Sneezy season

The immune system is a mysterious thing. Protective overall, and yet sometimes it backfires. A dramatic illustration of the immune system going wrong was the TGN1412 disaster: six young men given a monoclonal antibody in a clinical trial ended up in ICU with multiple organ failure. One is now showing signs of an aggressive cancer.

Less dramatic, but more aggravating to more people on a more regular basis, are your run-of-the-mill allergies. Almost everyone I know is allergic to something: peanuts, cats, dust, pineapple. I personally have some mild allergies to some animals, but a major reaction to dust mites. When I got an allergy skin test, the swelling that appeared in response to dust mites moved beyond the realm of a few millimetres, which they usually measure, and looked disturbingly like a fat worm under my skin.

It's bewildering, too, the different things that people say about what causes allergies. It seems that no one can agree on whether it's over- or under-exposure to the allergen that causes the immune system to go nuts and attack a harmless molecule. Now it's been suggested that the window of opportunity for avoiding the nastiness of an allergy is pretty small: sometime between six months and nine months of age, at least for food-related allergies.

Personally I don't think there's a straight answer to this one and it just highlights the intricacy of the body, which can work against us or in our favour, but is fascinating regardless.

Suddenly suspicious journalists: a pot/kettle scenario?

Washington Post journalist Rob Stein has cited the recent drama of Woo-Suk Hwang's data fabrication as a reason for increased skepticism among science reporters. Firstly, I find myself a little disbelieving about his statement, since (unfortunately) data fabrication is all too tempting (and hence common). Someone reading scientific media regularly would be well aware of this, and 2005 was a particularly bad year for it.

Secondly, it's usually the general media's fault that science is grossly misrepresented to the public. Any glance through the health and science sections of so-called quality media (such as Time magazine) will reveal poor understanding and explanation of scientific issues. In Australia, at least, reliance on press releases is common, as is sensationalist reporting of preliminary trials (usually ones run by pharmaceutical companies). The media doctor website keeps track of several Australian publications' health articles.

However, Stein is correct in stating that journal editors are often hard-pressed to detect fabrication. Realistically, scientists will fabricate data if they feel they can get away with it, so maybe what's needed is more verification of data (by independent researchers) before we get all excited and hail the next cloning god.

Agricultural revolution

Nationals Senator Ron Boswell recently dissed CSIRO for cutting funding to rural industry research by 5%.

(On a petty note, I'm wondering what the difference between the "livestock and wool industry". Aren't sheep livestock? But that's not really the point...)

I agree with him that there should be more research funding, not less, dedicated to renewable resources. But I feel it's a little incongruous to call for more research into agriculture as it currently exists in Australia at the same time as preaching about renewable resources. There aren't many crops in Australia that are actually suitable to our arid climate. Cattle and sheep die in the drought; farms require subsidies for water and nitrogen and phosphate fertilisers to be economically viable; and many crops grown in Australia (such as cotton and rice) are extremely water-thirsty.

As mentioned in a post last year, Professor Michael Archer (Dean of Science, UNSW) is a fan of harnessing native flora and fauna for economic gain, rather than continuing to pound our unique environment with European crops. He goes into great detail in his book Going Native (co-written with Bob Beale, ISBN 0733615228). From kangaroo meat (despite some unresolved issues) to native grains as crops (kurrajong and several wattle species are just a few examples), agriculture in Australia needs to change.

So maybe Boswell is right and agriculture does need more research funding. It just shouldn't focus on maintaining the status quo -- we need an agricultural revolution.

Still in the Stone Age down under

Debate is heating up in Australia about the use of mifepristone (RU-486) for medical (as opposed to surgical) abortions. Tony Abbott, who is clearly highly qualified to have an opinion about (a) medicine (he has an Economics/Law double degree) and (b) women (he quite obviously isn't one), has decided that he should be more cautious than the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, and the World Health Organization and keep mifepristone off the shelves in Australia. Well, that's his story, anyway. Unfortunately for Mr Abbott, people aren't stupid and are quite able to see that his views on mifepristone are just thinly veiled anti-abortion views (which go hand in hand with his anti-stem cell research views).

All research and medical opinion points to mifepristone's safety and efficacy in inducing termination, when combined with a prostaglandin analogue such as misoprostol (which is already available in Australia for other uses). From the reading I've done, I can't see how medical abortion is any less safe than a spontaneous abortion. Both can lead to complications, such as incomplete abortion, which can be taken care of with medical help.

It's insulting to doctors for Abbott to suggest that they would not be able to deal with the complications that can arise. If they can deal with a miscarriage, they can deal with a medical abortion too. And it's insulting to suggest that they would prescribe mifepristone unwisely. Any doctor prescribing it would, of course, be there to deal with any adverse effects, same as they would be for any medication they prescribed. Rural doctors, in particular, should be offended at the implication that they can't handle complications of pregnancy, when they can probably deal with them better than some over-specialised urban doctors. Should they be recommending that all female regional inhabitants relocate to cities for pregnancy care?

Abortion isn't nice or pleasant but it's a reality that some women find themselves facing for a variety of reasons. Whether the underlying cause is their own stupidity or the cruelty of rape, no woman should find herself facing the alternative of an unsafe abortion, or an unwanted pregnancy that will produce an unwanted child, who might never receive adequate care or love. And medical abortion makes it easier -- some might say too easy, but I feel that the option needs to be there for women in remote areas, or from communities where abortion is not acceptable, and going to the doctor for a pill and pretending that you've had a miscarriage might be your only option.

It's just mind-boggling that this decision is in the hands of one man who's clearly biased, rather than where it belongs: in the hands of each individual woman.

Forward, march

It's always tempting to do a 'year in review' type of article at this time of year. It's not hard (especially after every other publication has done theirs). For example, science in 2005 can be summed up thus: embarrassing NASA failures; freakish meteorology; bird flu fears and cover-ups; evangelism masquerading as science; the rise, rise and fall of Woo Suk Hwang and his therapeutic cloning; and perhaps the only proud moment: the completion of the chimp genome.

Too easy. So of course I'll have to put my foot in it and hazard a guess as to what might be the 'year in review' for 2006. Some of it's easy because it's just more of the same, really. Bird flu is only going to become a bigger problem, as is climate change. It would be nice to see some successes in space exploration. (It would be even nicer to put that kind of money into feeding the starving and AIDS prevention [for example], but you can't have everything.) Physicists will keep nattering on about string and other things that I don't pretend to understand (anyone care to calculate the trajectory of physics wooshing over my head?).

Apart from bird flu, obesity will probably be the most important health issue (unless there's some other awful pandemic). Genomes, which are just so last century really, will continue to be superseded by proteomes and epigenomes. But I think there's a very big missing link between genotype and phenotype that we're just not getting, sort of like the dark matter of biology -- the setbacks with cloning and the final figure of 96% similarity between the human and chimp genomes point to that. I'll be surprised if 2006 is the year that solves that mystery, though. And I'm going to be optimistic and hope for a new stem cell hero.

I'm not particularly optimistic about climate. There are so many pitfalls to all the alternatives to oil (the destruction of forests in developing countries for biofuels, for example) that I think headway will only be made when it's too late. It's already too late, really.

Technology will probably keep moving along the lines of smaller, faster, and cuter, and as usual not spend too much time on actually being helpful.

Not too cheery overall. But one thing I can predict with confidence: like every year, there will be good bits and bad bits. Is the ratio even up to us? Who knows?

Supersized mini-me

This is just the latest in a series of big babies being born all over the world, but particularly in America (land of the fat and home of the junk food?).

Apart from the freakish fascination that this kind of story holds, my mind just boggles at how it's news that this kid is abnormally big, but not the possible reasons why: not one but two overweight parents, gestational diabetes, and a condition called macrosomia.

Sometimes bigger isn't better. It's not good to be overweight; it's even worse to be morbidly obese, as these parents obviously are. But this kid has absolutely no chance. Every possible fat gene that hasn't been discovered yet has probably been switched on in the womb, and every environmental factor that could possibly exist will ensure that she'll probably be obese her entire life. Overall, not the best start for life. Those parents shouldn't be sitting there, they should be taking the baby out for a walk.

... the harder they fall

Hiding behind evolutions's victory in a Pennsylvania district court room this week is something that has the potential to become an even bigger embarrassment for science.

In August, Woo Suk Hwang was Korea's "king of cloning" (New Scientist, 3 August 2005. And he wasn't just the king of animal (or more specifically, Afghan hound) cloning; he was most famous for his success with human embryonic stell cells.

All that began to unravel last month when his American co-author Gerald Schatten announced that some of the eggs Hwang used for his experiments were donated by junior staff in his lab; a serious ethical breach (at least for Westerners; in South Korea the women were hailed as heroes rather than portrayed as victims). Hwang admitted to everything, resigned, and was hospitalised for stress.

As if that wasn't bad enough, due to media pressure Hwang was forced to admit to Science, who published his last two ground-breaking papers, that some of his data was flawed. At first it seemed that the corrections he was making wouldn't alter his findings, but last Friday (16 December), Hwang and his co-authors retracted their 2005 paper. Their 2004 article is now being re-examined too.

This whole chain of events erases scientists' excitement over Hwang's achievements and for him and his co-authors it is certainly a personal tragedy (albeit self-afflicted to some degree). And it must be a blow for anyone suffering one of the many diseases that may one day be cured by stem cell therapy. Christopher Reeve must be turning over in his grave. But there are deeper concerns for the broader scientific community; deeper than those caused by Luk Van Parijs's falsifications in physics.

Stem cell research has always been stymied by the far right's "moral" obligations, and by laypeople's squeamish imaginations conjuring up pictures of humanoid fetuses being murdered and dissected (the embryos used are really just bundles of cells). But the uphill battle that Western stem cell researchers faced when trying to carry out their work was at least somewhat alleviated by the knowledge that the work was being done, albeit not by them. But Hwang has given his detractors the perfect ammunition: he didn't follow ethical guidelines when obtaining the eggs crucial to his research, and he falsified his data. The conclusions they'll draw: Hwang is a bad, bad man, and what's more, his research didn't even work. Extrapolate that out to all stem cell researchers and suddenly they're all unethical and wastefully ineffectual.

Stem cell research, both fact and philosophy, is certainly worse off. If I'm right in assuming that at least some of the anti-stem cell mob are also part of the intelligent design mob, it's not such a victory in Pennsylvania. It's a 1-1 draw if we're lucky.