Bias in Selection for NIH Study Sections

Interesting exchange on the twitts today with someone who is intimating that the process of selecting peers to serve as grant reviewers on NIH study sections requires some transparency and fixing.

As my longer term Readers are aware, my main objection along these lines is that I think Assistant Professors should not be excluded and that the purge urged on by Toni Scarpa back some years ago was misguided. I will also venture that I think it is ridiculous that the peer review pool is limited to those Professorial rank people who have already won funding from the NIH (for the most part). If really pressed, I’ve been know to suggest that it is even unfair that the more senior postdoc types who have not yet won a faculty-level appointment cannot review grants.

Other than that, I am generally down with the official mandates to seek ethnic/racial, gender and geographic representation on panels. My personal experience has been that the SROs do a pretty good job at this. Also, because of these factors, I have found that the types of institutions represented spans the range pretty well..small mostly teaching profs, big Research Uni profs, research insitutes of various sizes, public Unis, private Unis, Med Schools and academic departments.

So it is with some confusion that I read someone asserting that there is a problem with who is selected.

My query of the day, therefore, is to ask you if you know of people who seek to serve on study section but cannot seem to land an invite. Alternately, do you know of categories of investigators that are routinely overlooked?

It was the MDPV that killed him

New Case Report from the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

Kesha K, Boggs CL, Ripple MG, Allan CH, Levine B, Jufer-Phipps R, Doyon S, Chi P, Fowler DR. Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (“Bath Salts”),Related Death: Case Report and Review of the Literature. J Forensic Sci. 2013 Jul 3. doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.12202. [Epub ahead of print][PubMed, Publisher]

The subject was a 39 year old man with a history of depression, back pain and drug/alcohol abuse. He was found in public talking to himself, delusional. Once admitted to the hospital, he became agitated, tachycardic and hyperthermic (107 degF noted). Although the decedent was positive for diphenhydramine, promethazine, diazepam and nordiazepam the conclusion was….

Based on the investigative, autopsy, and toxicology findings in this case, the cause of death was methylenedioxypyrovalerone intoxication and the manner of death was accident. It is also important to note that his bizarre behavior with life-threatening hyperthermia is consistent with an MDPV-induced excited delirium state in this individual.

Yep.

The peripheral blood level was 1.0 mg/L of MDPV. We’re just starting to see reports so we’ll just have to wait and collect various blood levels that are associated with medical emergency and death to try to get an idea of the danger zone. Of course, there will be no such thing as an absolute threshold, as individual susceptibility and the circumstances will vary.