Teaching with Treadmills

Inside the Biological Sciences Learning Center on the Medical Center campus is a laboratory that looks more like a gymnasium. Six state-of-the-art treadmills and six futuristic exercise bikes sit around the room, each connected to a computer alongside modified oxygen masks and suction cup sensors. Instead of dissecting frogs or mixing chemicals, students show up to lab sections in shorts and running shoes, prepared to sweat for science. In Mark Osadjan’s “Metabolism and Exercise” course, part of a two-quarter Exercise and Nutrition sequence, there’s no sitting on the sidelines.

Since joining the University of Chicago as a senior lecturer in 2003, Osadjan has designed courses that teach undergraduates about biology by connecting with what most college students care about: keeping fit, and sex. As part of the UChicago core curriculum, every undergraduate must fulfill a biology requirement, even if their interests lie in political science, music theory, or philosophy. With his “Metabolism and Exercise” and “The Biology of Gender” courses, Osadjan has met these science-shy students halfway, filtering instruction on evolution, physiology, and genetics through their own personal hobbies and interests. The efforts have been such a success that Osadjan’s courses fill up soon after registration is opened.

Today, Osadjan was announced as one of this year’s recipients of the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an esteemed UChicago honor that goes back to 1938. Last week I met with Mark to talk about his award and his career path, from a graduate student studying Antarctic fish to an instructor of graduate-level science to his current position, teaching predominantly undergraduate non-biology majors.

“It’s always a trick to figure out how to teach with enough enthusiasm, such that it spills over to the students,” Osadjan said. “It’s our challenge not only to teach these students a certain number of facts, but to show them why those facts are important, relevant, and worth thinking about throughout life.”

You can read more about Osadjan and the other Quantrell winners in the award package at The University of Chicago news site.

Elsewhere…

Most college students spend their summers traveling the country or working an internship, but 20-year-old Rachel Garneau had other plans: donating a kidney. On Tuesday morning, Garneau came to the Medical Center and made the rare gift of an altruistic kidney donation, triggering a kidney swap chain that helped patients in need of the organ in New York and Madison. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times followed the story before and during the surgery, and got some great play-by-play commentary from Yolanda Becker, professor of surgery and director of the kidney and pancreas program.  For instance: “‘The pancreas is the bitch of the abdomen,” she confided.’”

Are clinical trials handicapped by their own success? A new analysis from Anup Malani and Tomas Philipson of the University of Chicago Law School finds that trial enrollment for a given disease plummets when a treatment is found to be effective, using AIDS clinical trials after the approval of anti-retroviral therapy to illustrate the point. Richard Schilsky, professor and section chief of hematology/oncology at the Medical Center, agreed with the findings at Nature News: “There are so many options that patients are not flocking to get into clinical trials like they used to.”

Read how turtles move to warm areas to bask - even in their own eggs as embryos. Adorable photos and interesting commentary (are they determining their own sex?) at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

That news about the World Health Organization adding cell phones to their list of possible carcinogens? Here’s an article from Cancer Research UK to reassure your fears. Another reassuring fact: it was placed by the WHO into the same risk category [pdf] as coffee, dry cleaning, and pickled vegetables.

Can jazz musicians tell the difference between another musician improvising or following composed music? A new study finds the answer, and a ScienceNOW article gives you the chance to test yourself.

Did you know UChicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin does a regular science news roundup on local newsmagazine show Chicago Tonight called Scientific Chicago? Well he does, and the latest edition discussed a story familiar to readers of the blog: the mass extinction 360 million years ago that ended “The Age of Fishes.” Watch the video here.

A Magic 8-Ball for Cardiac Arrest

Cardiac arrest is one of the most common ways that people die, and hospitals need to be constantly vigilant about the threat of heart stoppage in their patients. So physicians have long sought to develop a way of predicting who is most at risk for cardiac arrest when checked into the hospital, such that extra care and surveillance can be taken. At the 2011 international meeting of the American Thoracic Society, held this past week in Denver, two Medical Center fellows presented research refining these early warning systems to make them a more effective hospital tool.

In the first study, pulmonary and critical care fellow Gordon E. Carr connected cardiac arrest with another frequent sight on the hospital ward: pneumonia. Carr’s study found that patients admitted with pneumonia are at elevated risk of cardiac arrest over the next three days after admission, and that almost 40 percent of these cardiac arrests occurred while the patient was outside of the intensive care unit. “We found a compelling signal that some patients with pneumonia may develop cardiac arrest outside of the ICU, without apparent shock or respiratory failure,” Carr said in a press release. “If this is true, then we need to improve how we assess risk in pneumonia.”

Adding extra caution about cardiac arrest to the care of patients with pneumonia is a specific way to improve surveillance. But to apply to more patients, a broader scale is needed, one that can be easily assembled from the vital signs that are already routinely measured in the wards. One such scale, called the Modified Early Warning Score or MEWS was tested by pulmonary and critical care fellow Matthew Churpek as a predictor of cardiac arrest, who found it to be better at predicting a cardiac arrest in the next 48 hours than any individual vital sign. But MEWS was designed for general risk of death, not specifically for cardiac arrest, and Churpek suggested a more specialized risk score could be calculated for use by hospitals. The benefits of such a measure, he said in a press release, would be immense.

“Rapid response teams are a complex and resource-intensive intervention, so providing evidence-based criteria for their activation is crucial,” Churpek said. “Our patients will do better if we can detect who is at high risk early enough to intervene and prevent a cardiac arrest.”

Doctors Against Ronald McDonald

Childhood obesity is a growing problem in the United States, and doctors point the finger of blame directly at increased consumption of junk food and fast food. Chains such as McDonalds have made noise about making their food healthier, especially for children, by posting calorie counts on menus and offering snacks such as apples and carrots instead of fries. But according to an open letter signed by over 500 health care professionals and placed in newspapers around the country this week, they have not done enough.

read more

More Honors for Shubin

In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed an order creating the National Academy of Sciences, an organization bringing together the country’s most esteemed scientists to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” From the original 50 members, the group has blossomed to 2,100 today, with roughly 200 of those Nobel Laureates. Any club with a 10 percent Nobel ratio is pretty exclusive, so being elected to the Academy’s lifetime membership is a thrilling honor for a scientist.

This week, evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin was the latest UChicago scientist given the honor of NAS membership, part of this year’s class of 72 new members and 18 “foreign associates.” Shubin becomes the 40th current member of the NAS located at the University of Chicago, and joins Medical Center faculty such as Janet Rowley, Martin Weigert, Donald Steiner, Bernard Roizman, Robert Haselkorn, and David Jablonski, who was elected last year (Fermilab director and professor of physics Pier Oddone was also elected in this year’s class). Election is no simple matter - each new member must pass a 10-step process [pdf] and be voted in to the academy by their potential peers.

Shubin is most famous for the discovery of the pivotal fossil named Tiktaalik roseae, a transitional species between ancient fish and the first limbed creatures to walk the land. But Shubin’s research is more than just fossil-hunting, as he studies the genetic programs that control development of limbs in the embryos of species such as sharks and salamanders. On the blog, we recently featured a paper by Shubin and former graduate student Andrew Gillis, where the embryos of strange creatures called holocephalons revealed some of the earliest steps in limb evolution.

In all likelihood, Shubin’s election was helped by his scientific communication skills as well. From his book about the discovery of Tiktaalik and the story of human evolution, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body, to his appearances as a correspondent on WTTW, to his anatomy teaching duties at Pritzker Medical School, Shubin has proven himself eager to educate the public at large about science. Appropriately enough, a second honor announced for Shubin this week was the Distinguished Service Award for Enhancing Education through Biological Research from the National Association of Biology Teachers. Once again, he finds himself in good company, as previous recipients include James Watson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins.

“I am deeply honored to receive the NABT Distinguished Service Award. In an age where the ideas and tools of biology are increasingly playing a role in our lives, it is a deep honor to be recognized by those who are at the front lines of educating the next generation,” Shubin said.

The Science of Killing Bin Laden

A news story as big as the killing of Osama Bin Laden spares no beats, and there were plenty of science stories written this week in the aftermath of Sunday night’s surprise news. The most direct scientific angle was in the identification of the terrorist leader’s body, a step U.S. officials wanted to prove beyond a doubt before going public with the news. Like many of the events surrounding the raid, many of the details remain classified. But that hasn’t stopped science writers from writing explainers on how biometrics and DNA matching likely would have been used to make sure the Navy SEALS really had killed Bin Laden. President Obama himself confirmed that DNA testing was used to confirm they had the right body, but one fascinating mystery is where the DNA used to make the comparison was gathered. Nature blog The Great Beyond describes the candidates - from Bin Laden’s half-brothers and half-sister to one of his purported 26 children - and talks a bit about the recent history of using DNA identification techniques in criminal matters, including one crook busted by DNA he left on a slice of pizza.

Elsewhere…

The creation of new drugs, and the death of old drugs - Medical Center researchers commented on both sides of the pharmaceutical life cycle in newspaper stories this week. In the New York Times blog Fixes, reporter David Bornstein looks at the “valley of death” in developing new drugs for less-than-common diseases, and focused on the Myelin Repair Foundation and researchers such as Brian Popko (who we have featured twice). Then yesterday, the Chicago Tribune’s Bruce Japsen wrote about the upcoming patent expirations on the popular drugs Plavix, Lipitor, and Actos, and talks to our Caleb Alexander about the implications for health care.

How do you make a new species in the lab? It’s easier if you find a lizard species that is entirely female and can reproduce by cloning. Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science describes genome mash-ups, asexual reproduction, and the trickiness of species-naming in this great post.

A retired nurse and research coordinator at the Medical Center talks with Dawn Turner Trice about her experiences working with a small rural clinic in Ghana.

The University of Chicago is the birthplace of nuclear energy. So like proud but concerned parents, UChicago has kept a close eye on the benefits and challenges of nuclear power over the years since the first self-sustained nuclear reaction under Stagg Field. Thus, the battle to manage the consequences of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant in Japan has drawn the University’s interest, and the short-term and long-term effects of that ongoing situation were the subject of a unique panel held on campus yesterday, “Lessons from Fukushima.”

Though nuclear power was created by scientists, discussing its use requires input from political and economic spheres as well. So the panel, assembled by the University of Chicago Alumni Association, brought together nuclear technologists (Hussein Khalil, director of the nuclear energy division at Argonne National Laboratory, and Mark Peters, deputy director of Argonne), nuclear policy watchdogs (Kennette Benedict, executive director of the UChicago-based Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), and energy economics experts (Robert Topel, director of the University of Chicago Energy Initiative). With such different perspectives, it didn’t take long for the panelists to find points of debate, reflecting the tug-of-war over nuclear power that has gone on for several decades.

Nobody disputed the magnitude of the Fukushima incident, with workers at the plant still struggling to limit core meltdown in at least three of the reactors as well as re-cooling spent fuel rods at the site. As well, the panelists agreed that the incident was very relevant to nuclear power in the United States, where roughly one-fifth of electricity is provided by nuclear plants, many of which use the same model as the Fukushima reactors. But opinions differed on what those consequences would be.

Khalil pointed out that this was the first natural disaster to cause “grave damage” to a nuclear power plant in nearly 60 years of their use, and that a similar occurrence was very unlikely in the United States. But Benedict argued that “very unlikely” wasn’t good enough for “the most dangerous technology on Earth,” and that not every safety precaution possible had been taken at Fukushima. Topel agreed with the latter point - “why build generators on the ocean side in a country that coined the term ‘tsunami’?” he asked - and noted that the renewed attention to the long-term dangers of nuclear power would only make it more difficult to build new reactors.

In fact, no new nuclear reactor has come online in the United States in 32 years, Khalil said. So while Argonne continues to research new designs for nuclear plants and new strategies for containing nuclear waste, the economic (and possibly now public opinion) barriers are too large. The most likely rescue for nuclear power may come from an unlikely source: climate change.

“If other technologies turn out to be a bust, and if we really are serious about reducing our carbon footprint and carbon pricing becomes important, then there is a technology we have that can produce a lot of energy at relatively low cost compared to the alternatives,” Topel said. “Then, nuclear energy will prosper.”

By the end of the 90-minute discussion, the panelists came back to common ground on a hopeful note. If a thin silver lining could be found on a disaster that hasn’t yet been completely averted, it’s that the events at Fukushima have re-opened the international dialogue on nuclear power - its immense benefits and equally immense costs.

“One of the positive externalities of the Fukushima accident is that many more people are interested in nuclear energy, and I think that’s terrific,” Benedict said. “It’s unfortunate that it takes an accident to do it.”

Elsewhere…

The conversation about cancer is changing, from a single disease classified by the organ where it appears to multiple diseases grouped by genetic and biological similarities. As ScienceLife has written before, the Chicago Cancer Genome Project is our local contribution to this strategic shift against “the emperor of all maladies.” This week the Los Angeles Times examined that research effort and others like it, speaking with project leader Kevin White and many of the Medical Center’s cancer experts collaborating on this new vision of how to classify and battle cancer.

read more

TED Comes to Campus

This weekend, the students of the University of Chicago are putting together a local edition of the renowned TED conference called TEDxUChicago. The theme, “Reinventing the Life of the Mind,” nicely blends the goals of TED and the University, the idea-sharing mission of the conference sutured to the intellectual spirit of our campus. Among the talks taking place at the Reynolds Club this Sunday are a few UChicago scientists: paleontologist and educator Paul Sereno (speaking on the topic of “Art In Science”), psychologist and child language expert Susan Goldin-Meadow (”What Our Hands Can Tell Us About Our Minds”), and student speaking contest winner Bruno Cabral (“The Life of the Mind Lived Through Noise”), an undergraduate working in the laboratory of psychologist Howard Nusbaum. Other speakers include Mark Inglis, the first double amputee to climb Mount Everest, Jonathan Greenblatt, the former CEO of GOOD magazine, and cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick giving probably the talk with the coolest title: “The Last Remaining Hurdles to Cyborg Technology.” Tickets are still for sale on the TEDxUChicago website, but if you can’t make it down to Hyde Park, the talks will be webcast live at the UChicago Facebook page.

The Rules of Language

Last week, the Joseph P. Kennedy Intellectual and Developmental Diabetes Research Center held a symposium called “Variations in Language Learning,” a series of talks about how languages are acquired by children, adults, and cultures. Elissa Newport, a professor of brain & cognitive sciences and linguistics at the University of Rochester, presented fascinating data on the concept of “statistical learning,” the theory that the brain uses mathematical tricks to learn the arcane rules of a new language. To test this idea, Newport and her colleagues played a made-up language of nonsense syllables for 20 minutes (!) to volunteers, showing that combinations of syllables that show up more frequently (such as “dutaba” or “babupu”) are eventually perceived as “words” by the listener. The researchers also went on to show that children are better at this “statistical learning” than adults when confronted with a new language, offering an explanation for why languages are easier to pick up when learned at a younger age.

The idea of a universal foundation for learning and developing language echoes the “universal grammar” theories of Noam Chomsky and others, if peripherally so - Newport’s experiments showing that the same statistical learning can be used for tones and visual sequences implies that it’s a universal learning mechanism, not specific to language. But a new phylogenetic analysis of the world’s languages appearing in Nature this week argues against innate rules for language, demonstrating deep grammatical differences between “families” of languages go against the idea of a universal human grammar. Most linguists seem skeptical or underwhelmed about the result, and the debate smacks of a false dichotomy, with the truth about language development less a battle between cognition and culture than a combination of the two forces. Discover, the LA Times’ Amina Khan, and Ars Technica’s John Timmer all weigh in on the study.

read more

In physics, there’s nothing better than an unexpected result. Wednesday, Fermilab scientists unveiled the graph at left and caused figurative rioting in the streets of the physics community, confirming months of rumors about an exciting new result from the suburban Chicago facility (You can watch video of the presentation here). It’s a big score in the final days of Fermilab’s Tevatron accelerator, which is due to close later this year due to budget cuts and the ascendancy of the more powerful CERN Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.

The buzzworthy peak was the result of collision experiments where Fermilab scientists expected to see a W boson and two quarks, elementary particles that are part of the Standard Model of physics. But the experiments produced something additional, something unexpected, something unusual: a bump. Particle physicists spend their whole life chasing bumps, as Sean Carroll of Fermilab explains at his Discover Magazine blog, because they are “often a signature of a new particle that has been produced and then quickly decayed.” The anomaly could thus be a previously undiscovered particle that is not predicted by the Standard Model (apparently it is too large to be the elusive Higgs boson), forcing a re-write of the core theory of modern physics. Even if it’s not a new particle, some say an incorrect prediction like this one could mean that some of the rules of the Standard Model may need to be tweaked.

But despite the excitement, caution still reigns - as Dennis Overbye wrote in the New York Times, “The key phrase, everyone agrees, is ‘if it holds up.’” The chance that it is just a statistical anomaly is less than 1 in 1375, the researchers said. With that kind of data, biologists (whose 1 in 20 standards were lampooned effectively by the science comic xkcd this week) would already be popping champagne, but it’s not good enough for physicists - past findings of that strength have disappeared with further scrutiny. If additional experiments still being analyzed push the chance of error to 1 in a million, the true celebration will begin, and the finding could be the most important piece of new physics in decades.

Scientific Shutdown

Fortunately, that analysis will continue even in the face of a threatened government shutdown, the Fermilab website assures. But if a budget agreement isn’t reached by midnight tonight, business won’t continue as usual for many scientists, beginning with the 6,000 employees of the National Institutes of Health. As for extramural research that relies upon federal dollars, most ongoing clinical trials will be unperturbed, experts said. But Johns Hopkins researchers said that no new clinical trials will be able to start during the shutdown, and the Medical Center’s Richard Schilsky told MedPageToday that he’s concerned about obtaining experimental drugs from the National Cancer Institute.

“The biggest issue for us would be studies of investigational drugs being supplied by the National Cancer Institute,” he said in an email. “Many times we have to order drugs for each unique patient to be treated, and if NCI shuts down and can’t ship the drug, then we can’t treat the patient!”

read more

llustration by Meike Köhler/Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Just in time for Easter, a team of scientists digging on a Spanish island have discovered the fossils of a prehistoric rabbit of unusual size: 26 pounds, more than six times the size of today’s bunnies. Called Nuralagus rex - the “king of the hares” - the big guy definitely did not hop when it lived 5 million years ago. While it might resemble more of a rodent than a rabbit to the untrained eye (and its discoverers originally thought it was a tortoise?), experts in the field are convinced that it’s an ancestral figure in the line. “Really, this is a rather typical rabbit head [albeit large] stuck on an atypical rabbit body,” Brian Kraatz, an expert in rabbit evolution at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, told National Geographic. (Kraatz seems like a funny guy - he also told Discovery News “It’s unclear whether their feet would have been decent good luck charms.”). Oh and before you start writing that giant bunny horror movie script, Brian Switek reminds us that it’s already been done.

Scientists in England find they can change the sexual preference of male mice by deleting genes related to the neurotransmitter serotonin. As you might expect, the study has led to some interesting headlines. For a more thoughtful take, science writer Ed Yong asks whether they are truly affecting sexual preference or whether they are merely making indiscriminately friskier mice.

Are people with strong religious beliefs at higher risk for obesity? A study by our friends at Northwestern University suggest that’s the case, finding a correlation between obesity and attendance at religious activities when other factors (such as age, race, sex, education, and more) are controlled for. One interesting take-home message from, suggested by the Medical Center’s Daniel Sulmasy in a HealthDay News article, is that religious activities might be a good place for potential anti-obesity interventions to take hold. No more donuts after Sunday services, bummer.

A scientific skirmish has erupted over a paper by co-authored by famed biologist E.O. Wilson disputing the existence of kin selection, a extension of Darwin’s theory of natural selection that has helped scientists explain the evolution of everything from homosexuality to child-rearing to altruism. Kin selection is the idea that an individual will help protect and nourish relatives beyond their direct offspring because even nieces, nephews, and cousins share some a significant portion of an individual’s genetic background. As recapped by Carl Zimmer, the current debate began with the publication of Wilson’s paper questioning the evidence of this process by Nature last August, a paper that was roundly criticized by the evolutionary biology community (my favorite quote Zimmer received for his original article: “This paper, far from showing shortcomings in inclusive fitness theory, shows the shortcomings of the authors.” Zing!). This week, Nature published several rebuttals to the original paper - one signed by 137 scientists - and the authors’ re-rebuttal. Jerry Coyne, one of the original critics of the paper on his blog, examines the latest salvos in the argument and what it says about the role of professional reputation in scientific publication.

The nuclear reactor situation in Japan appears to have fortunately become less alarming this week. But just in case you are still concerned about radiation traveling over thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean to the United States, here are reassuring comments from David Grdina, professor of radiation and cellular oncology at the Medical Center, given to Fox Chicago News. Also, to put reports on the amount of radiation being measured from Japan to O’Hare Airport into perspective, keep this awesome chart from science comic xkcd handy.

Photo by Bruce Powell

Yesterday wasn’t just St. Patrick’s Day for fourth-year medical students around the country - it was also Match Day, the tense and celebratory day when aspiring doctors learn the residency program where they will spend their next 3-7 years. At the Pritzker School of Medicine, green-clad students and supporters absolutely packed the hospital’s Billings Auditorium for the big event Thursday morning, cheering their peers as they were called one by one at random to collect their match envelope. In a local tradition, it literally pays to go last, as students throw into an informal prize pot for whoever has to wait and squirm the longest to pick up their envelope (second-to-last gets a Hershey bar as consolation). In the video below, you can see some of that process - including the outcry when the last envelopes are miscounted - followed by the amazing tension-release of the countdown and unison envelope opening.

The numbers from the day are just as exciting as the video. At Pritzker (recently ranked #12 among medical schools by US News and World Report), 110 students were matched in 24 specialties at 46 institutions, including 23 students who will stay with us here at the Medical Center. The most popular specialties for Pritzker students were internal medicine (25% of the class), general surgery (11%), and pediatrics (11%). Nationally, trends continued to shift for the second consecutive year toward primary care specialties such as internal medicine, family medicine, and pediatrics, according to the National Residency Matching Program, a step in the right direction to meet some of the increased demand for primary care doctors expected in the wake of health care reform. MedPageToday’s Kristina Fiore breaks down the numbers.

Podcast 0.3: Transplants, Rock-Paper-Scissors Ecology, and More

We have settled on a name for our young research podcast: Bench to Bedside. However, we are still keeping the training wheels on as we work out the technical kinks and explore the best ways to deliver audio versions of our latest research and medical stories. Please enjoy the third installment of our podcast, featuring a recent coast-to-coast kidney transplant chain that involved the Medical Center, how Rock-Paper-Scissors can explain biodiversity, the fight against indoor air pollution in Nigeria, and the new numbers on the eating disorders epidemic in the United States. As always, we would love to hear feedback on what we’re doing right and wrong at robert.mitchum@uchospitals.edu or dianna.douglas@uchospitals.edu.

Bench to Bedside Episode #0.3 by robmitchum

Elsewhere…

Some people keep ant farms, some people keep multiple flasks of bacteria growing for 13 years (and counting) to study evolution. Ed Yong writes about experiments from Michigan State University that show “tortoise” bacteria can beat out “hare” bacteria over the long run. (And if you’re a science communicator of any sort, do listen to Ed and Carl Zimmer’s “Death to Obfuscation” session from January’s Science Online meeting)

read more

Alien Life & Scientific Skepticism: The Sequel

In a bit of deja vu this week, a new paper stirred up fevered online debate about the existence of aliens among us - and the traditions of scientific publications. This time, ground zero for the debate was not the bacteria of arsenic-laced Mono Lake, but microscopic filaments on a rare group of meteorites collected in Antarctica in the 80’s and 90’s. In a paper published last Friday by the Journal of Cosmology, NASA scientist Richard Hoover argued that these filaments are bacterial fossils, of species that fell to Earth with the meteorite - a conclusion that was breathlessly reported by Fox News with the lede “We are not alone in the universe.”

Panspermia, the idea that life on Earth may have been seeded by alien organisms that arrived on the backs of meteorites, is a seductive idea. But as the old saying goes: once bitten by reports of alien bacteria, twice shy. Far fewer science reporters fell for the meteorite alien bacteria as they had on the arsenic-based bacteria story of last December, perhaps because of a lesson learned or merely because of the lower-profile journal in which the new paper appeared. And while the criticisms over the arsenic study took a few days to seep from science blogs to mainstream media, the travel time was much shorter this time around - Phil Plait’s skepticism on his Bad Astronomer blog was quickly trailed by an AP story that carried a chorus of criticism. Questions about the qualifications and objectivity of the author and the journal soon followed, as the Columbia Journalism Review recaps.

As with the arsenic story, the meteorite episode was almost more fascinating for what it says about modern scientific communication than what it said about science itself. On the surface, the Journal of Cosmology appeared to take some progressive steps for publishing research, including making the article free and open access and soliciting commentaries from “100 experts” on the findings, 24 of which were published soon after the original article. That move would appear to address one of the critiques of the team that published the arsenic bacteria paper, regarding their attitude that criticism was only valid through traditional (and slow) peer-reviewed channels, instead of online discussion that is able to react more immediately.

However, a very thorough, critical commentary by microbiologist Rosie Redfield (who also sounded the first alarm about the arsenic bacteria research) has not been published by the journal, while some very odd commentaries have, such as one concluding “Hoover’s findings are incompatible with the creationist model of life based on biblical Genesis and Aristotelian philosophy.” The journal has also reacted petulantly to criticism, posting an editorial called “Have the terrorists won?” that claims “Only a few crackpots and charlatans have denounced the Hoover study.” So while the latest alien bacterial invasion of Earth’s media is showing some steps in the right direction, it also signals that the growing pains of adapting scientific discussion to a faster media age are still present.

Elsewhere…

Last week, the Medical Center was part of a four-way kidney swap that spanned the country, from the Bronx to California (we should have a video of the event posted next week). Coincidentally, in a New York Times editorial published Sunday, the Medical Center’s Lainie Ross argued that such swaps or “donor chains” were a better option than proposed revisions to the current organ allocation system that would prioritize younger recipients.

read more

Sen. Dick Durbin tours Argonne National Laboratory with Rick Stevens, Professor of Computer Science (photo courtesy of Argonne)

In Washington, the fight over budget cuts is well underway, as a Republican majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate tussle over the best way to reduce a multi-trillion dollar federal deficit. The first bill of the new House, H.R.1, set federal appropriations for the rest of fiscal year 2011 (ending in September) and snipped $61 billion from the budget, predominantly from discretionary domestic spending. One target of those cuts would be the National Institutes of Health budget, which would lose roughly $1.6 billion of its $32 billion budget for funding scientific research in the United States.

As you might expect, this news was not welcomed by Chicago-area researchers, who turned up in lab coats to support a news conference by Sen. Dick Durbin last Sunday at Northwestern University’s downtown campus. Durbin vowed to fight against the cuts as H.R.1 is discussed in the Senate, saying that interrupting the funding would slow progress toward new treatments for diseases such as AIDS, diabetes, and cancer. (video here)

“When you put these research projects on hold, you can’t ask the laboratory mice to take a nap,” Durbin said. “You can’t ask the cultures to stop growing - we’ll get back to you at the end of the fiscal year. And you can’t expect the professional researchers, the men and women who have dedicated their lives to medical research, to have certainty that next year they’ll have a job.”

Researchers from each of the major Chicago academic hospitals appeared at the conference and talked about how the proposed budget cuts could harm their own projects. Michelle Le Beau, director of the University of Chicago Comprehensive Cancer Center, discussed the biomedical research underway at UChicago thanks to the nearly $300 million in NIH funding received this year and last. Le Beau focused in on her own research examining therapy-related acute myeloid leukemia - a “very cruel and ironic” cancer caused by the chemotherapy and radiation treatment of a prior tumor. Any job losses that follow from NIH cuts could break up the expert team she has formed to study causes and treatment of the disease, she said.

“A lapse in funding will result in dismantling our highly specialized research team, and this leads to a loss of capability, because it takes years to assemble these teams again,” Le Beau said. “These are individuals who have trained for years to apply their extraordinarily unique skills. They have families to support and bills to pay.”

read more

I’ve said it before, but the AAAS Meeting is my favorite scientific conference, a cross-disciplinary feast of research that’s perfect for omnivores of science. As I wait for the meeting to return to Chicago (2014!), I spent the week attending from afar through the many online recaps. Depending on your preferences, you can get your AAAS download from The Economist (writing about alchemy, of all things), Science News, in podcast form from Scientific American, The Scientist, the inside-baseball view of the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, or AAAS itself. Or you can read more focused recaps of a study that suggests being bilingual can protect against Alzheimer’s disease, the debate over how to effectively communicate climate change to a skeptical public, or monkey video-game self-awareness.

The University of Chicago was represented at the meeting by two talks on very different subjects: the future of health care spending, and the history of human evolution. David Meltzer, associate professor of medicine, argued that cost-effectiveness studies must be performed to control surging health care costs in the United States and other countries. Runaway costs can be partially explained by the flood of new technologies and therapies that are dropped into the healthcare market each year, Meltzer argued. While the FDA makes sure that these new technologies are safe for patients, there is less oversight on whether they actually will offer enough clinical value for their often high price tags. Even old methods, such as pap smears to screen women for cervical cancer, have rarely been assessed from an economic perspective, Meltzer said. Yearly pap smear exams are three times as expensive as exams every three years, but increase life expectancy by only 32 hours compared to less regular screening.

“The value of scientific advance and the resources available for it are greatest when we use scientific advances wisely,” Meltzer said.

On the other end of the spectrum from the future of medicine, Anna Di Rienzo, professor of human genetics, spoke about the history of man. Expanding upon her PNAS study from 2010, Di Rienzo presented genetic data found by her method of using environmental differences to find regional variation. In this case, the search ended in sweat: a gene called keratin 77, expressed in the sweat glands of the body, that has a variant more prevalent in hotter regions of the world. That variant may have become popular in tropical populations due its role in cooling off the body, but in the modern world, such environmental adaptations may be counter-productive.

“We know for sure that a lot of these differences are due to environmental risk factors that differ,” Di Rienzo said, according to Science News. “But there’s also a growing consensus that genetic factors may also contribute to these differences in disease or trait prevalence.”

Elsewhere…

Last May, we told you about Zoltan Takacs, who spends half his year chasing venomous animals around the world and the other half studying their poisons in the University of Chicago laboratory of Steve Goldstein, professor of biophysics. The good people at PBS’ Nova series got wind of Zoltan’s exciting adventures, and featured him in an episode this week on the potential of deadly venoms to be re-cast as life-saving medications for diseases such as cancer and heart disease. That’s one of his snake photographs up top.

read more

What the science of science looks like. (From Evans & Foster, Science, 2011)

Perhaps the biggest science story of the week took place, oddly enough, on a game show. The victory of an IBM supercomputer named Watson over human contestants on Jeopardy burned up the Internet, launching a million jokes about impending robot enslavement of humans and comparisons to 2001’s HAL. Now attention is starting to turn to how the best question-answering computer yet invented can next be applied to targets more meaningful than trivia, including helping doctors make medical diagnoses. But the computational methods behind Watson - essentially a giant word-association machine - might also help the world of science take a hard look at its own biases and flaws, according to an editorial in Science last week by two University of Chicago sociologists.

The key word is “metaknowledge,” James Evans and Jacob Foster write, meaning the assembly of knowledge about knowledge. Though the term is a bit on the Orwellian side - “Metaknowledge results from the critical scrutiny of what is known, how, and by whom” - it’s a name for the acquired instincts used by experienced scientists to read between the lines of scientific research articles. A newcomer to the field may only see the methods and results written on the page, but an experienced reader perceives additional information: the reputation of the author, the institution, and the journal, the history of the subject, and the biases and assumptions inherent to any scientific study.

Evans and Foster propose that the shift toward electronic publication and the growing ability of computers to find meaning in massive amounts of data could enable a formal study of this unwritten metaknowledge - and potentially make science more accurate and efficient. A machine trained to detect patterns in scientific literature could help sniff out a multitude of known issues that distort or impede scientific results. Many of the phenomena listed by Evans and Foster have colorful names, such as:

• the “file-drawer problem” - the tendency for experiments with negative results to go unpublished, biasing the literature toward the experiments that showed an effect
• the “Proteus phenomenon” - when scientists flock to a high-profile finding to gain attention by extending or debunking the original research.
• “ghost theories” - when unspoken assumptions of a field (i.e. the use of undergraduates in most psychology studies) influence the results.

Instead of slowly learning these house rules the hard way through the frustrating and slow process of accumulating scientific wisdom, a metaknowledge machine might make the implicit aspects of science explicit. That could help a graduate student avoid wasting time on experiments that have already been done, or help the government route funding to scientific areas that are truly promising, instead of just popular.

“Metaknowledge could inform individual strategies about research investment, pointing out overgrazed fields where herding leads to diminishing returns as well as lush ranges where premature certainty has halted promising investigation,” Evans and Foster write.

Elsewhere…

The crossover of technology into science and medicine doesn’t have to happen at the level of supercomputers - consumer electronics are also making an impact in the hospital wards. Since last fall, medical residents at the University of Chicago Medical Center have been using iPads on their daily rounds to check test results, view X-Rays and MRIs, and order medications for patients at the bedside. Nesita Kwan from NBC News came out a couple weeks ago to report on how these devices are making medical care more efficient, and how Bill Gates himself responded to one resident’s e-mail.

read more

Janet Rowley rides her bike in front of the Gwen & Jules Knapp Center for Biomedical Discovery. (Photo by Jason Smith)

It never gets old hearing the story of how Janet Rowley found the first genetic cause for cancer in the early 1970’s, so it’s a delight to read this week’s New York Times conversation between Rowley and reporter Claudia Dreifus. The interview retraces Rowley’s steps from working with mentally disabled children at Cook County Hospital through her almost accidental training in cytogenetics and her most famous discovery - the chromosomal translocation that causes acute myeloid leukemia. While Rowley has been repeatedly honored for her contribution to the concept of cancer as a genetic disease (and continues to remain a yearly subject of Nobel speculation), she remains understated in looking back at her life’s work.

“People accuse me of being too humble. But looking down a microscope at banded chromosomes is not rocket science. If I hadn’t found it, somebody else would.”

To go with the New York Times interview, the University of Chicago Facebook page put out a call for questions to Rowley, and have received some interesting thoughts. There’s still time to get your question in there for one of the most respected cancer researchers in the United States and a key figure in the history of genetic disease research. [See also Lisa Belkin's post on the New York Times parenting blog about recent research on barriers against women in science, in which she cites Rowley's example.]

Elsewhere…

As a kid growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I remember being trained in emergency procedures for the seemingly infinitesimal chance of a Midwest earthquake originating in the New Madrid fault in Southern Missouri and Illinois. But despite recent rumbles in the Chicago area, it’s been 200 years since the last New Madrid quake to get into the 7’s on the Richter Scale, according to this nice New Madrid By the Numbers post by natural science blog +/- Science. Perhaps those school drills weren’t so crazy after all - the blog points out that in 2003 the U.S. Geological Survey estimated a 7 to 10 percent chance of a major New Madrid earthquake in the next 50 years.

Blue penguins, and what they have to say about how feather color is produced.

Things are finally getting back to normal in Chicago after last week’s blizzard, but amazing stories of Chicagoans helping each other out during the storm continue to pop up. Here’s one story, from Medill Reports, of a woman who delivered her baby at the Medical Center in the midst of the blizzard Wednesday.

Hillary Rosner, one of the many cool people I met at Science Online 2011, has a new blog at PLoS with the excellent name of Tooth & Claw (from Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” often associated with natural selection). In her first post, she brings up a fascinating fruit fly name from our own Manyuan Long - “jingwei,” named for a Chinese myth of a woman who drowns and is reincarnated as a bird to have her revenge on the sea. As the 1993 study describes, the gene was once thought to be a “pseudogene” without function, but was later revived and used by Long to study the origin of new genes - an area he still studies today.

Finally, what better way to prepare for Valentine’s Day than reading Brian Switek’s article on dinosaur sex at Smithsonian Magazine. I love the lede.

“If sleep does not serve an absolutely vital function, then it is the biggest mistake the evolutionary process ever made.” - Allan Rechtschaffen.

We spend approximately one-third of our lives asleep, and yet there is still much to learn about why. Modern sleep research only began less than a century ago, when Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago in 1925. Since then, many of the mysteries of sleep have been uncovered by UChicago researchers, including the discovery of REM sleep by Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky in 1953, and the characterization of the first sleep disorder, narcolepsy, by Rechtschaffen and Gerry Vogel in the early 1960’s.

But in the last two decades, the study of sleep has shifted from how it works and doesn’t work to the serious consequences when sleep is lacking. Locally, the hub of this new wave of sleep research is Eve Van Cauter, who has linked insufficient or irregular sleep to a long list of chronic diseases including diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. Earlier this week, Van Cauter was doubly honored in receiving the Frederick H. Rawson Professorship and headlining the christening of the new University of Chicago Sleep, Metabolism, and Health Center (SMAHC, pronounced “Smack”). Sleep scientists from UChicago, Northwestern University, and Harvard University gathered to discuss the latest evidence on just how important sufficient sleep is for good health. The consensus message was frightening: From infancy to the golden years, the failure to get a good night’s sleep can cause a wide variety of problems - and may be a major contributor to today’s most worrisome health trends.

The importance of sleep starts with birth, said David Gozal in his talk, and maybe even before due to epigenetic imprinting during the mother’s pregnancy. Gozal reviewed his paper from last month on the elevated risk of obesity in children with shorter and less consistent sleep patterns, but also presented even newer findings, including altered expression of metabolic genes in children who snore and mouse studies that found frequently-disrupted sleep can cause animals to ingest more food and retain more fat tissue. Meanwhile, more and more studies are finding that young children are not getting nearly as much sleep as recommended.

“Sleep curtailment is not only a problem of our adult society, but clearly has pervasively infiltrated to infants and young toddlers,” Gozal said.

The effect of poor sleep upon children may go beyond metabolic issues such as obesity and diabetes, proposed neurobiologist Daniel Margoliash. In both humans and birds, Margoliash’s laboratory has found evidence that sleep helps the brain consolidate information learned during the day into memory. As young birds sleep after a day of practicing their distinctive song, the brain recreates its activity patterns from those earlier performances, presumably part of the process of making that newly learned skill permanent. For schoolchildren, the lesson is clear: lose out on sleep, and you could be losing what you were taught during the preceding day.

Later in life, the problems associated with insufficient sleep only appear to grow worse. In older adults, chronic insomnia has been linked to cognitive decline, perturbations in hormones associated with hunger, and insulin sensitivity, said Northwestern’s Phyllis Zee. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome, a condition marked by infertility, hormonal dysregulation, obesity, and diabetes, are more than 8 times more likely to suffer from obstructive sleep apnea, said David Ehrmann. And the medical effects of poor sleep can literally appear overnight - Vineet Arora’s study of poor sleep in noisy hospital wards found an average blood pressure increase of 6.2 mmHg for every hour of sleep lost. read more

photo by Cheryl Reed

A quick round-up of science around the web to end a busy, snowy week:

The “facepalm” has become a popular piece of the internet lexicon, alongside peers such as “epic fail” and “OMG.” But, as Ed Yong writes at Not Exactly Rocket Science, humans aren’t the only ones who make the universal expression of disgust and embarrassment. A group of Mandrill monkeys in an English zoo have started to make the expression. However, he writes, they may be signaling something different than facepalming humans: “Why are they doing it? It’s unlikely that they’ve found something stupid on the Internet.”

Jerry Coyne posts another example of purportedly human behavior observed in animals with the green heron - a bird that not only has a crazy expandable neck, but also has been filmed “fishing” by using a piece of bread as bait (yes, there is video). A webpage he links to at Tufts University contains a few other examples of bird tool use.

Earlier this week, in discussing his study on sleep and child obesity, David Gozal theorized that the modern family structure of two working parents has disturbed sleep routines for adults and children alike. Another study, released this week, appears to support that hypothesis, as a team including Ariel Kalil of the Harris School for Public Policy found an association between working mothers and their children’s body-mass index. Lead author Taryn Morrissey of American University stressed to Time magazine that the study is not meant to bash working moms, but rather to remind busy families about the importance of maintaining sleep schedules.”If all moms were to leave the workforce tomorrow, it wouldn’t solve childhood obesity,” she says.

With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, allow us to point you back to a post written last year at the start of the World Cup about heart attacks in sports fans while watching important games. Some new research has come out in time for this year’s Big Game, including a study of LA fans during the 1980 and 1984 Super Bowls profiled by Ferris Jabr at New Scientist.

When you’re a hospital, you can’t call a snow day. If you’re curious as to how the Medical Center handled this week’s third-snowiest Chicago blizzard ever, here’s your answer: a lot of cots, and free lunch.

University of Chicago chemistry post-doc Niels Holton-Andersen views evolution as a “beautiful, amazingly huge experiment” that has produced elegant solutions to biological problems. His latest discovery is a self-healing, powerful adhesive produced by mussels, published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Mussels secrete the substance to stick to rocks in rivers and lakes, and researchers found that tweaking the pH of the adhesive can turn it into a self-healing gel, “kind of like Silly Putty,” Holton-Anderson said. The potential of the discovery was covered by “Green movement” blog Tainted Green.