at the University of Chicago, a city recently named the fattest in America. "But we would rather take improvements in technology and agriculture than go back to the way we lived in the 1950s when everyone was thin. Nobody wants to sweat at work for 10 hours a day and be poor. Yes, you're obese, but you have a life that is much more comfortable."
[To which I say, As if those are the only two options: sweat at work and be thin but poor, or have a comfortable work life and be fat?! Please!]

"For many corporations, and even for physicians, Americans' obesity has also fattened the bottom line. William L. Weis, a management professor at Seattle University, says revenue from the "obesity industries" will likely top $315 billion this year, and perhaps far more. That includes $133.7 billion for fast-food restaurants, $124.7 billion for medical treatments related to obesity, and $1.8 billion just for diet books -- all told, nearly 3 percent of the overall U.S. economy."

Never mind the gazillions of dollars obesity-related illnesses cost in health care, disability payments and diminished workforces. People are cashing in on obesity, and those people certainly aren't obese ...

On Writing: Baltimore Review Interview

2006-01-02T16:42:00.000-05:00

I often get emails from writers asking for tips on breaking into magazine writing or making the leap to becoming a full time freelancer. I keep promising myself I'm going to put together a Frequently Asked Questions page as a resource (I actually plan to write a book about this stuff at some point), but my writing schedule has been particularly hectic lately. So, for now, I thought I'd post a link to a recent Baltimore Review interview, where writer Heather Harris asks me about writing, getting published, and more. The answers are very condensed, but some of them touch on points folks may find useful.

It starts with this hilarious (and undeniably true) first line: "Talking with Rebecca Skloot is like sticking your head out the window of a car moving at 70 miles per hour." What can I say ... I've been accused of being a fast-talking whirlwind since I was three. And riding with your head out the window is fun (see above). So I thank her for that, and for making me younger in print than I am in life -- can't complain about that.

Updated NYTMagazine Stories

2005-12-12T12:40:00.000-05:00

There was a glitch on the New York Times website yesterday that cut the last paragraph off of all their stories -- including the 3 of mine I blogged about. So if you read them yesterday, you missed the ends. They've corrected it, and I've re-linked to the full stories in the post below.

On Writing: Contagious Yawning (and celebrity Teeth and Unpopped Popcorn)

2005-12-11T09:51:00.000-05:00

Today the New York Times Magazine published three short stories of mine as part of their annual Year in Ideas issue -- a catalogue of interesting ideas from 2005. This issue is always a blast to write for: Last year I got to write about Eyeball Jewelry and one man's quest to Make The National Anthem Singable. This year it's Why Certain Popcorn Kernels Won't Pop, and People Who Want celebrities' Teeth and Why Yawning is Contagious.

The yawning story, which was probably the most interesting one, had to be short for space reasons, so there was a lot I couldn't go into: The scientist I wrote about, Steve Platek, is actually interested in using contagious yawning to study the evolution of human consciousness, which is completely fascinating and at points mind-boggling abstract.

Platek, as the story explains, has found that contagious yawning has to do with empathy: The more empathetic you are, the more likely you are to relate to a yawner and experience a yawn yourself. The way this relates to consciousness is almost counter intuitive: The neural pathways involved in empathy are the same pathways involved in self-awareness, because we empathize with people by tapping into our own experiences. Self-awareness gives us a reference point for empathizing with people: You fall down on the sidewalk and get embarrassed, and I feel embarrassed for you because my brain remembers a time when I felt the same.

Yawning exists in all living creatures: Insects, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals, you name it. But contagious yawning only exists (as far as scientists know) in humans and certain "higher primates" that have been shown to have "empathetic abilities." (Don't get me started on this idea that some animals are self-aware and others aren't -- I have issues with that, but I won't go into it here.) The way Platek sees it, at some point in evolution, certain brains -- specifically those of humans and some primates -- evolved a level of consciousness that allowed them to experience empathy (and therefore contagious yawns), and other brains didn't.

"In trying to understand something like the evolution of the self, of consciousness and empathy," Platek told me, "we need specific tests for it. We can't use Petri dishes and microscopes to see these things, so we have to develop creative ways of looking for evidence that they exist." Which is precisely what contagious yawning is, Platek says. It's a cue that a brain has a level of self-consciousness that makes "empathetic mechanisms" possible.

Platek and I had a great time talking about yawning. When we got to this point in the conversation I said, Wait a minute ... You're saying you can study consciousness by looking at yawning? To which he said, Yep, that's right: "Contagious yawning is a way for science to have a window into understanding the basic neural mechanism that may have given rise to the evolution of consciousness, or what we call the human condition." Then he paused.

"Whoa," I said, "that's heavy."

"I know," he whispered, laughing. "I was just thinking the same thing: It's weird. We were talking about yawning and now I'm talking about consciousness!? But that's where it all came from, so that's what happens. You talk about yawning, you end up at consciousness. "

Who knew studying yawning could be so useful. And there's more: Certain types of brain damage can cause people to suddenly lose their empathethic abilities, so contagious yawning can serve as a test to see if your brain is functioning normally. Yawning is also a very curious (and little understood) side effect of certain drugs -- especially impotence drugs, which has led one researcher to investigate the connection between sexuality and yawning. Then there's scizophrenia (as I mentioned in my last post): Platek uses people with schizophrenicenic tendencies to study contagious yawning -- since schizophreniaenia interferes with empathetic abilities, it can make people immune to contagious yawns.

Clearly, I could go on and on about yawning. And I will with a longer story soon. But until then, I'll end with this: You want evidence that yawning is contagious? Just do a google images search for "yawn" and start looking through the pictures ...