Over at Neurotopia, SciCurious has a fabulous post on the question of who is a scientist. Her discussion really teases out a lot of important nuances, and I think her analysis is spot on.
I’m going to add my two cents simply to connect Sci’s discussion with an issue I’ve pondered before: the boundaries (or lack thereof) between who we are and what we do.
Category Archives: Scientist/layperson relations
Alternative medicine, scientific research, and a clash of world views.
Orac takes issue with a pair of posts I wrote yesterday about the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). I gather he thinks I’ve been far too trusting as far as the information provided on the NCCAM website, and that I’m misrepresenting the issues the critics of NCCAM have with the center. If my posts communicated that they were giving the straight dope on NCCAM and the objections to it, then I blew it; that wasn’t at all what was intended. Rather, I wanted to have a look at the ethical issues that arise from such an official effort to examine medical treatments that are not part of the mainstream, and to start to tease out how these might be connected to broader issues around the interactions between scientifically grounded health care providers and patients who are not adherents to scientific ways of thinking.
Here, let me reiterate that I am not an expert on NCCAM or the movement to get broad acceptance for alternative medical treatments. Rather, I’m trying to understand the political battles in terms of the divergent ways of understanding the world driving the participants in these battles.
With that in mind, some specific responses to Orac’s post:
Your tax dollars at work: a look at clinical trials supported by NCCAM.
In my last post, I started wading into the question of what kinds of ethical questions arise from clinical trials on “alternative” medical treatments, especially clinical trials supported by the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The ethical questions include whether alternative treatments expose human subjects to direct harm, or to indirect harm (by precluding a more effective treatment), not to mention whether the money spent to research alternative modalities would be better spent on other lines of research. I think it’s worthwhile to dip into the NCCAM website to look at some of the clinical trials this federal agency has supported.
From the NCCAM website’s discussion of clinical trials being conducted on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM):
More commentary on animal rights extremists.
In an op-ed by Tim Rutten in today’s Los Angeles Times:
No sensible person dismisses the humane treatment of animals as inconsequential, but what the fanatics propose is not an advance in social ethics. To the contrary, it is an irrational intrusion into civil society, a tantrum masquerading as a movement. It is a kind of ethical pornography in which assertion stands in for ideas, and willfulness for argument, all for the sake of self-gratification. At the end of the day, there is no moral equivalence between the lives of humans and those of animals.
More violence against researchers by animal rights activists.
Again, at UCLA, a researcher has become the target of violence at the hands of animal rights activists.
From the Los Angeles Times:
President Obama’s memo on scientific integrity.
The full text of the memorandum is here. Let’s look at some of the details.
Animal rights activist takes drugs tested on animals.
I’m not a regular reader of the Huffington Post, but I received a pointer to an article there that strikes me as worthy of comment.
The article, Why I Take Animal-Tested Drugs, was written by Simon Chaitowitz, the former Communications director for the animal rights group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
From the title, you might expect a defense of animal-tested drugs, or at least a coherent explanation for why the author is taking them. However, what the article actually offers is condemnation of the use of animals in biomedical research, and even a claim that animal-tested drugs and medical interventions contributed to the author’s cancer.
Fellowship for public outreach about humane use of animals in research.
Americans for Medical Progress has announced the Michael D. Hayre Fellowship in Public Outreach, designed to inspire and motivate the next generation of research advocates.
The Fellowship is named in honor of AMP’s late former Chairman, Mike Hayre, as a testament to his visionary leadership within the laboratory animal medicine community.
Animal research, violent attacks, and the public’s right to know.
An article in the Wall Street Journal notes the collision between researchers’ interests in personal safety and the public’s right to know how its money is being spent — specifically, when that money funds research that involves animals:
Tracking flu through online search queries.
This morning, I was made aware (by my better half) of the existence of Google Flu Trends. This is a project by Google to use search terms to create a model of flu activity across the United States. Indeed, the results have been good enough that they were reported in a Letter in Nature [1] back in November 2008 (but with a correction published online 19 February 2009). From that letter: