Darwin/Chicago 2009 was a bit like two conferences in one. In the movie theater of Ida Noyes Hall, evolutionary biologists sorted through the hard details of how evolution happens beneath wide-screen Powerpoint slides. Three floors above, in a long room with hand-painted walls, historians and philosophers of science synthesized decades of reading and scholarship into half-hour lessons. One session gazed forward at future promise, one session made sure the previous steps and missteps weren’t forgotten. After two days of running back and forth from one theater to the other, I felt I got a three-dimensional portrait of Charles Darwin and his elegant theory - the decades of thoughts, influences and experiences that went into the writing of On the Origin of Species, the multitude of new and exciting examples still being found that prove the truth of evolution.

Because my dispatches from the conference turned into two very long posts, here’s a menu to jump to the highlights of the conference.

Thursday

The conference kicked off in the Gothic setting of Rockefeller Chapel with a trio of talks (Richard Lewontin, Ronald Numbers, Marc Hauser) that set the tone for a gathering that would approach Darwin and his work from every possible angle.

Friday

Pietro Corsi reminded the room that Darwin (and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) weren’t the only scientists pondering evolution in the 19th century.

The finches that bear Darwin’s name remain one of the best species for studying rapid natural selection in nature, as Peter and Rosemary Grant explained.

Robert Richards got provocative with his argument that Darwin believed in a purpose behind evolution when he was crafting his famous theory.

Famous fossil hunter Paul Sereno outlined his proposal for a common language of morphology while the second-oldest bird ever discovered lay beside him.

The University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne threw down the gauntlet on the debate over how species have formed over Earth’s history.

Eric Lander, one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, primed the audience on how that data and the sequences of other organisms have changed assumptions about genetics.

Perhaps Darwin’s most lasting metaphor, the Tree of Life has been dramatically altered by the flood of genetic data, and Philip Ward explained how that has changed biologists’ knowledge of how species are related.

Saturday

Thomas Schoener kicked us off with a discussion of how evolution and ecology are finally working together…and David Jablonski made a similar pitch for cooperation between evolutionary biologists and paleontologists.

The study of animal behavior helped Darwin craft his theory, but it took more than a century for it to gain steam as a scientific discipline, said Richard Burkhardt.

Neil Shubin used his discovery of Tiktaalik - and the ensuing lab experiments on the genetics of limb structure - to illustrate how evolution can build a bridge between two very different kinds of science.

To answer the question of whether being a “Darwinist” still has meaning in the modern world, Michael Ruse gave an inspiring and very funny explanation of how Darwin’s hypothesis was built to last.

How the oldfield mouse has adapted to beach living made for a perfect cap to the weekend, the research of Hopi Hoekstra an delightfully simple demonstration of natural selection at work.

Elsewhere

I was quite impressed with the instantaneous insight PZ Myers of Pharyngula posted all weekend from the front row of the conference; it was like reading over the shoulder of a truly excellent note-taker.

Skip Evans, of The Panda’s Thumb blog, was on hand representing Wisconsin Citizens for Science and photographing evolutionary biology superstars with his stuffed penguin, Flightless Frank.

As if conference organizer Robert Richards wasn’t busy enough, he also gave radio interviews to WMFT and WGN (the latter with science historian Ronald Numbers).

Jerry Coyne has posted some pictures from the conference to his blog, Why Evolution is True.

Finally: the entire conference was videotaped, and the organizers hope to have it online soon. Rest assured, when they are accessible, I’ll point you to them from here.

Many thanks to PZ Myers, author of the amazing evolution blog Pharyngula, who gave us a nod last night in his ongoing live-blogging of the Darwin/Chicago 2009 conference. PZ is doing a fantastic job covering the event in real time. For other coverage, check out WMFT’s interview with conference organizer Robert Richards, and Milt Rosenberg’s interview on WGN Extension 720 with Richards and conference speaker Ronald Numbers.

Darwin/Chicago 2009 is here! Here is the lineup for tonight, our live-blog will begin below around 6:00 p.m.

6:00 p.m. Welcome by Robert Zimmer, President of the University of Chicago

6:15 p.m. Richard Lewontin (Harvard University): “Genetic Determination and Adaptation: Two Bad Metaphors”

7:00 p.m. Ronald Numbers (U. of Wisconsin): “Anti-Evolutionism in America: Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design”

7:45 p.m. Marc Hauser (Harvard University): “From Where do Morals Come? NOT Religion!”

Over the course of four days covering the Neuroscience 2009 meeting in Chicago, I wrote nearly 7,000 words between Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. You might say I was excited to be there. But I know not everybody has an hour to devote to reading feverish recaps of the latest neuroscience research, so here’s a post summarizing some of my favorite parts, along with some excellent posts from other websites about the conference.

Best Talks

Eric Kandel - I was charmed by this 80-year-old Nobel laureate’s undiminished enthusiasm for scientific research; even though he’s already contributed more than perhaps anyone else to our understanding of how the brain learns and remembers, he’s still forging ahead with new, ambitious experiments.

Thomas Sudhof - There is no shortage of bad science about autism, so it was refreshing to hear some good science, even if the answers aren’t as easy and reassuring as those provided by the quacks. Sudhof, who used black widow spiders to discover two proteins that help neurons find each other and communicate, spoke eloquently about how defects in these proteins could underlie many of the symptoms of autism spectrum disorder.

Hot Tech

Optogenetics - Everyone at the conference seemed to be abuzz about this technique, developed by Karl Deisseroth of Stanford, for activating or de-activating specific neurons with light. Here’s an awesome video from Deisseroth’s lab of a mouse’s activity being controlled by a fiberoptic implant, and a talk by Deisseroth describing his method and its applications.

Wikipedia - Nothing new about this tech, of course, but two Wikipedian-scientists held a fascinating workshop on how neuroscientists can help improve public understanding of science by writing and editing for the open-source encylopedia…and circumvent the media in the mean time.

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After a week layoff, here’s some more Linkage focused on that thin ellipse of the Venn Diagram where sports and science intersect.

Chicago Marathon: An Enormous Study of Trauma & Torture?

This Sunday marks the 32nd running of the Chicago Marathon, and as reported on this blog, at least one University of Chicago scientist will be in the field. But marathons are of interest as well to scientists who aren’t avid long-distance runners, and perhaps not in the way you think. Covered well by the excellent neuroscience blogs Mind Hacks and The Neurocritic this summer was a study out of Columbia University that used marathon runners as stand-ins for victims of violent trauma - the argument being that marathons are a voluntary (and thus, ethical to study) pool of people who subjected themselves to intense, long-duration stress.

The study focused on how long-term elevations in cortisol, often known as the “stress hormone,” affect memory. In the study, authors Teal S. Eich and Janet Metcalfe cite studies that found running a marathon produces cortisol levels equivalent to military interrogation, severe burn injury and “first-time parachute jumpers.” Fun! So marathon runners were asked to perform tests for two types of memory after running their 26.2 miles, and the results were compared to tests taken by marathon runners tested 1-3 days before their race.

As you may expect, the researchers found that people are significantly worse at remembering a list of words (which tests explicit memory) immediately after a four-hour jog. But implicit memory (measured by the completion of words when given the first three letters) was actually improved after the marathon. So high levels of cortisol over an extended period of time can inhibit your ability to recall facts, giving you a form of temporary amnesia. Meanwhile, the unconscious, quick-fire recall of implicit memory is enhanced - a sensible strategy for a brain faced with an emergency situation.

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A portrait of Joseph Kirsner outside his Grand Rounds lecture

It’s not every day you get to hear a lecture from a physician two weeks shy of his 100th birthday. But for yesterday’s Department of Medicine Grand Rounds at the University of Chicago Medical Center, the honored speaker was 99.96 years old (to be exact) and spent an hour recalling a career spanning an incredible 70+ years in the field.

Joseph B. Kirsner, affectionately known to the medical world as “GI Joe” (the GI stands for gastrointestinal, of course), came to the University of Chicago in 1936, the year Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics and Gone With the Wind was first published. 73 years later, he remains a full professor at the University of Chicago, no longer seeing patients but working from his hospital office two days a week.

In May, Kirsner was honored during the Digestive Disease Week meeting held this year in Chicago, an annual gathering of doctors in the gastroenterology field where Kirsner is considered a giant. Tuesday was the University’s chance to pay tribute, and Kirsner received two standing ovations from a crowd wearing buttons reading “JBK 100.”

Titled Gastroenterology: A Look Back 1936-2009, Kirsner’s talk was a first-hand account of how disorders of the digestive system have been studied, diagnosed and treated over the last seven decades. For example, Kirsner talked about how the endoscope revolutionized his field…then talked about how Rudolph Schindler, co-inventor of the endoscope, came to Chicago and taught him how to use the device. The first endoscope was a rigid, steel tube that had to be threaded down a person’s mouth, down the esophagus and into the stomach. “This was not an easy task,” Kirsner said. I’ll say.

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Hormones: The New Economy Fall Guy

It might be just a coincidence, but as the market has reeled over the last few years there have been more and more scientific studies looking at one potential source of blame for dangerously risky financial behavior: our hormones. A study published in 2008 (that I wrote about with Joshua Boak in the Chicago Tribune) found that male financial traders with elevated levels of testosterone took more chances and performed better on a British trading floor. John Coates, one of the authors of that study, told me he was inspired to look at the influence of hormones on trading after observing unusual behavior from people in the financial world:

“I began to think that the people involved in this insanity were under the influence of some drug,” said Coates, who was a Wall Street trader. “When it was all over, they were like people in a hangover, they couldn’t believe they had bought some net company with no earnings, no interest plan, and lost all of their savings.”

An extension of that study recently took place not far from our home at the University of Chicago Medical Center, as 550 students from the University’s Booth School of Business were the subjects for an experiment on testosterone levels and career choice. That study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, has stirred up a lot of media coverage, from the likes of The Economist and the Wall Street Journal. Authors from U. of C. and Northwestern found that testosterone does indeed correlate with risk-taking behavior - the higher your level of the hormone, the more risks you will take. The authors found no gender difference in this correlation; that is, women were just as susceptible to the effects of elevated testosterone levels on risk-taking as men. Testosterone levels also were found to influence career choice, as business students with higher testosterone levels and low risk-aversion tended to choose riskier careers in investment banking or trading.

Another fun fact from the article is that you can assess your prenatal testosterone exposure by measuring your fingers. Take the ratio between the length of your index finger and ring finger - the higher the ratio, the less testosterone you experienced in the womb. This ratio has been linked to everything from sexual preference to heart disease to athletic ability, and there is even a blog devoted to the latest finger-ratio news. Nothing surprises me any more on the internet.

Why Give Drugs When the Placebo Works Just As Well

An excellent and very long article in this month’s Wired by Steve Silberman looks at why the placebo effect in pharmaceutical trials has been increasing, and how that is bad, bad news for drug companies.

From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

(Silberman also reveals a piece of industry jargon - “the futility boundary” - which should definitely be the name of an emo band.)

The placebo effect is a fascinating phenomenon that is both crucially important to how scientific experiments are conducted and, perhaps ironically, poorly understood by science. Silberman’s point that the placebo effect has been misappropriated as a mere obstacle for pharmaceutical approval rather than for its insight into our inherent biological healing processes is right on. But it’s also worth noting that the placebo effect can be put to nefarious uses as well. An amusing example of this is Obecalp, a sugar pill marketed to parents looking to basically trick their children out of minor illnesses. More disturbing is the rise of overseas stem-cell clinics promising cures for a whole slew of currently untreatable diseases, from spinal cord injuries to blindness. Many of these clinics offer patient testimonials about how the treatment worked for them; my suspicion (informed by the lack of scientific proof for these therapies) is that the patients’ improvement is pure placebo effect, obtained at very high cost.

But Silberman gives an encouraging description of the increasing amount of research, here and abroad, into what neurobiological processes create the placebo effect. Tapping into those processes more directly might actually lead to new, more effective drug treatments, potentially making the boring old sugar pill one of the most important drugs in modern medicine.

And Finally…

A study finds that drinkers are less depressed than those who abstain from drink, a “suicidal planet” is discovered, and (in a finding that hits close to home) habitual multi-taskers perform worse on attention and cognitive tests. Now for a nice weekend of writing e-mails while watching soccer while folding laundry while listening to music while talking to my wife.

Women's 800m champion Caster Semenya

Track Meet Becomes Scientific Conference

The World Track & Field Championships being held this week in Berlin has been in the headlines a lot in the United States, which is unusual for a non-Olympics year. But there’s been a mix of the awesome and the odd from the meet which has generated a slew of fascinating science discussion. And believe it or not, it hasn’t had anything to do with doping.

First, the amazing: Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, who didn’t just set new records in the 100m and 200m races, he annihilated them. Bolt’s 100-meter time of 9.58 and 200-meter time of 19.19 shaved 0.11 seconds off his world records for both events, and the media has gone crazy. There’s a great graphic of how he broke the record here, more graphs and analysis than you could ever ask for here, and a clever video illustrating just how short 9.58 seconds really is, through the medium of the Beatles, here. One interesting article from the Guardian explains how Bolt’s performance was so extraordinary, it forces scientists to recalculate the limits of how fast humans can run.

The story of Caster Semenya is much trickier. The South African Semenya won the women’s 800-meter race on Wednesday under a cloud of suspicion that makes doping look like a mere annoyance: allegations that she’s not actually a woman. It turns out this is not an easy question to settle, as conditions like Klinefelter syndrome (born with XXY chromosomes) and androgen insensitivity syndrome (born XY, but unresponsive to testosterone) produce people whose genes and sexual characteristics do not match. The International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body of track & field, has reportedly begun “a series of tests” to determine whether Semenya is “entirely female.” How that is defined is unclear, but there’s precedent: in 2006, Indian runner Santhi Soundarajan was stripped of an 800-meter silver medal after failing a sex test.

The excellent sports medicine blog The Science of Sport, coincidentally run by two South African doctors, has been all over this story, and even the comments to posts like this one are worth reading if you’re interested in this unusual case.

H1N1 Flu Vaccine Recommendations Questioned As Flu Season Approaches

Last month, we discussed the recommendations of the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) on who should receive vaccination for the H1N1 “swine flu” virus this coming fall. As the ACIP reports directly to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those guidelines - which said that pregnant women, caregivers for infants, health care workers, people under 24 and people with chronic medical conditions should be first in line - were likely to be followed by the medical community. And because there won’t be enough H1N1 flu vaccine to give to everybody at the start of flu season (the CDC’s Jay Butler estimated today that between 45 and 52 million doses will be initially available in mid-October), those priorities will be necessary.

But a report published online by the journal Science yesterday says that the ACIP may not have settled on the best strategy for preventing the spread of the novel flu virus this fall. Jan Medlock and Alison Galvani, epidemiologists from Clemson and Yale, ran computer models suggesting that targeting the limited supply of vaccines at school-age children - the demographic most likely to spread the virus - and their parents would likely minimize the total number of infections and deaths from the flu, as well as lowering the public health costs. Even though children may not be the population most at risk for severe flu symptoms with this virus (or seasonal influenzas, which they also studied), more vulnerable populations can be indirectly protected by targeting the children first before the virus spreads rapidly through classrooms, the authors said.

“Instead of vaccinating them directly, you can protect them better by vaccinating the children, stopping the transmission in schools and from schoolchildren to their parents,” Medlock said in a podcast interview on the Science website.

The difference highlights an interesting question: when you’re deciding who to vaccinate first, what goal are you aiming for? The ACIP recommendations were largely intended to give vaccine first to the groups that are most at risk of severe symptoms and death after viral infection - pregnant women, for example. Medlock and Galvani’s models tested several different goals, including minimizing death, minimizing infection and minimizing the economic cost of the disease’s spread. A cold computer might think it’s easiest to vaccinate schoolchildren and minimize infection across the general population at the risk of more pregnant women dying, but public health officials and scientists, for the most part, are not computers.

And Finally…

Science writer Carl Zimmer writes a perfectly-headlined summary of glia, the brain’s secret weapon. In Germany, a “hotel” for studying genetically modified mice is overbooked. And in a week where NASA announced the discovery of the amino acid glycine in a comet’s tail, here’s a nice overview of astrobiology, the search for life on other planets.

The committee members who make up the shortlist for the  Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine each year might want to start listing an unlikely trio of medical researchers: The Brothers Gibb, otherwise known as The Bee Gees.

Last fall, David Matlock, a medical resident with the University of Illinois School of Medicine presented a study at the American College of Emergency Physicians meeting that found listening to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” during a CPR refresher course helped doctors and medical students perform the lifesaving method accurately. Retesting the same subjects five weeks later, with the subjects instructed to replay the song in their heads, the doctors and students continued to show excellent CPR technique. Though Matlock’s proof appeared to be the first scientific study of Bee Gee-related emergency medicine, inside medical sources (i.e. my wife), say that the song has been an instructional CPR tool for some time. [Conveniently, the song is also a health threat in its own right. - ed.]

Since it’s already stuck in your head by now…

The song’s medical benefits had little to do with the soothing sound of falsetto harmonies or fond memories of John Travolta, but rather with the pace: “Stayin’ Alive” struts along at 103 beats per minute, very near the 100 compressions per minute recommended for CPR. As such, any 100bpm song would do, but the uplifting message of the Bee Gees chorus makes for an irresistible and memorable lesson.

That tempo was harnessed for the powers of health again recently, this time as a guide for  aerobic activity. Earlier this week, the website of the Department of Health and Human Services spotlighted a May paper in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine that found “Stayin’ Alive” sets the internal metronome for a healthy walking pace. Researcher Simon Marshall of San Diego State University determined that 100 steps per minute was the ideal rate for “moderate intensity walking,” which public health guidelines recommend adults do for at least 150 minutes each week. Therefore, humming the tune and making like Travolta is a low-budget solution for those unwilling to purchase a pedometer to track their feet.

“The tempo of it is such that – as with most disco music from the ‘70s – the beat is fairly consistent throughout the whole song, and most people find it hard to sit still to,” the pro-disco Marshall told HHS.

Of course, an anti-disco attitude can also help you burn off some calories, but may result in legal charges. If you’re planning on performing CPR or walking at a moderate intensity pace and can’t stand the Bee Gees (or just prefer “Night Fever”), here’s a list of songs that are exactly 100 beats per minute, so you’ll be even more accurate. Perhaps Ricky Martin’s “Shake Your Bon-Bon” suits you better? I won’t judge.

To hold you over for the weekend, here’s a brief roundup of some interesting science stories around the web this week:

How Victor Yushchenko’s Skin Saved Him from Poisoning

In 2004, Victor Yushchenko was running for president of Ukraine against an opponent hand-picked by the previous ruling regime, when he became suddenly and mysteriously ill. Saved by emergency medical attention, it was subsequently found that he had been suffering from poisoning with dioxin, one of the active ingredients in the infamous “Agent Orange.” Yushchenko, who was later elected president and is still in office, survived the rare poisoning but was left with odd facial scarring that doctors could not fully explain.

This week, Yushchenko’s doctors put forward a theory about the scarring that is fascinatingly bizarre: the facial growths were a defense mechanism of his body that helped isolate dioxin away from important organs as the body tried to remove the poison. Yushchenko’s case is so rare – only one other case has been reported on a person poisoned with pure dioxin – it has extended beyond political news into the realm of medical case study. One paper, published in British medical journal The Lancet this week, suggests that the reason these cases are so rare is that the unfortunate recipient of dioxin dies so quickly: “whether forensic investigators would have detected the poison in Victor Yushchenko had he died soon after the intoxication is unknown,” the authors report.

Unmentioned in this study, but appearing in a news report by New Scientist magazine, is the fact that Yushchenko’s strange facial growths may have helped save the Ukranian president’s life. Jean Saurat, a Swiss dermatologist who helped treat Yushchenko, told the magazine that the growths on his face and body sequestered the poison and produced an enzyme, normally expressed in the liver, to metabolize dioxin.

“A new organ was created out of normal structures of the skin, and the tissue expressed very high levels of dioxin-metabolizing enzymes,” Saurat told New Scientist.

Francis Collins Confirmed as NIH Director

As covered previously in this space, some online controversy has gathered around the nomination of Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, as the new director of the National Institutes of Health, arguably one of the most powerful scientific positions in the world. After opposition was ignited again last week by atheist writer Sam Harris’ Op-Ed in the New York Times, Collins was nevertheless approved as NIH director late Friday afternoon by a unanimous Senate vote without facing a confirmation hearing.

The inconvenient timing of the news means that prominent online Collins critics, such as University of Chicago’s Jerry Coyne and PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota, Morris, have yet to post a response as of press time, but watch their blogs this weekend.

(Myers spent his Friday touring the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky - home of displays portraying humans and dinosaurs peacefully co-existing - with a group of more than 200 atheists. Sift through Twitter comments here for highlights including Myers riding a saddled triceratops.)

Rooks Use Tools to Capture Floating Worm

On a visit to the Lincoln Park Zoo last month, I was delighted to watch one of the chimpanzee fishing for bugs with a piece of straw, a favorite clip of nature shows illustrating chimps’ human-like ability to use tools. Thanks to Wired Science, I learned this week that birds have their own tricks to enlist their natural surroundings in the attainment of a snack. Check out the video below, where Connelly the rook uses the principle of water displacement to reach a tasty worm.

How the Injured are Treated at Music Festivals

This weekend brings the annual Lollapalooza festival to Chicago, just in time for the first really, really hot weekend of weather to hit the city - temperatures are supposed to hit the mid-90s. Though I’m not attending Lollapalooza this year (already saw all the bands I wanted to see at Bonnaroo), the event reminds me of one of my favorite Tribune articles, a peek at what goes on inside the medical tents of music festivals. My favorite factoid: the type of  concert with the most medical-tent visits are Christian rock shows. “All these patients who would normally have albuterol inhalers for asthma or different medications would leave all their stuff at home,” Dr. Jeff Grange, a professor of emergency medicine at Loma Linda University told me. “Then they would come into the first-aid tent saying, ‘I thought I would be healed, so if I took my stuff it’d be like I didn’t have faith.’”

Decades of research advances have made depression less mysterious and less stigmatized in most circles, accepted as a neurobiological disorder rather than a more abstract (and untreatable) entity. But some news about depression remains surprising, at least to people outside the realm of psychiatry. Tuesday’s newspaper had one such example: a new study out of Washington University in St. Louis following a group of clinically depressed and young – very young – children, between the ages of 3 and 6.

Diagnosing a preschool child with major depressive disorder was a new concept to me. But it turns out that it’s relatively old news to psychiatrists, who have been studying the diagnosis and treatment of early childhood depression cases since at least the mid-1980’s. Prior to that, even practitioners  had trouble grappling with the idea of toddlers and kindergartners suffering from a traditionally “adult” disorder like depression, said Sharon Hirsch, section chief for child and adolescent psychiatry in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

“People used to have a different concept about kids,” Hirsch said. “They figured, from a developmental point of view, that if you didn’t understand abstract concepts – if you only knew right and wrong, black and white – you didn’t have to worry about the larger concepts in life. Therefore, you weren’t really capable of becoming depressed, because you were only focused on food and basic necessities, which are all provided for you, so what is there to get depressed about?”

But as theories of depression focused less on psychoanalysis and more on neurochemical causes, researchers began asking whether the brains of very young children might be vulnerable to mood disorders such as depression. They found that depression does strike kids, but it takes distinct physical and emotional forms.

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There are a lot of reasons to be disturbed by the revelation, covered by the New York Times on Wednesday, that at least 26 published review articles in medical journals were ghostwritten by a medical communications company. But I’m not sure all of those reasons are obvious at first glance or fully addressed by the article. Sure, it’s ethically questionable for doctors to affix their names to a review article (which typically summarizes dozens or even hundreds of separate research articles into a cohesive statement about a medical or scientific topic) that they didn’t write. But it also raises serious questions about other, less overt ethical violations that beset the field.

The story has its origins in the controversy over hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which was found in 2002 to elevate risks of heart disease, stroke and some cancers. Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, as one of the leading sellers of hormone replacement therapy, has become one of the biggest targets for litigation: the Times piece counts roughly 8,400 lawsuits filed against the company by women claiming illness caused by HRT. As a result of those court cases, documents were released last week revealing that Wyeth paid DesignWrite, a medical communications company, about $25,000 per article for 26 articles advocating the benefits of HRT and published in prominent scientific journals. Though written by DesignWrite employees, who may or may not have medical or scientific training, the authors eventually listed for the articles were MDs.

Reprehensible? Sure. Unique? Hardly. Other companies, marketing other drugs, have also been forced to disclose similar arrangements in court. But the Times article and other online commentaries haven’t mentioned that this particular case is merely an especially egregious example of questionable practices that threaten scientific integrity.

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Now that my new job leaves less time for blogging, we’re changing the format of this site a bit and adding more voices to the mix. The biggest change is the addition this week of Rob Mitchum, who got his PhD in neurobiology here at the University of Chicago a couple of years ago before joining the Chicago Tribune as a reporter. Now Rob is back here, with a mandate to write, blog and give perspective to the biological research he knows so well. Here’s a nice sample of the science writing Rob was doing at the Tribune.

ScienceInsider, the top-notch blog by Science magazine writers, flags this case of a scientist who discovered his research grant application had been part of a Freedom of Information Act request. A physician at another university asked for the application, on the assumption that once something is submitted to a federal agency it’s fair game for a public records request.

This reminds me of the slightly shady practice among journalists of doing a FOIA for all the other FOIAs that have been submitted to a given agency. It’s a way to keep track of what your reporting competitors are up to, but it always struck me as a bit like cheating.

In this case, as the original post explains, there’s a legitimate legal case that the unpublished data in such an NIH application should be shielded from public view. And as the poster argues, a FOIA is certainly a non-collegial way of getting information. But is it unethical? Clearly it is if the intent was to get an unfair advance peek at another scientist’s methods, objectives, etc. But public records are public. I never submitted an e-mail, FOIA or other communication to a public agency that I wouldn’t have been comfortable seeing released. Grant requests are different, but it’s probably safe to assume that unless there’s a clear exemption, anything you give a government office could become public.

This was a busy week for biomedical news. The National Institutes of Health got a new nominee for its director, Francis Collins; the NIH finalized new rules for funding of research on embryonic stem cells; and swine flu got a new quasi-official name: “Pandemic H1N1 2009.”

Of the three events, the naming of Francis Collins as NIH chief may have the biggest long-lasting effects. Pending his confirmation, Collins will take over NIH at a time of rebounding budgets fueled by recovery funds, setting the course for the world’s most powerful research body.

But Collins’ nomination is causing more controversy than I would have thought possible.

I’ve talked with Collins in his prior capacity as director of the Human Genome Project and more recently in connection with his interest in reconciling science and religion. Collins, an evangelical Christian, has drawn heavy criticism from scientific atheists like PZ Myers and our own Jerry Coyne. Myers clearly admires Collins’ organizational skills, but describes him as a “lovable dufus” when it comes to issues of religion and some scientific principles. Coyne says he “can’t help but be a bit worried” about some of Collins’ religious views, including his conviction that the evolution of humans was in some sense inevitable. The psychologist and author Steven Pinker said he has “serious misgivings” about Collins’ appointment, calling him “an advocate of profoundly anti-scientific beliefs.”

Based on my interviews with Collins and reading of his work, most of these criticisms seem unfair.

It’s certainly true that Collins wants to reconcile religion with, for example, evolutionary biology. And this is something that naturalists such as Coyne and Richard Dawkins say cannot be done. But time and again in my lengthy talk with Collins about his book “The Language of God,” he stressed that he’s never thought religion should modify what science shows to be true. “I believe in truth, and I think we shouldn’t be afraid of truth,” he said. “If you believe in God as the creator of the universe, that can hardly be threatened by our efforts to understand how nature works.”

As Chris Wilson wrote this week in Slate, “Most of the time, Collins starts with the science and then reconciles the religion with it.” For a scientist to take issue with this approach seems gratuitous, bordering on intolerant.

On the other hand, like many of the critics I take issue with some of the content on Collins’ website for his BioLogos Foundation. The idea that God affects evolution or other natural processes through unmeasurable influences on quantum events strikes me as a game of three-card Monte - “Oops, you thought God had to act through overt miracles, but actually he was hiding with Heisenberg the whole time. Thanks for playing.”

But even on the BioLogos site, Collins and his crew make some fair points. A section called “God’s Relationship to Time” claims that as creator of the universe, God also would have created time, and would exist in some sense outside of time. This is relevant to the question of divine action, since it raises the possibility that such influence does not consist of supernatural intervention but is part of a larger scheme that was “baked into the cake” of the universe from the start. This seems to me more fundamental than a simple case of three-card monty. It’s a question that thinkers from St. Augustine to Heidegger have grappled with. It certainly doesn’t suggest an “anti-scientific” mindset.

As Wilson notes, for the most part Collins targets issues that seem by definition to be unsolvable by science; he’s not squeezing God into gaps that science has not yet solved, and he’s not challenging any facts that science has revealed. For example, Collins is understandably curious about the origins of life, but he dismisses the idea that because those origins are still murky, they require a divine explanation. When it comes to hard-core biology, Collins does not look for answers in Genesis.

This indicates a species of faith that Collins’ atheist critics share. It’s the faith that the dogged pursuit of empirically solvable questions will lead to answers we can trust, and that most of nature’s interesting mysteries will yield to rational explanations. That’s the sort of faith that should serve an NIH director well.