Science and the media: 11 - 17 September
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0749
In this week’s review, Steve Corneliussen discusses a Washington Post news article and a Wall Street Journal op-ed engaging the federal exercise of scientific authority, an editorial and an article in Nature on turmoil and change in China’s scientific publishing, a front-page Post report on women surpassing men in the earning of PhDs, a Nature editorial on political dangers for science, and a set of Wall Street Journal letters joining controversy about Stephen Hawking’s latest book.
To “celebrate courage and scientific decision-making”
At first, this posting won’t appear to be about science at all, and in the end, in any case, it’s not about physics—not very directly anyway.
Whatever is to be said about the columnist George Will’s political opinions, it must always be said that he’s very good at selecting concrete examples to support them. For his 16 September newspaper column —headlined “Trifle with the government?"—he selected the Depression-era story of tailor and launderer Jacob Maged, who ran absurdly and unjustly afoul of the New Deal era’s NRA: National Recovery Administration. Maged charged 35 cents instead of the federally required 40 cents for pressing men’s suits.
Will’s opinion—that economic recovery, then or now, is no excuse to subordinate private interests to public authority—leads him to conclude with this observation from the economist Milton Friedman: “Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.”
Three letters? Do without? The observation has nothing to do with science, yet calls to mind something important about private interests, public authority and science.
Consider FDA, for Food and Drug Administration and consider Lyndsey Layton’s 14 September Washington Post news article “Honoring a decision that made history: 50 years ago, Frances Oldham Kelsey refused to approve drug later found to cause birth defects.”
Like George Will, the reporter has selected a compelling story, this one also about private interests and public authority. It’s the story of a young scientist whose adherence to science and principle at the FDA headed off disaster for some unknown but probably substantial number of American families.
Even those who don’t remember the drug thalidomide’s terrible effects on babies might well appreciate Layton’s article. Like Will’s column, it achieves its force by exploiting a narrative, a story. Here are excerpts from its start:
It was a straightforward assignment for a newcomer to the Food and Drug Administration, such a simple task that Frances Oldham Kelsey was given a cubbyhole of an office and the bare basics to get it done: review an application from a drug company to market a new sedative called Kevadon. The drug was already widely used in Britain, Germany and about 20 other countries and it was a lucrative success for its manufacturer. . . .
At the time, in 1960, Americans were dazzled by vaccines, antibiotics and the vast array of new discoveries defining modern life.
But Kelsey, a physician and a pharmacologist, questioned the safety of Kevadon, the brand name for thalidomide, and refused approval. “It just came with so many extravagant claims that I didn’t believe,” Kelsey, now 96, said Monday in an interview at her Bethesda home.
The drug company pushed back and started an intense campaign, repeatedly calling and meeting with Kelsey and her superiors, including the FDA commissioner.
Kelsey was steadfast, and her resistance became the stuff of legend when it turned out that thalidomide caused severe birth defects in thousands of babies born in Europe and elsewhere. The drug had been prescribed for women to help them sleep or manage morning sickness. The babies often had malformed arms or legs or extra appendages.
As a young researcher at the University of Chicago, Kelsey had been concerned about the dangers that drugs can have on fetuses, and she held that in mind as she handled the thalidomide case.
Kelsey was celebrated as a heroine, and President John F. Kennedy gave her the highest civilian honor. . .
The article also reports that to mark the 50th anniversary of this action, the FDA has created something called the Kelsey Award to be given regularly to an employee to “celebrate courage and scientific decision-making.”
Wall Street Journal op-ed: One woman’s “Battle with Cancer and the FDA”
This posting’s subject, again—with no direct link to physics, again—is the entrusting of the special authority of science to government, as seen in a story about the Food and Drug Administration’s public authority over private interests. Only this time, the private interests are those of one citizen, Geraldine Satossky of Reston, Virginia. She’s the author of the 16 September Wall Street Journal op-ed “My Battle With Cancer and the FDA: By Friday regulators may withdraw the drug that’s keeping me alive.” Satossky begins:
I am 67 years young and I’ve been battling breast cancer for 11 years. I’m alive today because of a drug called Avastin. But by Friday the FDA is expected to revoke its approval of the drug for use against breast cancer. I’m terribly frightened—and angry.
She recounts both the harrowing spells and the benign ones from that period, leading most recently to three and a half successful years with Avastin. “Today, I’m not just living life,” she writes, “I’m enjoying it.” However, on Friday the FDA will “rule on its advisory panel’s recommendation to withdraw approval of Avastin.” Though it’s possible that Satossky would be grandfathered, she says, there are still “countless women who might benefit from the drug.”
She calls this “outrageous.” She says, “I don’t understand the government’s rationale” and mentions two aspects of it. First, the FDA believes “Avastin doesn’t show enough promise against breast cancer,” but she finds this “very hard to believe,” for she herself is, she asserts, “proof that Avastin works.” Second, the FDA is also concerned about side effects, but she calls this too illogical, since “all chemotherapy has horrible side effects, too"—as “does every other medicine” that she has tried.
Moreover, she declares, “the worst side effect is death, and that’s guaranteed to happen when cancer isn’t treated.” She also reports that some people claim that the FDA’s decision is merely about the money. Maybe a better treatment or even a cure will eventually materialize, she conjectures. But until then, she says, “Avastin is all I have. And I want to live.”
Powerful story. Something missing—obviously and maybe also understandably—is the FDA’s full rationale, presumably framed with more scientific rigor than implied in this op-ed. It’s bordering on heartless to assert it, but wouldn’t an FDA scientist at least be tempted to dispute, for example, the statistics of a single-case “proof”?
And one other something is also missing, something that came up in an earlier, somewhat related posting’s mention of three-letter federal agencies. Even Geraldine Satossky, who has bravely gone public with her wrenching, riveting personal drama, doesn’t so much as begin to express skepticism about the very existence of this particular three-letter federal agency, the FDA, or of its scientific vetting function.
Nature reports on and advises about China’s new scientific publishing ambitions
In a news article and an editorial , the 16 September issue of Nature discusses at length China’s new ambitions in the field of scientific publishing.
Under the headline “Strong medicine for China’s journals: Weak publications will be ‘terminated,’” David Cyranoski’s news article reports on an effort to improve—or maybe revolutionize is the word—China’s scientific publishing. Many of the country’s journals, writes Cyranoski, “are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism.” He continues:
Li Dongdong, a vice-minister of state and deputy director of the General Administration of Press and Publications (GAPP)—the powerful government body that regulates all publications in China—acknowledged that the country’s scientific publishing had a “severe” problem, with “a big gap between quality and quantity,” and needed reform.
The reform reportedly will involve closing or relaunching deficient journals, giving support to stronger journals, and concentrating scientific publishing in 5–10 large publishing groups. At the end of the article, Cyranoski summarizes the underlying motivation:
For Li, strong scientific publishing is a necessary “driving force in innovation and technological strength.” Once the new reforms are under way, she says, “journals will be a strong part of our soft power.”
Cyranoski also reports that most of China’s “top researchers already forgo Chinese publications for international ones” and that “in November 2009, scientists from China became the second-most prolific publishers of scientific articles in international scientific journals.” He mentions “an open letter signed by 35 librarians [that] criticized foreign science, technology and medicine publishers for ‘using their monopolistic position’ to raise subscription prices annually by more than 14% for the next 3 years.”
And Cyranoski notes that “some of the better Chinese journals are being published in collaboration with foreign companies such as Wiley-Blackwell and Springer” and that many Chinese journals are switching to English to increase their impact factors. He does not mention the new publishing presence in China of the American Institute of Physics.
Under the headline “China needs to elaborate on plans to modernize its flagging academic journals,” Nature‘s editorial encourages China to be “aggressive” in “evaluating its journals [and in] improving the strong and killing off the weak.” The editors call for transferring the resources and publishing rights of the eliminated journals “to the growing number of scientists and publishers who are familiar with the international publishing landscape.”
The editors caution, however, that it would “be a mistake for government agencies to give themselves too strong a role in this transition,” that the 5–10 new publishing houses must be able to “move freely and openly” and to “compete both with each other and with foreign publishers,” and that the GAPP regulatory agency “needs to make its expectations and evaluation methods transparent and bring in its reforms consistently,” which so far “does not seem to be happening.”
The editors also call for an open-access approach:
The best opportunity to revive Chinese publishing, whether in Chinese or English, probably lies in an open-access platform—increasingly popular in Western journals. Because they already charge authors a publication fee, many Chinese journals should be able to make a smooth transition to the open-access model, in which they are supported by fees rather than by subscription revenues. Making content freely available would help to popularize journals and would encourage them to develop an online presence. Too many operate without one, so they enjoy a captive audience at their home institutions and lack any competitive spur to bring themselves up to speed on internet publishing. The government could provide the interest, investment and expertise to bring these publishers into the 21st century.
Washington Post front page: “More women than men got PhDs last year”
For the first time, more women than men got PhDs last year, according to a headline below the fold on the front page of the 14 September Washington Post. The article conveys findings from the report Graduate Enrollment and Degrees: 1999 to 2009 , by the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington.
Women undergraduates began reaching parity in the early 1980s, the Post says, and “then they eclipsed men—so thoroughly that federal officials are now investigating whether some liberal arts schools are favoring men in admissions to preserve some semblance of gender balance.”
The article also reports that men hold more faculty and administrative positions in academe, and that according to the American Association of University Professors, at every level men also still make more money. And it notes that men “retained the lead in doctoral degrees until 2008, largely through their dominance in engineering, mathematics and the physical sciences,” and that they “still earn nearly 80 percent of engineering doctorates.”
Nature‘s editors warn about “scorn” for science
A book review in the 9 September issue of Nature begins by asserting that “the ‘Climategate’ affair is now subsiding into the long grass of conspiracy blogs.” Subsiding? Maybe that’s wishful thinking, at least for the US, if an editorial in that same issue has merit. Under the headline “Science scorned,” Nature‘s editors offer strong cautions about the “anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States.”
It may be noteworthy that the editors take special aim at the political commentator Rush Limbaugh, whom they mention several times, including in this opening paragraph:
“The four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.” It is tempting to laugh off this and other rhetoric broadcast by Rush Limbaugh, a conservative US radio host, but Limbaugh and similar voices are no laughing matter.
The editors call it reassuring that “polls continue to show that the overwhelming majority of the US public sees science as a force for good,” and they offer the hope that “the anti-science rumblings may be ephemeral.” But they also offer two reminders that Climategate may be far from “subsiding":
Take the surprise ousting last week of Lisa Murkowski, the incumbent Republican senator for Alaska, by political unknown Joe Miller in the Republican primary for the 2 November midterm congressional elections. Miller, who is backed by the conservative ‘Tea Party movement’, called his opponent’s acknowledgement of the reality of global warming “exhibit A for why she needs to go.”
Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world.”
For some reason the editors don’t cite the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, where as recently as 19 July an editorial unreservedly attacked as “evasions” what many in science—including the book reviewer mentioned above—have seen not only as Climategate participants’ exonerations, but as exonerations assumed to be widely respected. Is that assumption valid?
Letters in WSJ attack Stephen Hawking’s and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Grand Design
“The Hawking vs. God debate has featured prominently in the news of late,” reports Sean Carroll in an 11 September Wall Street Journal review of Stephen Hawking’s and Leonard Mlodinow’s new book, The Grand Design. And indeed in that same issue, eight letters to the editor—an unusual number for this newspaper—constitute an episode in that debate.
As mentioned last week, the 4 September Wall Street Journal had run a lengthy excerpt of the book under the headline “Why God Did Not Create the Universe: There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required.”
Now WSJ‘s opinion editors have chosen a nearly uniformly negative set of letters in response. The headline telegraphs the letters’ general theme: “At Their Outer Edges, All Belief Systems Require Faith.” That is, Hawking and Mlodinow are attacked for offering not science, but—allegedly—merely their own assumptions and beliefs wrapped up as science.
The first letter introduces this theme. The writer had expected the excerpt to challenge his religious faith, but says he found instead a “joke,” with Hawking and Mlodinow simply “being funny.” He continues:
Their explanations require such high levels of intricate faith that they make Jesus walking on water look like a parlor trick.
They tell us that we are the spontaneous creation of another universe. Dumb question maybe, but where did that universe come from, and the one before that and the one before that? Where is the science? Oh, I get it. It is based on assumption not faith.
To see the world through only the eyes of faith and be unwilling to recognize patterns that we call science is to be closed to the truth. To see the patterns without recognizing that we are part of a greater mosaic, the coordination of which is beyond our comprehension is, likewise, to be closed to the truth. As Billy Graham, the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa and Joyce Meyer are people of faith, Messrs. Hawking and Mlodinow are men of assumption.
The recurring charge that the authors haven’t tested their theory, and can’t test it, is capped in the last of the letters. There Jerry Schad, a professor of physical science and astronomy at San Diego Mesa College, asks, “Until and unless hard evidence of ‘other universes’ comes in, how can I (or anyone) justify the teaching of the multiverse idea in a science classroom?” Then he declares, “The elevation of the multiverse mythology within science to anything more than a pure speculative idea personally embarrasses me.”
In one letter, the sarcasm and derisiveness take the form of a joke:
God in heaven happened to hear a group of scientists on Earth expounding on the progress made by modern science and the fact that God was irrelevant and might not even exist. Intrigued, God assumed human form and popped down to earth and joined the conversation.
“You say that you are so advanced that you can create life from mere dirt and that God is not part of the equation?,” God inquired. “Yes, that’s right,” said one scientist. “Let me see how you do that,” said God in disguise.
The scientist bent down and picked up a handful of dirt. God looked at him and said, “Oh, no, no, no. Get your own dirt.”
More than one letter writer insists that it’s illogical to assert that “something can come from nothing.” But none of them challenge, or even engage, the quantum cosmological basis that Hawking and Mlodinow offered in the excerpt when they wrote, “As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing.”
There’s more, and maybe there’ll also be more—maybe to compare, maybe to contrast—in other national papers.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for “Science and the media.” He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
