Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Lifting the stem cell ban – was there any point?

    President Obama has lifted the ban on embryonic stem cell research enacted by Bush, but I’m left feeling that this intervention came many years too late.

    Pledging that his administration will “make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology,” President Obama on Monday lifted the Bush administration’s strict limits on human embryonic stem cell research.

    …

    But Mr. Obama went on to say that the majority of Americans “have come to a consensus that we should pursue this research; that the potential it offers is great, and with proper guidelines and strict oversight the perils can be avoided.”

    In making his announcement, Mr. Obama drew a strict line against human cloning, an issue that over the years has become entangled with the debate over human embryonic stem cell research.

    As someone who works with stem cells I find this largely an empty, symbolic act, but one that needed to be done anyway. The reality is the damage was done by Bush already, and we’re fortunate that it was only a temporary delay in some of the most important research humans have developed to date.

    What a lot of people don’t realize is that in 2006 a revolutionary result was discovered by Japanese scientists led by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University. What they found was the reset button for mammalian cells, the genes that need to be expressed for a cell to revert to a pluripotent state. We wrote extensively about what results in these cells – induced Pluripotent Stem Cells or iPSC – mean for stem cell research and regenerative medicine overall. Basically, the ability to reprogram the cells of any individual to a totipotent state – one in which the cells may make any cell-type or tissue in the human body. Before some fool suggests this was due to Bush remember it was a Japanese group, the research started long before Bush, and it never would have been possible without ES cells from which they culled the critical genes for the transformation.

    So why does it matter that Obama has reversed this policy? Not only are ES cells inferior compared to iPSC for human therapies, but wouldn’t it be easier not to upset the fundamentalists that would equate the value of our lives to that of a ball of undifferentiated cells?

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  • Rating your doctor online – is this a good idea?

    I have just finished taking my last major exam of medical school – Step 2 of the boards (including Step 2 Clinical Skills, or CS, which costs 1200 bucks, requires you to travel to one of a few cities in the country hosting it, and is sealed by a EULA that forbids me from talking about what the test was like), and am winding down my medschool career in the next few weeks. It’s about 2 weeks from Match Day (the 19th), when I’ll find out for sure where I will spend the next 5 or so years of my life. I’ll be sure to have a post up a little after noon that day when I find out what the answer is. And then, around May 17th, graduation day, I’ll be a medical doctor, ready to start internship (also known as the hardest year of your life).

    One of the things I’ve found universal to all medical students is that we really want to be good doctors when we are finished with our training. I don’t think I’ve ever met a medical student who was in this career for the money (you’d be crazy), or for other selfish reasons. They tend to be hard working, dedicated, humble people who, if anything, are sickeningly sincere about wanting to help other people. Maybe that’s just my school, but my experience is, these folks want to do good in the world.

    But another universal is that not all doctors will be able to avoid making mistakes. Doctors are human, they all will eventually make errors, and the goal of any profession dedicated to improving the human condition should be constant self-reflection and efforts at self-improvement. This is not a simple thing to do however. Medicine is complex, and quality of medical treatment is very difficult to assess. We’ve discussed before, using metrics in medicine is challenging, and often rather than studying medical quality you end up merely assessing the social demographics of the physicians’ patients.

    So it is with interest that I see reading boingboing that lots of people are upset because some doctors are forcing their patients not to rate them on sites like RateMD.com by having them sign a contract forbidding them from doing so.

    The arguments for and against this practice are fascinating. We tread into the mucky waters of free speech, free enterprise, the practice of medicine, and the practical problem of assessing physician quality…

    More below the fold…
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  • Will the Lead Toy Industry Get Bailed Out?

    Who cares about moral hazard anymore! AEI, Cato, where are you when we need you?

    It goes something like this: A group of companies that chose to put lead in children’s toys, or to offshore their operations to countries with poor manufacturing controls in order to save money, are now upset that their schemes are going to cost them money. The government has the audacity to do something about this crisis, and guess what, it costs the industry money! Maybe they should have incorporated the costs of lead when they decided to offshore!

    Joseph Pereira of the Journal reports:

    Makers of children’s products and charities that run second-hand shops are stuck with more than $1 billion of inventory they can’t sell because of a new federal product-safety law, according to surveys by trade groups and the charities.

    They’re stuck with this inventory because of a new federal product safety law? What a way to shift the blame! If the industry as a whole maintained quality controls, we wouldn’t be in a toxic toy crisis, and then the federal safety law would not have been passed. Consumer protection laws do not just pass out of the blue; they are motivated by serious, overwhelmingly problematic situations. Trust me on this, there are 100 lobbyists against any consumer protection matter for each advocate in favor of it. They only pass when agencies and Congress have no option but to side with the single advocate.

    The Toy Industry Association estimates that more than $600 million in toys made illegal by the law are sitting in manufacturers’ warehouses or have already been shipped to retailers. A trade group for small apparel makers in New York called the Coalition for Safe and Affordable Childrenswear says its members have a $500 million problem. And the California Fashion Association, which represents many Western clothes makers, puts their troubled inventories at $200 million.

    The trade groups were reluctant to disclose the names of the companies affected or provide documentation in support of their estimates.

    Yep. Sounds like they’ll be next in line for a bailout.

  • WaPo's ombudsman just doesn't get it

    Is he being purposefully obtuse? Once again the ombudsman decides to defend George Will, but only on a single point.

    A key paragraph, aimed at those who believe in man-made global warming, asserted: “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    Bizarrely, he acknowledges Will was wrong:

    It said that while global sea ice areas are “near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979,” sea ice area in the Northern Hemisphere is “almost one million sq. km below” the levels of late 1979. That’s roughly the size of Texas and California combined. In my mind, it should have triggered a call for clarification to the center.

    But according to Bill Chapman, a climate scientist with the center, there was no call from Will or Post editors before the column appeared. He added that it wasn’t until last Tuesday — nine days after The Post began receiving demands for a correction — that he heard from an editor at the newspaper. It was Brewington who finally e-mailed, offering Chapman the opportunity to write something that might help clear the air.

    Will’s column is grossly dishonest, as we and others pointed out it wasn’t just sea ice, but the repeated misquote of a scientific paper and a whole host of dishonest statements. He’s apparently been misquoting one paper to push this “global cooling” nonsense since 1992 and basically recycling this same BS article for almost two decades!

    Alexander may be correct there is fact checking “on multiple levels”, but that does not change that it was incompetent, missed willful errors, and that there has not been a correction of Will’s mistakes or a repudiation of his incessant repetition of falsehoods like the myth of global cooling.

    For yet another week the Washington Post has failed to demonstrate accountability for its errors.

  • Nerds once again in control of government

    And I breathe a sigh of relief. Working nights my schedule is a tad goofy, but I wake up today to see this guy describing the changes in the new budget:

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    This is Peter Orszag the new director of the Office of Management and Budget. He is a nerd and I instantly like him. I was not surprised to find he used to be a blogger.

    It was especially refreshing because for too long our government has been run by this guy:
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    In particular I agree with their emphasis on health care as a necessary element for creating a viable modern economy. America has to compete with other countries that provide this for their workers, and we have a system that regularly ruins the finances of our citizens. I also agree with it as a moral necessity. Within the last week I’ve admitted several people for whom a hospitalization would result in significant financial stress. I talk about it with them, and they’re terrified. On the one hand, they need help. Sometimes their life depends on it. On the other hand, if they lack insurance a hospitalization can bankrupt them, and they’ll honestly admit, they avoided doing anything about their problems until they become life-threateningly severe because they are they can’t afford the help. This isn’t just stupid system, but immoral.

    Additionally the need for reform of redundancy and costs in medicine would be a welcome reform. While the privacy issues with the electronic medical record are significant (I’d love if Chris would comment on this), the obvious need for it is undeniable. I can’t tell you how many times tests, expensive tests, are repeated because of incompatible records systems, delays in record transfer, and, frankly, the fact it’s sometimes just easier to duplicate the test than do the scut to find the answer. The emphasis on evidence based medicine, an attack on redundancy, and improvements in coverage will go a long way towards decreasing the terrible costs to insurers and the government, and terrible financial harm medical care can do to our countrymen. I am excited about seeing how this will be implemented, and relieved that once again we have people in charge who use words like “data” and “evidence” and seem that if there are problems generated by these reforms, they will be receptive to criticism.

  • Tumors in a (quack) human stem cell therapy

    It’s almost like a bad Yakov Smirnoff joke, “In America you test therapies in animals before giving them to humans, in Russia…” All I can do is wonder, what were they thinking? Injecting stem cells into a kid’s spinal fluid to correct a genetic disorder? Are they insane?

    Stem cells, in particular embryonic and fetal stem cells, are useful because they represent cells that are less differentiated than the cells that are working at specific functions throughout your body. Another result of being stem cells is that they are able to divide and proliferate without differentiating or undergoing apoptosis and as cells differentiate towards their final fate they tend to divide less and ultimately commit cellular suicide if they are signaled to begin dividing again – a protection against cancerous growth. The downside of this is that stem cells act, in their normal state, a bit like cancerous cells. In fact one of the assays to demonstrate the pluripotency of a cell (the ability of a stem cell to make many kinds of other tissues) is to inject them into an animal where they will make tumors called teratomas which are (usually) benign growths of cells that represent endoderm, mesoderm, and ectoderm – the three germ layers than give rise to all tissues in the body during development.

    As a scientist who works with stem cells, both in culture and in vivo I could have told you this therapy was a bad idea. A year ago Jake explained why this was a bad idea. If you had described this therapy to us, we would have told you exactly what would happen based on scientific knowledge of how these cells act in vivo. The therapies offered to stem cell tourists are frank quackery. They are unproven, untested, unstudied, and unmonitored. And to you anti-FDA libertarians out there, this is what you get when you don’t have regulatory oversight of human therapies. You get stupid quackery. The fact that this kid’s cancer was detected is probably just luck – there are likely many more people who have tried these therapies of desperation who suffered side effects, and possibly even death, but we just haven’t heard about it yet.

    Ethical human trials require many things. At the very least, the therapy should have been tested extensively for safety in animals and ideally for efficacy in animal models of the disease. The patients should be selected carefully, should have a reasonable expectation of therapeutic benefit, and after the treatment follow-up should be extensive. Further, in the case of such a novel therapy, the bar should have been set higher before attempts in humans were made. In this case we have a child with a rare genetic neurodegenerative disorder that was experimented on without proper oversight, or a reasonable expectation that this therapy should do anything. Ataxia Telangiectasia is an autosomal recessive disorder in which every cell in the child’s body lacks the appropriate gene which is involved in cell cycle regulation and DNA repair. By what mechanism did they think neural stem cells would have an effect on such a disorder? Would the cells replace the child’s entire central nervous system? Would they miraculously repair the genetic defect? Or manage to insert themselves in just the right places to fix symptoms caused by a universal defect in the the hosts genome? This is magical thinking, not scientific thinking, and further I believe it is grossly unethical and stupid.

    It is of no surprise that the careless injection of fetal stem cells into a child would result in tumors. This was a mind-bogglingly stupid act. What’s worse, as we hear more about the damaging quackery being offered in countries without proper regulation and oversight of human therapy we will likely hear more stories like this one.

    In the rush to find some dramatic cure for a disease using stem cells it is likely efforts like these will damage the success of legitimate and careful studies in regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies. Injury and deaths from careless stupid quacks using these cells will create and association in people’s minds between stem cell therapies and cancer. We know the obstacles to using these cells in humans. The major one – immune compatibility – may have been solved already. The major remaining obstacles towards implementation of some fairly crude stem cell therapies are going to be (1) differentiating the cells into the appropriate tissues, (2) purifying the cells so that undifferentiated cells aren’t accidentally transplanted into humans, (3) preventing tumorous growth in the transplanted cells (possibly including a lethal gene to reverse the therapy if necessary), and (4) proper anatomic delivery of the cells so they perform a useful function and survive in the host. We know what the problems are. Careful study must include addressing each of these issues and ensuring they are resolved before shoving them into someone’s spinal fluid.

    This quackery is not only going to prove harmful to individual human patients, but will likely harm the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine as a whole. For the sake of the patients, and for all future patients that might benefit from well-studied therapies, this quackery must be stopped.

  • For-Profit Fundraising Fleeces the Charitable

    Phillip Reese and Andrew McIntosh of the Sacramento Bee report:

    If you give to a charity over the phone, there’s a growing likelihood that most of your donation will go to the telemarketer instead, according to a Bee analysis of state records.

    More than a third of California charity telemarketing campaigns sent less than 20 cents on the dollar to the charities during 2007, the most recent year on record. Those campaigns and a smaller number of charity auctions and concerts raised $93 million for commercial fundraisers, and just $3 million for the charities.

    There are some eye-popping numbers in the report (PDF) released by the California Attorney General. The Bee points to the American Diabetes Association, where in California alone, commercial fundraisers generated $13,000,000 in donations at a cost of $17,000,000. That organization is an outlier, but other prominent charities had significant negative revenue using telemarketing and other commercially-operated fundraising.

    The most effective for-profit fundraising was done on behalf of the Ronald Regan Presidential Foundation, with 92% of a $3,482,100 bounty going to the organization!

    Since the creation of the Do-Not-Call Registry, many charitable organizations have resorted to in-person solicitation on the street. Is this more or less invasive than telemarketing? I’m not sure. But I am very skeptical of the eleemosynary nature of these groups. Several of the popular in-person solicitors work for child poverty organizations. I’m not sure about the actual names of these charities, but “Children International” raised $1,275,675 and ended up paying the fundraiser $614,850; and “Save the Children Federation” only kept $997 of $71,811 raised. In dead last for effectiveness is the “Children’s Defense Fund,” which paid the fundraiser $29,676 for raising $2,480.

  • 4 Arrested in Animal Researcher Harassment

    The San Francisco Chronicle reports that four young people have been arrested on suspicion that they harassed UCB and UC Santa Cruz animal researchers under the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act.

    It is clear from the reporting that law enforcement is taking this issue seriously. The FBI and seven other law enforcement agencies were involved, and effort was coordinated through the Joint Terrorism Task Force. From the press release and reporting, it looks as though agents were following these activists in public places, and filmed them using publicly-available computer terminals. Even DNA was used to link items in a car used to flee from a harassment incident to the suspects arrested.

    The FBI’s press release alleges the following harassment:

    On Sunday, October 21, 2007 a group of approximately twenty people, including Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, and Ms. Stumpo, demonstrated outside a University of California Berkeley professor’s personal residence in El Cerrito, California. The group, some wearing bandanas to hide their faces, trespassed on his front yard, chanted slogans, and accused him of being a murderer because of his use of animals in research. The professor told police he was afraid, and felt harassed and intimidated by the extremists.

    On Sunday, January 27, 2008, a group of approximately eleven individuals, including Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, Ms. Stumpo, and Ms. Khajavi, demonstrated outside the private residences of several University of California Berkeley researchers over the course of the day. At each residence, extremists dressed generally in all black clothing and wearing bandanas to hide their faces marched, chanted, and chalked defamatory comments on the public sidewalks in front of the residences. One of the researchers informed authorities he had been previously harassed and the incident had caused him to fear for his health and safety.

    On February 24, 2008, five to six individuals including Mr. Pope, Ms. Stumpo, and Ms. Khajavi, attempted to forcibly enter the private home of a University of California researcher in Santa Cruz. When her husband opened the door, a struggle ensued and he was hit by an object. As the individuals fled, one yelled, “We’re gonna get you.” The professor and her husband both told the FBI they were terrified by the incident.

    On July 29, 2008, a stack of flyers titled “Murderers and torturers alive & well in Santa Cruz July 2008 edition” was found at the Café Pergolesi in Santa Cruz. The fliers listed the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of several University of California researchers and stated “animal abusers everywhere beware we know where you live we know where you work we will never back down until you end your abuse.” The investigation connected Mr. Buddenberg, Mr. Pope, and Ms. Stumpo to the production and distribution of the fliers. Distribution of the fliers preceded two firebomb attacks outside researchers’ Santa Cruz homes, both of which are still under investigation by the FBI.

    I’m willing to bet that local and federal police have people in every one of the area animal rights groups, in light of this pattern of harassment. This effort is likely to deflate this type of criminal behavior, because violations of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act can result in up to 5 years in prison. Whether guilty or innocent, a federal investigation and prosecution will turn one’s life upside down. And if guilty, the government will be seeking maximum prison stays.

  • George Will – We must not allow his dishonesty to be ignored

    I’m heartened to see a broad disgust with George Will’s lies about climate science. After all it’s pretty extraordinary when a major syndicated columnist repeats a lie about science, not once, not twice but three times despite being corrected.

    PZ wishes he too could just make up his own facts, and Mike too is pleased the disgust is moving beyond the scientific community. Carl Zimmer at the Loom covers the broad mistakes made in the essay, and TPM documents how it was almost all lies. Mark Kleimen has caught on to the fact that in the end, this is just another conspiracy theory on par with HIV/AIDS denialism ( would add anti-vax denialism, 9/11 trooferism, or evolution denialism and every other kind – they’re all ultimately the same).

    It’s reassuring to me to see that people are catching on. When we hear pseudoscience drivel, it’s never unique. It always follows a specific method – the pseudoscientific method. We happen to call that method denialism.

  • Bank Secrecy on Life Support

    If you are socking money away in offshore banks, pay attention to this man’s expression. He’s saying, you’re screwed.

    Yes, taxpaying citizens, you can rejoice, because tax cheats across the country are having panic attacks. They’re thinking about refiling their tax returns, or going to the IRS to beg forgiveness with a check to cover past taxes and potential fines. Some are evening thinking about sailing away from this great country. Good riddance.

    As part of a 9/11 trend that requires banks to collect more information about their clients, and the fact that our government needs money, bank secrecy is on life support. Governments are willing to share information nowadays, and as the Times reports, the US government is going after 52,000 customers of UBS bank. (If you’re a customer, call your lawyer, today.)

    When rich and powerful people have their privacy invaded, it oftentimes results in new privacy laws. Maybe the long-term result of this will be less privacy for the ultra tax cheating rich, and more for us. Maybe.