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Tag: Derek Lowe

Chinese Research: Not Quite the Juggernaut?

A perennial topic around here has been the state of scientific research in China (and other up-and-coming nations). There’s no doubt that the number of scientific publications from China has been increasing (be sure to read the comments to that post; there’s more to it than I made of it). But many of these papers, on closer inspection, are junk, and are published in junk journals of no impact whatsoever. Mind you, that’s not an exclusively Chinese problem – Sturgeon’s Law is hard to get away from, and there’s a lot of mediocre (and worse than mediocre) stuff coming out of every country’s scientific enterprise.

But what about patents? The last couple of years have seen many people predicting that China would soon be leading the world in patent applications as well, which can be the occasion for pride or hand-wringing, depending on your own orientation. But there’s a third response: derision. And that’s what Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang provide in the Wall Street Journal. They think that most of these filings are junk:

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Translation Needed

The “Opinionator” blog at the New York Times is trying here, but there’s something not quite right. David Bornstein, in fact, gets off on the wrong foot entirely with this opening:

Consider two numbers: 800,000 and 21. The first is the number of medical research papers that were published in 2008. The second is the number of new drugs that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year.

That’s an ocean of research producing treatments by the drop. Indeed, in recent decades, one of the most sobering realities in the field of biomedical research has been the fact that, despite significant increases in funding — as well as extraordinary advances in things like genomics, computerized molecular modeling, and drug screening and synthesization — the number of new treatments for illnesses that make it to market each year has flatlined at historically low levels.

Now, “synthesization” appears to be a new word, and it’s not one that we’ve been waiting for, either. “Synthesis” is what we call it in the labs; I’ve never heard of synthesization in my life, and hope never to again. That’s a minor point, perhaps, but it’s an immediate giveaway that this piece is being written by someone who knows nothing about their chosen topic. How far would you keep reading an article that talked about mental health and psychosization? A sermon on the Book of Genesization? Right.Continue reading…

Potassium Iodide Pills

Well, the nuclear crisis in Japan seems to be causing a run on potassium iodide (KI), and not just in Japan. If news reports are to be believed, people in many other regions (such as the west coast of the US and Canada) are stocking up, and some of these people may have already started dosing themselves.

Don’t do that. Don’t do it, for several reasons. First, as the chemists and biologists in this site’s readership can tell you, it’s not like KI is some sort of broad-spectrum anti-radiation pill. It can protect people against the effects of radioactive iodine-131, which is a major fission product from uranium. It does that by basically swamping out the radioactive iodine a person might have been exposed to, keeping it from being taken up into the body. Iodine tends to localize in the thyroid gland, and that uptake and local concentration is the real problem. An unfolded newspaper will shield you just fine from the alpha particles that I-131 gives off, but not if it’s giving them off from inside your thyroid. Correction: I-131 is a beta/gamma emitter – my apologies! The point about not wanting it in your thyroid, of course, stands. . .

And this is why potassium iodide won’t do a thing to help with the other radioactive isotopes found in nuclear reactors. That includes both the uranium and/or plutonium fuel, as well as the fission products like strontium-90 and radioactive cesium. Strontium-90 is a real problem, since it tends to concentrate in the bones (and teeth), and it has a much longer half-life than I-131. Unfortunately, calcium is so ubiquitous in the body that it’s not feasible to do that uptake-blocking trick the way you can with iodide. The only effective way to deal with strontium-90 is to not get exposed to it.Continue reading…

New Cures! Faster! Faster!

I wrote here the other day about the NIH’s new translational medicine plans. The New York Times article that brought this to wide attention didn’t go over well with director Francis Collins, who ended up trying to disabuse people of the idea that the NIH was going to set up its own drug company.

But there’s been an overwhelming negative response from the academic research community, largely driven (it seems) by worries about funding. Given the state of the budget, flat funding would be seen as a victory by NIH, so this isn’t the best environment to be talking about putting together a great new institute. The money for it will, after all, have to come out of someone else’s pile. Collins spends most of that statement linked above denying this, but it’s hard to see how there won’t be problems.

I think, though, that there’s an even more fundamental problem here. In the latest BioCentury, there’s an interesting sidelight on all this:

In comments submitted to NIH, Joseph Zaia, associate director of the Center for Biomedical Mass Spectrometry at the Boston University School of Medicine, argued against setting timetables for research results. “I do not believe that running medical science on a short sighted business time schedule will produce more cures faster. It will, however, deplete NIH resources very rapidly and possibly tear down an infrastructure of knowledge that took decades to create.” Zaia complained that the NCATS “process seems to be driven by the FasterCures movement sponsored by Michael Milken,” which he said has “been masterful in manipulating the political system for their purposes, and forcing NIH into this reorganization.”

FasterCures’ Margaret Anderson, executive director of the non-profit group that advocates for accelerating medical innovation, submitted a letter strongly endorsing NCATS, which she said “will provide a significant stimulus to moving ideas out of the lab and into the clinic.” Continue reading…