Stories I’m following (but can’t yet weigh in on)

You know how, when you go to your day job, the relevant stories keep unfolding? And you say, “Gee, I should think more about that so I have something useful to say here,” but meanwhile another story pops up? And soon, you’ve got like 20 tabs open on Firefox with the things you want to deal with, but you’re going to have to restart the computer because your software update requires a restart and you’re not ready to deal fully with those stories you’ve been tracking?!
Yeah, me too. So, until I can catch up, here are some links:

• At The Well-Timed Period, incorrect information about emergency contraception and ectopic pregnancy disseminated by NIH. Does NIH have brand new data that hasn’t hit the journals yet? Are they interpreting the published data while drunk? Or is there some politically driven lying going on?
• At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe looks at the trends in the best-selling drugs … and where they’re being made. He counsels,
  

  So, think about what you’re doing for a living, fellow chemists. Is it something that someone easy to locate could do for a lot less money? It had better not be. Failing that, you’d better start to pick up some impressive new reasons to justify your paycheck.

  Probably this is solid economic advice to industry chemists. But I wonder about extending it to the academic scientist. Also, I worry whether efforts to protect a niche might (at a certain point) collide with the importance placed on scientific replicability (a balancing act I was thinking about a while ago, in a slightly different way).

• From NPR’s All Things Considered, can a drug company (say, Procter & Gamble) be counted on to cast an objective eye on efficacy data of one of its top-earning drugs (say, Actonel)? And, if one of the scientists involved in the research has concerns about the data the drug company left out of the analysis (and it’s around 40% of the data collected), what should he do? What if the drug company doesn’t share his concerns? To whom, exactly, are you supposed to make your declaration of shenanigans?
• At nanopolitan, two posts about the difficulties scientists from India (among other places) have had getting visas to come to the U.S. for scientific conferences. This poses a problem, obviously, for attempts to build international scientific communiities where scientists can actually communicate findings to each other in venues other than peer reviewed journals (which can be slow). Also, in the most high profile such case, Professor Goverdhan Mehta, an organic chemist at IIS Bangalore, was flagged for extra scrutiny because his research could conceivably have applications in chemical warfare. Of course, conceivably, nearly any piece of research could have applications that could be used to smite one’s enemies. (As Ani di Franco aptly put it, “Any tool can be a weapon if you hold it right.”) So, why are scientists from India getting a harder time from the U.S. government than scientists from, say, Belgium? Is their research really much more dangerous, or is there some other agenda at work?
• At Footnotes on Epicycles, an examination of the principles guiding responsible conduct of research, with some thoughts about how they hang together (e.g., which are higher-level principles that imply the lower-level principles). And, one of the principles — “[U]se … scientific knowledge and its applications to promote the social good” — may not be binding on scientists in the way the other principles (like “Don’t cause suffering”) are. Or does this principle state a real obligation rather than just something that would be nice for scientists to do if they can swing it?

While I await the time and space to deal with these issues sensibly, I welcome my commenters to take a crack at them.