Medical Experiments on Slaves
April 28, 2015
An article by Dan Vergano at Buzzfeed alerts us:
Electric shocks, brain surgery, amputations — these are just some of the medical experiments widely performed on American slaves in the mid-1800s, according to a new survey of medical journals published before the Civil War.
Previous work by historians had uncovered a handful of rogue physicians conducting medical experiments on slaves. But the new report, published in the latest issue of the journal Endeavour, suggests that a widespread network of medical colleges and doctors across the American South carried out and published slave experiments, for decades.
…
Savitt first reported in the 1970s that medical schools in Virginia had trafficked in slaves prior to the Civil War. But historians had seen medical experiments on slaves as a practice isolated to a few physicians — until now.
to the following paper.
Kenny, S.C. Power, opportunism, racism: Human experiments under American slavery. Endeavour,
Volume 39, Issue 1, March 2015, Pages 10–20[Publisher Link]
Kenny writes:
Medical science played a key role in manufacturing and deepening societal myths of racial difference from the earli- est years of North American colonisation. Reflecting the practice of anatomists and natural historians throughout the Atlantic world, North American physicians framed andinscribed the bodies, minds and behaviours of black subjects with scientific and medical notions of fundamental and inherent racial difference. These medical ideas racialised skin, bones, blood, diseases, with some theories specifically designed to justify and defend the institution of racial slavery, but they also manifested materially as differential treatment – seen in medical education, practice and research.
I dunno. Have we changed all that much?
Baltimore
April 28, 2015
A few weeks ago, the Baltimore police severed the spine of a citizen who had apparently committed the crime of running away from a police officer. Mr. Gray died.
In the past few days, Baltimore has experienced a lot of protest and unrest.
I am saddened and I am frustrated. As small a thing as it is, I feel better when I go over to DonorsChoose, select a few science-related project in Baltimore schools and donate some money. I invite you to join me. Perhaps projects such as the following might catch your eye.
Ms. Robinson’s Books project at Yorkwood Elementary School:
As I continue building a safe learning environment now I’ve learned that emotions play a HUGE part in a students’ ability to learn. I want to help students express themselves emotionally by identifying how they feel, the cause that feeling and teaching them strategies to manage and regulate them.
Two resource books – Zones of Regulation and Social Thinking for Tweens and Teens. Zones of Regulation will provide the research behind it and teach me how to implement this strategy and share with our parent community and fellow colleagues. Social Thinking for Tween and Teens will help our mentors connect with our students participating in our Girls Social Group.
Finally, one yellow hokki stool and one red bean bag is needed to identify the color-coded zones. (I already have the other colors). These two additional seating choices will allow me to create two Zones of Regulation.
As we interact with the world and others, we respond emotionally leaving us with a good or bad experiences. Those experiences shape how we view ourselves, others and our place in the world. In this day and age, we live in a volatile world in which our students are apart, so it’s imperative that I help them to deal with their emotions and discover ways to cope or manage it for optimal learning and a lifelong skill.
Mrs. Edmonds’s Supplies project at Gardenville Elementary School addresses all six grade levels:
The materials in this project will be used throughout the 6 grade levels. Kindergarten and first grade focuses on plants and animals and living things, in which the different insects and plants will be used. First grade also learns about life cycles and the frog life cycle will be amazing for them to actually see these stages. The third grade life science focus is on insects and they will also be using the live insects. The fifth graders will learn about food chains and webs and will participate in dissecting the owl pellets.
I don’t usually gravitate toward the high school projects but Mrs. Reigel’s Books project at Carver Vocational Tech Senior High School seeks to use The Hot Zone to educate on biology.
My students love to read interesting things and have discussions. It is my goal to challenge them with reading materials, and engage them in discussions that relate to their everyday lives and the world at large. Reading “The Hot Zone” will cover many Biology topics as well as current events. Students will read, analyze, connect, discuss and debate the books this year.
Why are you a scientist?
April 27, 2015
From the Twitts…..
Me, I think I never got past “I wonder what that does?”
That study of peer review perplexes me
April 24, 2015
I just can’t understand what is valuable about showing that a 1%ile difference in voted score leads to 2% difference in total citations of papers attributed to that grant award. All discussions of whether NIH peer review is working or broken center on the supposed failure to fund meritorious grants and the alleged funding of non-meritorious grants.
Please show me one PI that is upset that her 4%ile funded grant really deserved a 2%ile and that shows that peer review is horribly broken.
The real issue, how a grant overlooked by the system would fare *were it to be funded* is actually addressed to some extent by the graph on citations to clearly outlying grants funded by exception.
This is cast as Program rescuing those rare exception brilliant proposal. But again, how do we know the ones that Program fails to rescue wouldn’t have performed well?
Scientific Publishers
April 23, 2015
Scientific publishers being told they can’t keep fleecing the taxpayer so badly are basically Cliven Bundy. Discuss.
New plan for angry authors
April 23, 2015
Two years after your paper is published in Journal of SocietyB send the citation report showing that it quadrupled the JIF of the JournalA that rejected it to the rejecting Editor.
Let’s make this a thing, people.
Thought of the Day
April 22, 2015
You know those clickbait links on the bottom of some dubious “news” website articles, including HuffPo? Usually about the latest celebrity pictures or “hottest NFL wives” or something?
There is a trend for “white celebrity you didn’t know was married to a black spouse!”
Now it’s “…and aren’t their biracial kids kyooooot?”
This feels like interracial fetish porn to me.
Icky.
Discuss.
Newt Gingrich to the rescue! (Again)
April 22, 2015
In the 420 bit from this week, Jessica Williams asserts that marijuana is “a non-addictive proven medical treatment“.
Marijuana is most certainly addictive.
In 2012, 17.5% of all substance abuse treatment admissions had marijuana as their primary abused drug. Alcohol alone was 21.5%, heroin 16.3% and cocaine 6.9%.
Daily marijuana smokers use 3 times a day on average and have little variability from day to day.
Pregnant women are unwilling or unable to stop smoking pot almost daily. Increasing numbers of pregnant women are seeking help to discontinue pot use.
At least one woman found out her hyperemesis during pregnancy was the pot, not morning sickness.
Marijuana is addictive in adolescents.
When adolescents stop smoking weed, their memory gets better.
About six percent of High School seniors are smoking pot almost every day.
Clinical trials of medications to help people who are addicted to marijuana stop using are far from rare.
Francophones are addicted to pot.
Yes, Dutch people are addicted to pot.
Many Cases of cannabis hyperemesis syndrome are unable to stop smoking pot, even though it is severely incapacitating them.
About 37% of frequent pot users will transition to dependence in three years.
Oh, and pot users are not awesome, friendly and mellow, actually nondependent users are impulsive and hostile on the day they use pot compared with nonsmoking days.
Flakka is just the latest in a long line of stimulant drugs that can, in some very rare cases, result in astonishing public behavior.
Such as running nude through the streets to escape “unknown people trying to kill him”.
Such as trying to kick in the door of a police station to get IN so as to escape cars that were supposedly chasing him.
Such as trying to shoot oneself on a rooftop, naked.
Such as trying to have carnal relations with a tree after proclaiming oneself to be Thor.
These stories are like crack to the mainstream media. They have been telling these stories for years, encompassing public scares over PCP, crack cocaine and methamphetamine over the decades past. More recently we’ve seen these types of stories about synthetic cathinones, in particular under the generic term “bath salts”.
Sprinkled amongst the stories about classical psychomotor stimulant effects, we have stories of overdose involving synthetic opioids, MDMA and/or Molly and stories of adverse psychotropic effects of synthetic cannabinoid products. I’ve addressed some of these issues in prior posts and for today I want to discuss the stimulants of more traditional effect.
My greatest frustration with the reporting is not actually the breathless sensationalism, although that runs a close second. The biggest problem is the lack of verification of the bizarre behavior (or overdose) being associated with ingestion of the drug that is alleged in the initial reporting. I have not see one single verification of alpha-PVP in the body tissues of these recent Florida cases where the subjects reported consuming Flakka. We still do not know exactly what drugs were consumed by the 11 Wesleyan University students who became ill enough to hospitalize. We don’t know what caused the death of Kimchi Truong at last year’s Coachella music festival.
Oftentimes there are multiple media reports which, to their credit, mention that toxicology testing will take some weeks to verify. And yet. Rarely is there ever a follow-up accounting. And when there is a followup, well, it gets very poor penetration and people often parrot the wrong information even years later.
The Florida Causeway Cannibal is a case in point. At the time of the initial event it was almost universally reported to be due to “bath salts”, i.e. MDPV. Toxicology reporting found no sign of any synthetic cathinone in Mr. Eugene.
It is long past time for us to hold the media as accountable for accuracy and followup on drug-related stories as we do for, say, sports reporting.
Now, there are a couple of bright lights in this generally dismal area of news reporting. Here’s a local story that reported MDA, not MDMA, was at blame for a death (although they still screw up, MDA is not a “parent” drug of MDMA). In 2013 there was followup in three music festival deaths in New York to confirm MDMA, methylone and the combination of the two caused the three fatalities. We need this kind of attention paid to all of these cases.
Getting back to the current media storm over “Flakka”, which is alpha-pyrrolidinopentiophenone (alpha-PVP), I have a few links for you if you are interested in additional reading on this drug.
@forensictoxguy posted a list of scientific papers on alpha-PVP at The Dose Makes the Poison blog. It is not a very long list at present! (Marusich et al, 2014 is probably the place to start your reading.)
The Dose Makes the Poison discussed alpha-PVP back in early 2014….this is not a new 2015 drug by any means.
Michael Taffe from The Scripps Research Institute [PubMed; Lab Site] gives a preview of a paper in press showing alpha-PVP and MDPV are pretty similar to each other in rat self-administration.
There was also a post on the Taffe blog suggesting that alpha-PVP samples submitted to ecstasydata.org were more consistently pure than MDPV and some other street drugs.
Jacob Sullum has written a pretty good Opinion piece at Forbes Fear Of Flakka: Anti-Drug Hysteria Validates Itself.
Review of the above information will help you to assess claims in the media that Flakka is “[insert more addictive, more dangerous, more powerful, worse] than [insert bath salts, MDPV, methamphetamine, cocaine]”.
tldr; It isn’t.
It will also assist you in coming to an understanding that Flakka is likely to be just as addictive and problematic as these previously sensationalized stimulants.
tldr; It is.
In my view, the scope of the Flakka problem over the coming years will be dictated by user popularity and availability, and not by anything particularly unique about the molecular structure of alpha-PVP.
Question of the Day
April 17, 2015
Do you keep track of your manuscript rejections in any systematic way? If so, how?
Ted’s an [Censored] and Other Lessons on Lab Closures
April 16, 2015
The following is a guest post.
For those who have never had the unique experience of visiting a high security prison and the opportunity to meet @drugmonkeyblog in real life….he’s an asshole. Earlier this week, this sentiment ran thru parts of science Twitter and Ted’s blog comments following his kicking the academic ‘nads of one Andrew Hollenbach after he had the misfortune of posting his story about having to close his lab when his funding ran out.
Ted gets in a twist that Andrew Hollenbach says he was ‘trying’ and rails for paragraphs about how Hollenbeck efforts should not be construed as ‘trying’. In his own bit of MDMA-fueled cyber sleuthing, @drugmonkeyblog took the poor doods CV to task. Not enough pubs. Gaps in funding. Unclear appointments. Ted stood at a tree in the forest, found a leaf and chopped that thing up.
If you were that hacked up bit of leaf, how well would you do? You need to know the answer to this. Look at your CV. Be brutally honest. Ask others to be brutally honest. Get a mentoring committee you trust. Find IRL or cyber peers who will hold your feet to the fire and know people who won’t blow smoke up your arse when you fail.
Hollenbach talks about his love of science and teaching yet now has no idea what his next step is because can’t find an adult job as scientist. I don’t personally care about his CV. At my core, I am upset that this is someone who could be anyone I know. Throw in a personal tragedy, an experimental disaster (check your -80 lint screen lately?) and you can go from independent academic scientist to sadsack sitting in a pile of dried out samples in no time.
We are in a diminishing forest of people and this is not how we honor those in our profession. He’s leaving academics and this is sad. And it is scary. And I’m not going to kick him in the arse on the way out the door. Doing science is noble and anyone who does it with passion should be able to find a place. We have invested too much in scientists and have too few highly educated people to not mourn when they have clear no future in mind after closing a lab.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not handing out cookies. But if you played well with others, did your job by other accounts, and were not a cheatfuckking, harassing, credit stealing fucknuts, I will always be sad we lose an academic scientist. I don’t know if he should have been a PI. But I sure won’t be the one that suggests he be an investment banker.
Ted is an asshole but he evaluated his CV. And until there is another way to measure scientist’s impact honoring all the things we can bring to academia and society, you will be at the hands of assholes like Ted.
Review your own CV. Frequently.
April 14, 2015
Yesterday’s review of the research publications of a person who had written about closing down his lab due to lack of funding in this “unfair” grant award environment touched a nerve on at least one Reader. I assume it was uncomfortable for many of you to read.
It was uncomfortable for me to write.
You can tell because I felt compelled to slip in the odd caveat about my own record. I can write one of those reviews about my own career that would be equally, if not more, critical and uncomfortable.
No doubt more than one of you got the feeling that if I wrote a similar review of your record you would come up wanting …or at least PhysioProffe would jump in to tell you how shitasse you are*. Certainly at least one correspondent expressed this feeling.
But that tinge of anxiety, fear and possibly shame that you feel should tell you that it is a good idea to perform this little review of yourself now and again. Good to try to step outside of your usual excuses to yourself and see how your CV looks to the dispassionate observer who doesn’t know anything about your career other than the publication and NIH-award (or other grants, as relevant) record.
Do you have obvious weaknesses? Too few publications? Too few first/last author (as appropriate). Too few collaborations? Insufficiently high Journal Impact Factor points? Etc.
What is all of this going to say to grant reviewers, hiring committees or promotions committees?
Then, this allows you to do something about it. You can’t change the past but you can alter the course of your future.
In some situations, like crafting the NIH Biosketch Personal Statement, you do actually have the opportunity to alter the past….not the reality but certainly the perception of it. So that is another place where the review of your CV helps. That voice of excuse-making that arises? Leverage that. You DO have reasons for certain weaknesses and perhaps other features of your CV help to overcome that if they are just pointed out properly.
___
*he wouldn’t, btw.
On productivity and the “unfair” grant funding game
April 13, 2015
There is an article up on ASBMB Today by Andrew D. Hollenbach that laments the shut-down of his research program. In The reality that dare not speak its name we learn:
It was the day after my lab manager left, forced to find a new job by a vicious funding environment that took a trusted employee and friend from me and shut down my research program.
This is terrible, I will acknowledge. I have feared this outcome for my own research program, only briefly interrupted, for my entire independent career. The wolves are always near the door and winter is most certainly coming.
Hollenbach finds this to be unfair. And that assertion triggers slightly more thought than mere sympathy and empathetic butt clenching.
I spent 20 years studying the mechanisms underlying a childhood muscle tumor. I published more than 20 articles with a lab of no more than three people at one time, intentionally kept small so I could focus on mentoring. I established a new paradigm in my field, identified viable therapeutic targets and trained five students (three of whom went to Harvard University for postdocs). I am recognized worldwide for my research.
You would think that all of that would be enough to bring in money and continue my research. But it’s not.
My immediate thought was no, no I don’t think that is enough in this day and age. 20 papers in 20 years of an independent career is not a fantastic publishing rate. Of course, yes, there are going to be field and model specifics that greatly affect publishing rate. There will be differences in publishing style and venue as well…if this had been 20 CNS publications, well, this would be pretty good productivity. But a search of PubMed seems to confirm that the pursuit of the very highest Glamour publications was not the issue. I am not an expert in this guy’s field of study but glancing over his publication titles and journals I get the distinct impression of a regular-old Jane/Joe type of scientist here. Many people can claim to have established new paradigms, sent trainees off to impressive-sounding postdoctoral stints (or assistant professorships) and to have identified ‘viable’ therapeutic targets. I say this not to belittle the guy but to point out that this is not in any way special. It is not an immediately obvious compensation for a rather underwhelming rate of publication. For a PI, that is, who asserts he’s had a long-term lab manager and up to three people in his group at a time.
Hollenbach’s funding hasn’t been overwhelmingly generous but he’s had NIH grants. RePORTER shows that he started with a component of a P20 Center grant from 2004-2009 and an R01 from 2009-2013.
Wait. What “20 years”?
Hollenbach’s bio claims he was made junior faculty in 2001 and won his first Assistant Professor job in 2003. This matches up better with his funding history so I think we’d better just focus on the past 10 years to really take home a message about careerism. One senior author publication in 2003 from that junior-faculty stint and then the next one is 2007 and then three in 2008. So far, so good. Pretty understandable for the startup launch of a new laboratory.
Then we note that there is only one paper in each of 2009 and 2010. Hmmm. Things can happen, sure. Sure. Two papers in 2011 but one is a middle authorship. One more publication in each of 2012, 2014 and 2015 (to date). The R01 grant lists 7 pubs as supported but two of those were published before the grant was awarded and one was published 9 months into the first funding interval. So 5 pubs supported by the R01 in this second phase. And an average as a faculty member that runs just under a publication per year.
Lord knows I haven’t hit an overwhelming publication output rate across my entire career. I understand slowdowns. These are going to happen now and again. And for certain sure there are going to be chosen model systems that generate publishable datasets more slowly than others.
But.
But…..
One paper per year, sustained across 10 years, is not the kind of productivity rate that people view as normal and average and unremarkable. Particularly when it comes to grant review at the NIH level.
I would be very surprised if the grant applications this PI has submitted did not receive a few comments questioning his publication output.
Look at my picture, and you will not see a failure. You will see someone who worked hard, excelled at what he did, held true to himself and maintained his integrity. However, you also will see someone whose work was brought to a halt by an unfair system.
Something else occurs to me. The R01 was funded up to March 2013. So this presumably means that this recent dismissal of the long-term lab manager comes after a substantial interval of grant submission deadlines? I do wonder how many grant applications the guy submitted and what the outcomes were. This would seem highly pertinent to the “unfair system” comment. You know my attitude, Dear Reader. If one is supported on a single grant, bets the farm on a competing continuation hitting right on schedule and is disappointed…this is not evidence of the system being unfair. If a PI is unfunded and submits a grant, waits for the reviews, skips a round, submits the revision, waits for the reviews, skips another round, writes a new proposal….. well, THIS IS NOT ENOUGH! This is not trying. And if you are not trying, you have no right to talk about the “unfair system” as it applies to your specific outcome.
I close, as I often do, with career advice. Don’t do this people. Don’t let yourself publish on the lower bound on what is considered an acceptable rate for your field, approaches, models and, most importantly, funding agency’s review panels.
PS: This particular assertion regarding what surely must be necessary to survive as a grant-funded is grotesquely inaccurate.
Some may say that I did not do enough. Maybe I didn’t. I could have been a slave-driving mentor to get more publications in journals with higher impact factors. I could have worked 80-hour weeks, ignoring my family and friends. I could have given in to unfettered ambition, rolling over anyone who got in my way.
A new Stock Criticism for NIH Grants
April 11, 2015
I have decided to deploy a brand new Stock Criticism.
“No effort for a staff scientist is described, which may limit progress.”
Feel free to borrow it.
DrugMonkey 