One of the best chroniclers of last week’s hyping of the 47 million-year-old Darwinius masillae fossil has been Carl Zimmer, the talented science writer and New York Times contributor, who detailed the overheated publicity campaign here, here and here. (Our own Jerry Coyne’s blog has also been on the case.) Carl found that the scientific paper had been withheld from most science journalists until the start of the press conference unveiling the find - an awful strategy if the goal was to get informed and nuanced coverage, but not so bad as a way of generating buzz for the uncannily timed book and History Channel special. Carl concluded:

science writers who were trying to do their job well and responsibly were actively hindered. Those who declared ridiculous things, such as claiming that human origins were now solved once and for all, were not.

That astute analysis made it all the more jarring today when I checked out the print edition of the Science Times, where Carl’s fine work often appears, and found a prominent, section-front ad for the Darwinius book, titled “The Link.” The ad claims breathlessly, “The History of Evolution Has Just Been Rewritten,” calling Darwinius “our earliest ancestor,” and predicting, “she’s about to change everything we know about the origins of humanity.”

To be clear, reporters like Carl Zimmer bear no responsibility for the ads that a publication like The New York Times chooses to run. Yet the irony here is pretty thick. Carl painstakingly traces and helps debunk the overblown claims being made for this nice fossil, only to see his employer provide a prominent forum for those very claims on the front of the Science Times.

The least they could do is give Carl equal space to rebut his own paper’s ad.

The Chicago Tribune’s new medical reporter Trine Tsouderos (my successor at the paper) has a must-read article in today’s Trib about misguided efforts to use the “chemical castration” drug Lupron as a treatment for young kids with autism. It’s part one in a two-part series, with contributions from an all-star cast including veteran national reporter Tim Jones and investigative reporters Patricia Callahan and Steve Mills.

I can’t say enough good things about the piece. It draws on an impressive array of endocrinologists and pediatricians who attest that the children being treated are not suitable for the testosterone-lowering drug. Bonus: They quote the brother of the actor who plays “Borat,” noted Cambridge University autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen.

The father-and-son physician team who developed the suspect protocol claim that many experts back their approach, including Baron-Cohen - but Baron-Cohen delivers a stinging rebuke of their reliance on Lupron: “The idea of using it with vulnerable children with autism, who do not have a life-threatening disease and pose no danger to anyone, without a careful trial to determine the unwanted side effects or indeed any benefits, fills me with horror,” Baron-Cohen said. So much for that endorsement.

One of the best things about the piece that it gives both sides room to make their case without falling into a “he said/she said” routine, which would not reflect the consensus against using this therapy. Autism is a terrifying condition, but that doesn’t justify trying powerful treatments without evidence that they will work safely. These physicians claim to have seen some effect in patients, but that’s not surprising - any potent drug with psychiatric effects could influence a child’s behavior in the short term. The article indicates that the daily dose the doctors use for autism patients is 10 times the normal amount typically given for children with early puberty. With that kind of dosage I’d be surprised if there weren’t some psychiatric effect. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right effect, or that the drug is safe for children. Only a trial can determine that.

So kudos to Trine, and to the Tribune for giving these careful reporters the time and space to explain a difficult issue and a treatment that could put kids at risk. It’s a heartening sign during a gut-wrenching time for newspapers. I can’t wait for part two.

Ever since the swine flu outbreak hit, Patrick Wilson has been immersed in what he calls “emergency science.”

The emergency may have abated thanks to the low mortality rate observed from the H1N1 strain, but Wilson’s group is working with scientists at Emory University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help combat the novel flu variety.

Wilson’s skills suddenly are in high demand because of a paper he co-authored in the journal Nature last year, demonstrating a rapid method of making antibodies to specific types of flu. The technique one day could help protect against new pandemic strains for which a vaccines do not yet exist. In the short term, the method offers a new way of rapidly diagnosing cases of H1N1 flu.

“The first application the CDC wants is to make a rapid diagnostic,” said Wilson, an assistant professor in the department of medicine at the University of Chicago.

The method that Wilson’s team published last year could be a new chapter for an old way of dealing with infection through “passive immunization.” The idea of harvesting antibodies for sick patients began in 1891, when Emil von Behring and Shibasaburo Kitasato cured a patient with diptheria by injecting serum from sheep that had antibodies to the disease. Von Behring later won a Nobel Prize as “The Founder of Serum Therapy.”

Before the advent of antibiotics, such treatments with antibodies became widely used for many infections, including anthrax and Streptococcus pneumoniae.

“Doctors used to keep vials of antibody serum that they could use off the shelf for various infections,” Wilson said.

The risk of anaphylactic shock and other drawbacks of antibody serum made doctors turn to antibiotics and vaccines once they became widely available. But even today, the idea of using antibodies has appeal for emerging viral infections, for which scientists have not yet developed a vaccine.

Flu vaccines typically take months to make, but the technique that Wilson devised with colleagues from Emory and the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center can produce monoclonal antibodies to a specific strain of flu in just a few weeks.

No one knows yet if the flu antibodies would offer meaningful protection in the case of an emerging pandemic. Wilson said it’s possible that the technique would prevent infection in people at high risk of exposure during the period when scientists are still working on a vaccine.

“It’s controversial how useful antibodies would be in treating this kind of infectious disease,” Wilson said.

But using the antibodies to develop a rapid diagnostic tool could be almost as valuable. Currently, most hospitals use an antibody-based test to see if a patient has influenza, then they ship samples to state labs or the CDC for further testing, which usually takes several days. The new method of producing monoclonal antibodies would allow for faster and more widespread testing of new flu viruses as they emerge.

This may be the best expression I’ve seen yet of why swine flu still is a source of concern, even though it’s looking about as severe as normal influenza. From the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of a press conference today with Keiji Fukuda of the World Health Organization:

The reason why we’re paying so much attention to this virus is that the seasonal flu viruses have been around and circulating for many years. We understand their behavior and know most people have had previous infections and some immunity to them. When a new virus enters the human population and people do not have immunity to this virus, then the levels of serious illness and the levels of death can be higher than what we see with regular seasonal influenza.

…In the past, we’ve seen pandemics cause relatively fewer deaths, and some cause relatively huge amounts of death. One of them started out mild in the spring and over the course of several months became a severe illness. This is a situation in which things can evolve, and can do so quite differently. That’s why so much attention is being paid to what’s going on and why we’re jumping so hard on it. If it stays mild and people stay healthy, then that is great. But if it turns severe, then it’s something we have to know about, be prepared for and jump on.