Category: ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate)

Silver Lining in News of a Silver Bullet

Science outreach is one of the reasons I spend a lot of time on G+. It’s one of the reasons I care about G+ as a platform. If you follow me, you might have seen me bellyache about getting notifications from people I don’t have circled and how that interferes with my science outreach (mostly curating #ScienceSunday ). Today I’m going to share an example of why it is important to me for people to be able to notify me about science.

❒ Science Outreach

Michael Davis read an article in TIME magazine (http://goo.gl/elCMSa) and wondered if the claim that chemotherapy would be a thing of the past was true. So he mentioned me in his post and I looked at the article and realized it was another case of sensationalizing some exciting research. The fact that Michael follows my posts enough to trust my opinion about cancer, really pleases me. It is very fulfilling to  be able share my knowledge with people who want to learn. It’s interactions like this that make me tolerate any negativity on G+, e.g. trolls. It’s people like Michael that make me want to post more science and get better engagement on my science posts.

❒ Sensational Headlines

The TIME article discusses a recent phase 1-b clinical trial for a new cancer drug. I explain more about it below. The claim that traditional chemotherapy will be a thing of the past is not only premature, it’s also misleading. There will still be cases where current treatment (surgery, radiation, and non-targeted chemotherapy) is an appropriate course of action. Say for example, someone receives a PET scan and it reveals tumors throughout the patient’s body. It doesn’t make sense to biopsy all of those tumors and it is possible that all of those tumors aren’t genetically identical. So some of the advanced targeted therapies would not be applicable. See Buddhini Samarasinghe’s post (The Signatures of Cancer http://goo.gl/LmyS0z) to get a sense of the variability in tumors. 21 distinct mutational signatures are discussed.

Many of us have posted about sensationalizing headlines before.

Science is already Sensational

http://goo.gl/LmiQDe via Buddhini Samarasinghe 

Bench to Bedside

http://goo.gl/xudsu via me

Viral Vectors Versus Viral Video

http://goo.gl/q4Bk7 via Rajini Rao 

PhD Comics: The Science News Cycle for fun

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174

❒ Silver Bullet

Here’s how I replied to Michael’s post.

A quick glance at the article suggests they are really trying to say that broad spectrum (to borrow the terminology from antibiotics) are being phased out in favor of targeted therapies. This isn’t really new or news. One example they give is imatinib or Gleevec. Imatinib targets a specific type of enzyme, a tyrosine-kinase inhibitor. You can read the Wiki on it or I can write more later. The important thing is that imatinib builds on knowledge from previous tyrosine-kinase inhibitors like sorafenib, which has an antiangiogenic mechanism. It targets new blood vessels, which the tumor creates. As far as the HIV comment, check out Rajini Rao’s post (http://goo.gl/q4Bk7) if you haven’t already. There’s comments about other gene therapies in there too.

Backing up a little bit, a protein kinase, is an enzyme that’s involved with a process called phosphorylation, where a phosphate group is transferred from a high energy molecule to a specific substrate. A tyrosine-kinase is just a type of kinase where the phosphate group is attached to tyrosine (an amino acid). Phosphorylation is often described as a molecular on/off switch. When a protein is phosphorylated or dephosphorylated it can be switched from on to off or vice versa.

So the new drug in the article, ibrutinib, is a Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitor. BTK is essential for the proliferation of chronic lymphocytic leukemia cells. As mentioned in my comment above, it builds on prior knowledge of kinase inhibitors. In my opinion, it’s not a revolutionary breakthrough. It’s an important and fantastic step forward. It is not a silver bullet.

❒ PDX

An example of another targeted drug that’s been around for a while is tamoxifen. It targets estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer. For breast cancer, a biopsy is often taken when there is a suspicious lesion in a mammogram, ultrasound, or MRI. The biopsy might reveal that the lesion is in fact cancer and is ER+. In that case it is reasonable to try tamoxifen. My point here is that targeting is not new, even though the targeting is getting more specific.

A colleague is working on an exciting project called PDX, patient derived xenograft. What that means is that a piece of the patient’s tumor is taken to the lab on ice and implanted in immunocompromised mice. That’s called a xenograft, i.e. grafting from different species. Typically cancer research is carried out on tumor cell lines that are well characterized and have been around for a long time. The problem is that some of those cell lines don’t fully resemble the tumor in the patient scenario. The PDX project has the potential to better model the patient scenario as we know exactly where the tissue came from. More importantly, it allows us to better target that specific tumor. That’s exciting work without making it sensational and it won’t be a silver bullet either as some tumors might not grow in a mouse.

Image source:

V.A. “Vinnie” Musetto “Headless Body In Topless Bar”

http://goo.gl/1suPQK

I picked this image because Mr. Musetto was well known for writing sensational headlines.

Sensational Science friends fix headlines

I’ve been busy with visiting family for the 4th of July holiday. You’ve probably noticed my stream is stagnant. Since I don’t have time to write up a decent post, I’ll piggyback on Buddhini Samarasinghe’s excellent post.

G+ is a great place to meet people with similar interests. I’ve heard several times that FaceBook is for keeping in touch with people you already know and Google Plus is a place for meeting people you don’t know, who have similar interests. For me that’s Science. I’m a scientist and I’ve had the pleasure of becoming friends with other scientists here that share a passion for science and science outreach.

Whether it’s curating ScienceSunday, posting about science on our own, or fighting pseudo science/anti-science, there is a group of real scientists that work hard on this endeavor. Counteracting the sensationalizing of science is part of what we do.

Thanks Buddhini Samarasinghe for an excellent post that I agree with wholeheartedly. Here’s my favorite post for dealing with a cancer story that was blown out of proportion.

Bench to Bedside

http://goo.gl/xudsu

Here’s another post where Tommy Leung helped out.

Picture worth 1k words, references are worth more

http://goo.gl/zkdjL

The OP already mentions this great post by Rajini Rao explaining the real science behind the Fight fire with fire video.

Viral Vectors Versus Viral Video

http://goo.gl/q4Bk7

Finally this is just a fun, related TED talk.

Evolution of a headline: neurobollocks

http://goo.gl/iH2iy

Originally shared by Buddhini Samarasinghe

Science is already Sensational

Two years ago, I signed up to G+ and was thrilled to discover so many scientists and science advocates on here – I found my kind! From those early days, we built a community, from the ground up, made of people who were passionate about communicating science and battling anti-science. Over time, we gained enthusiastic support from the public, and our followers on G+ grew, along with the engagement we received from the content we produced. Fascinating topics, insightful discussions, the occasional swatting of the pseudoscience troll, these were all things that brought us closer together. Pages and Communities sprang up, all with the common goal of science outreach and public education and I am so proud and happy to be a part of that. To that end, ScienceSunday and Science on Google+: A Public Database are excellent resources for any newcomers.

As a scientist, communicating science comes with a responsibility to be honest. When I write a science post, I do it because I read a paper that made me go “wow, that is so cool! I want to share that with people!”. My goal is not to hit What’s Hot, or to get more followers, or to become popular, or to increase a Klout score or whatever. I don’t care about those things because they are side effects.

Because of this, I don’t sensationalize my posts to become popular. I strongly feel that the science I write about is already pretty damn sensational. I don’t need to lie to you, the public, to make you excited about it, because I hope that my science writing skills can translate the jargon from the research so that you are excited about the science itself. 

Sensationalizing scientific discoveries is patronizing. It implies that you, the public, is too stupid to understand or care about the science, and I need to deliver it in a form that you will consume easier. This is lazy, and ultimately doesn’t really educate anyone about the scientific discovery; it just spreads misinformation. 

Sensationalizing science also leads the public to have false expectations about the science. A sensationalized title such as “Scientists Have Grown a Fully Functional Liver from stem cells” might hit What’s Hot, but is an outright lie. It leads the public to expect ‘fully functional livers’ to be made available to transplant candidates within months and years, whereas the reality is far from the case. This is not the fault of the science, or the scientist. 

Misinforming the public to popularize science does not popularize science; it hurts science. The science out there is already so amazing, we don’t need to make it something it’s not. I understand that it’s not easy for everyone to always read the original paper and understand it, let alone convey the findings in a manner that the public can understand, but sensationalizing it to make people take notice is disingenuous and lazy at best, and harmful and detrimental to our collective goals of science outreach at worst.

If you have me circled, I won’t lie to you. I will do my best to share the research that I think is exciting, in a jargon-free manner that I hope you can understand, and be available to answer any questions you might have about it, or find other scientists who could answer you. You can expect to read about things like radioactive bacteria shrinking tumors (http://goo.gl/FhPeM), the evolution of snake venom proteins (http://goo.gl/qZHcF) or how a compound in breast milk could be used to treat MRSA (http://goo.gl/RQGv5) if I am in your circles. I am here to communicate science and to make you as excited about it as I am. I don’t need to sensationalize something that is already sensational.

Thanks Tommy Leung, Rajini Rao, Hedwig Pöllöläinen and Brian Koberlein for inspiring this post. It’s something that was on my mind for quite a while, and you guys were awesome catalysts 🙂

PS: Yes I’m not wearing a labcoat…shh!

#ScienceSunday   

Honey bee boo boo?

There is a lot of concern about the decline in bee colonies. As most people know, if there are no bees, then many crops will suffer as they need the bees to pollinate them.

Wenfu Mao, Mary A. Schuler, and May R. Berenbaum, from the University of Illinois, recently published in PNAS that feeding high fructose corn syrup, as honey is taken away from bees, might be contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder. Since the 70s, corn syrup has been given to bees in colonies as their honey is harvested from them. Mao et al found that the bees immune system was stronger when exposed to p-coumaric, an enzyme that turns on detoxification genes. It’s found in pollen walls.

Reference:

Researchers find high-fructose corn syrup may be tied to worldwide collapse of bee colonies

http://goo.gl/mLWNz via physorg

What about pesticides?

Most of the focus has been on neonicotinoids, which are a class of neuro-active insecticides chemically related to nicotine. Pyrethroid is a compound used in commercial insecticides that is similar to pyrethrum, which is the active ingredient in Chrysanthemum flowers. Chrysanthemum flowers were used to kill lice for centuries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrethroid

In this article by Frazier et al, they explain how neonicotinoids aren’t the sole problem. The amount of neonicotinoids found does not add up. 

This is in contrast to pyrethroids which were found in 79.4% of samples at 36-times higher amounts than the neonicotinoids, on average.

Pesticides and Their Involvement in Colony Collapse Disorder

http://goo.gl/3BgDE

Here’s another article that explains more about neonicotinoids.

Neonicotinoid Seed Treatments and Honey Bee Health

http://goo.gl/pCYSe

Here’s a good site for bee info:

http://www.extension.org/bee_health

Image source: http://goo.gl/dXckv

#ScienceSunday