Science Friday

A few of the particularly interesting stories of the past week (there are always so many, though):

--In Science, a new paper examines the Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), created from scratch by deaf children in a special-ed program in Managua 30 years ago and evolving ever since. A multinational team of scientists looked at three different age cohorts of students in the program, and found that the language had evolved over those three generations from primitive gestures and physical mimicry of actions to more complex signs underpinned by apparent syntactic rules. Bottom line: Kids not only are "wired" to learn language; by the way the learn it, they can also shape and reshape the way the language itself works. The paper itself, plus an interesting review of it, can be found on Science Online (abstract free with registration; full text requires subscription); nice write-ups appear in New Scientist and news@nature.com.

--Over at Nature, meanwhile, evidence that the ancient Egyptians were as obsessed with their pets as some modern Americans. Based on a chemical analysis of the mummified remains of animals, such as cats, that were buried with their masters, it would appear that the embalming agents and techniques used on these animals were every bit as complex as those used for human remains. Read more at news@nature.com and ScienceNOW (subscription required).

--Several interesting items related to potential techniques to stem or cure blindness. Both the New York Times and New Scientist included interesting features on the first human clinical trials of RNA interference techniques, which work by using small pieces of RNA to silence troublesome genes -- in this case, the gene that causes age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the elderly. And the Journal of Clinical Investigation publishes new research in which mice suffering from retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited form of progressive blindness, were spared their otherwise sightless fate via an injection (before the retina had begun to break down) of bone marrow stem cells from other mice. The control mice, by contrast, went completely blind. Remarkable.

--A couple of grim items on the health front. The World Health Organization's program to reduce global tuberculosis rates is apparently failing, according to a recent review in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (though the program has had some regional successes). And a recent study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health notes that the health of U.S. children, by most measures, is worse than that of children in most other industrialized countries.

And, lo and behold, I'm out of time. More physical science next week. I promise.

Science and the Election, Continued

Both Nature [PDF] and Science have posted interviews with Bush and Kerry (or, more likely, with their science-policy surrogates) regarding their biggest science priorities for the next four years. The postings illustrate at least two things: (i) The country and the world face a lot of important near-term scientific issues and decisions; and (ii) both the Bush and Kerry campaigns can be remarkably adroit at avoiding or finessing hard questions.

(As a side note, the two interviews also illustrate some interesting characteristics of the candidates. According to the editorial that accompanies the Science candidates' forum, Kerry's answers came in on-time and at reasonable length -- whereas Bush's responses were three weeks late and prolix. Apparently, as with so much else, Bush assumes that he's entitled to special treatment -- and he got it from Science: The editorial dryly notes that "President Bush took 3 weeks more, so we let him have an untimed exam and got longer answers." Same pattern for the Nature interviews: "Bush's answers were some 30% over length, and have been edited; Kerry kept to the limit and his responses are presented in full." So Nature, at least, saw fit to administer a little editorial Immodium to Bush's logorrhea.)

Some highlights from the discussions:

--On climate change, Kerry is forthright, and aligns himself with the prevailing view of the scientific community -- i.e., the evidence for global warming is now clear and compelling, and we've got to do something about it. What Kerry would do, he says, is re-engage with the world community and adopt a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Bush, by contrast, falls back on his long-standing view, buttressed by quotes yanked out of context from several NAS reports, that the science is inconclusive regarding human-induced climate change; in this, of course, he ignores the recent, widely covered release by the government's own climate change research directorate of a study that argued that some sort of human contribution to warming is an inescapable conclusion.

--On stem cells, the differences are even starker. Kerry would roll back Bush's ban on federal funding of stem cell lines created after August 2001, which has had a chilling effect on U.S. stem cell research. Kerry also seems to understand the difference between reproductive cloning (the creation of new human beings) and somatic-cell nuclear transfer, or "therapeutic" cloning (the creation of early embryos for biomedical research) -- he'd ban the former and allow the latter. Bush would ban all human cloning, and maintains, in a nice example of Bushian doublethink, that his decision to sharply limit the cell lines that could be used in federally funded stem cell research actually advanced the interests of that research.

--Both Bush and Kerry punt on the issue of creationism, falling back on the canard that school curricula are the province of local school boards and not the federal government. (Actually, the way the Science editors raised this question was rather odd: "Should 'intelligent design' or other scientific critiques of evolutionary theory be taught in public schools?" That wording suggests that intelligent design is a legitimate scientific critique of evolution by natural selection, rather than a clever set of untestable rhetorical devices rooted in the discredited "watch and watchmaker" arguments of the 18th century. Disappointing that Kerry in particular wasn't willing to say this -- but not surprising, given the country's general scientific ignorance and the pressing need, in modern politics, to avoid giving your opponent a sound bite with which to beat you over the head.)

--Kerry asserts that his administration would "never utilize biased advice as a foundation for public policy," something the Bush Administration has done repeatedly -- notwithstanding Bush's statement, answering the same question, that he has "sought out the best scientific minds -- inside and outside the government -- for policy input and advice. . . ." That must be why 60 Nobel laureates and other eminent researchers issued a statement in February 2004 "calling for regulatory and legislative action to restore scientific integrity to federal policymaking," and why 48 Nobel prizewinners endorsed Kerry in June 2004, arguing that "the Bush administration is undermining the nation's future by impeding medical advances, turning away scientific talent with its immigration practices and ignoring scientific consensus on global warning and other critical issues."

--Most revealing, perhaps, were the candidates' answers to Science's questions on their three top priorities in science and technology. Bush threw out three eminently political answers: the "chicken in every pot" promise of broadband Internet access for everyone (one can question whether this is really a "science and technology" goal any more), next-generation hydrogen fuel research (a good idea, but also Bush's favorite way to avoid doing anything meaningful on climate change), and "recruiting science and technology to combat terrorism" (political significance obvious). Kerry, by contrast, took a broader view that stressed the long-term goals of restoring and enhancing America's scientific preeminence, boosting science education, and bringing scientific integrity back to policymaking.

Not surprisingly, there was overlap between the two interviews on a number of questions -- with sometimes comical results. In the area of space policy, both publications asked different but related questions on the issue of sending humans to the Moon and Mars, with Nature asking why humans should be sent instead of robots and Science asking what parts of the existing program should be scaled back to fund human exploration. Here's Kerry's response to Nature:

Today, thanks to decades of public investment in space exploration activities, a rotating international team of astronauts is living and working in space on the International Space Station, a dozen Americans have walked on the Moon, we have rovers exploring the surface of Mars, and an armada of spacecraft continues to explore our Solar System. NASA is an invaluable asset to the American people and must receive adequate resources to continue its important mission of exploration.

However, there is little to be gained from a space initiative that throws out lofty goals, but fails to support those goals with realistic funding. John Edwards and I are committed to increasing funding for NASA and space exploration because it not only makes critical contributions to our economy, it also expands our understanding of the world we live in.

In his more nuanced answer to Science, Kerry explores different aspects of capitalization, subject-verb agreement, and other matters of house style:

Today, thanks to decades of public investment in space exploration activities, a rotating international team of astronauts are living and working in space on the International Space Station, a dozen Americans have walked on the Moon, we have rovers exploring the surface of Mars, and an armada of spacecraft continue to explore our solar system. NASA is an invaluable asset to the American people and must receive adequate resources to continue its important mission of exploration.

However, there is little to be gained from a space initiative that throws out lofty goals but fails to support those goals with realistic funding. I am committed to increasing funding for NASA and space exploration because it not only makes critical contributions to our economy but also because it expands our understanding of the world we live in.

Bush's answers, too, seem quite similar between the two publications (though the fact that Nature edited Bush's copy means that direct comparisons of his answers aren't quite as ludicrous). In any event, the campaigns clearly weren't banking on having a geek like me out there doing line-by-line analyses.

Social Security's Real Meaning

Cynthia Crossen, in her monthly Deja Vu column in the Wall Street Journal (alas, subscription required), offers a look back at the real impact of Social Security. A few extracts:

Getting old is rarely regarded as a happy prospect, but before Social Security, aging in America often meant penury and sometimes even the poorhouse. . . .

And over the hill to the poorhouse many older people went. Financed by local taxes, poorhouses were the shelters for all of a region's indigent, and in the early 20th century, most counties had one. The best of the poorhouses provided a meager standard of living. The worst doubled as insane asylums and orphanages. "I was three miles from town but felt like I was 3,000 miles from friends and country," wrote Ed Sweeney in his 1927 memoir, "Poorhouse Sweeney." "I have ate off trays that looked like they had spent the rainy season laying on a city dump."

Germany, Sweden, France and England, among other countries, already had legislated publicly funded old-age insurance before Americans took up the debate. Proponents in the U.S. wondered why men and women who had been diligent, thrifty workers should suffer hunger and insecurity in their old age. In a letter to an editor, a postal worker pointed out that horses owned by the federal government lived out their old age on full rations. "For the purpose of drawing a pension," he declared, "it would have been better if I had been born a horse than a human being."

Opponents argued that sensible people would provide for themselves, and that universal old-age insurance would set the country on the slippery slope to socialism. Children, not the state, were obliged to care for the old, they said; without that responsibility, family ties would loosen. And if employees were guaranteed lifetime support, wouldn't they feel less incentive to work hard?

Granted, Social Security came on stream during the Great Depression, and some of this reflects the general misery of those times. Still, Crossen points out that the problems faced by the elderly predated the Depression, and that even at the height of the stock market boom before the 1929 collapse, the combination of low incomes and high medical bills meant that "retirement nest eggs, except among the wealthiest Americans, didn't exist."

All of this is worth remembering when we consider Bush's stated desire to create an "ownership society" -- a concept nicely eviscerated by Jonathan Chait, in a recent article in the New Republic (registration required), as just another stalking horse for the Administration's ongoing efforts to redistribute income upward. One plank of Bush's plan, which he's talked about for years, is the "privatization" of Social Security, under which workers would personally manage a chunk of their Social Security nest eggs. That proposal, however, seems to speak of a fundamental ignorance of both the structure of the program and of the problems it's trying to solve. I'll cheat once again and let Chait's article speak for itself:

The second element of Bush's "ownership society" is the privatization of Social Security accounts. Social Security is another form of insurance--insurance against the risk of making bad investments, the risk of outliving your savings, the risk that a disability keeps you from working, or the risk of being widowed. (To some extent, it also treats the possibility of earning a low income as a risk, giving low-earning workers a higher return on their payroll taxes than high-earning workers.) The program is designed to spread those risks among the working population.

But Bush insists that workers "need to own and manage their own pension and retirement systems." He proposes that, instead of giving your payroll taxes to support somebody else's retirement, you should be able to keep some of it for yourself. Unfortunately, there is an arithmetic problem with that idea. Right now, payroll taxes go to fund people who are currently retired. If that money were instead diverted into the individual accounts of those still in the workforce, it would open up a huge financing hole (at least $1 trillion over a decade). And remember, Social Security is already facing a financing hole as it is.

Beyond the shaky math, there's a deeper philosophical principle at stake. If you control your own retirement, you have a better chance of striking it rich in the stock market. But you also have a better chance of losing your money. In other words, privatization concentrates the risks on the individual, making impossible the risk-spreading that's the entire point of Social Security. As former Bush I Treasury official and current Yale Law School tax professor Michael Graetz told National Journal, "ownership of assets does not spread risks in the way that insurance does."

Clearly, Social Security faces some major problems during this century -- problems that we as a society need to grapple with. But at a time when workers are already shouldering an increasing amount of responsibility for their own retirement assets, should we really be loading more risk on their backs?

Take a look at these two articles together.

Moral: Don't let anyone tell you this election isn't important.

Finally, An Explanation

From the Atlantic (via Salon's War Room) -- a medical hypothesis for the origin of the Shirker-In-Chief's so-called "Bushisms."

(Still) More on Antidepressants and Children

A new wrinkle in the ongoing saga on antidepressants and children (sorry, I seem to be a bit obsessed by this topic): An item in the New York Times this morning reports that a top FDA official is now on record that these drugs increase the risk of suicide in minors. That's a finding, apparently, that the drug companies kept under wraps, partly at FDA's insistence, despite 15 clinical trials whose data pointed in that direction; FDA itself had suppressed a 2003 meta-analysis that concluded the same thing. Judging from the emotional testimony, recounted in the Times article, of some parents who had lost SSRI-treated children to suicide, the drug companies can look forward to some nasty litigation (the New York State Attorney General's office is already filing suit against GlaxoSmithKline for failing to disclose the clinical-trial results that called Paxil's efficacy into question).

Still, the Times article did a nice job in underscoring the two sides of this story, something that I've perhaps minimized in previous posts on the topic. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death among U.S. teenagers; facing that abyss, parents need to do something. And many parents whose kids do seem to have been helped by these drugs have argued fairly passionately against restricting their use to adults. An example (again from the Times):

But others said that antidepressants had helped millions. Dr. Suzanne Vogel-Sibilia of Beaver, Pa., said that she had brought her 15-year-old son, Tony, to the hearing to represent what she said were the vast majority of patients who had been helped by the drugs.

"Please help me preserve my future," Tony told the committee. "Don't take away my medication."

A study just reported from Johns Hopkins and 12 other medical centers will certainly fuel additional debate here. This study, published in JAMA in mid-August, looking specifically at depressed teens, found that patients undergoing a combination of talk therapy (read cognitive therapy) and Prozac did significantly better than those on either therapy alone. It also found, however, that Prozac alone was better than talk therapy alone, which had results, at least in this study, that were little better than those taking placebos.

(I find it interesting that Prozac specifically was the drug used here; one thing I've noticed in other stories about this topic is that Prozac seems to do better than other SSRIs with these patients, though that may just be my impression. On the other hand, though the study itself was NIMH-funded, the "Financial Disclosures" section of the paper lists the senior author, John S. March, as having "served on the speaker's bureau for Pfizer and Lilly" and having "received research support from Lilly, Pfizer, and Wyeth," as well as documenting a range of relationships between other authors and drug companies. That's not necessarily a reason to doubt the validity of the research -- but I guess one point of this recent controversy is that the drug companies have tended to publish only the positive results from clinical trials, so one at least needs to take these sorts of financial relationships and dependencies into account.)

What's really needed here, it seems to me, is a good deal more subtlety in how we, as a society, approach both the inherently complex and subjective condition we call depression, and the slippery, highly individual transition between "childhood" and "adulthood." Much as the medical community would like it otherwise, diagnosing and treating depression doesn't have the specificity and relative simplicity of applying an antibacterial or antiviral agent to a pathogen identified by a lab test. And the legalistic, age-based definitions we have settled on to mark off adulthood, apply movie ratings, and issue learner's permits don't really provide us with any insight on the plasticity of the childhood brain and the point at which a minor becomes an adult for purposes of antidepressant drugs.

But a more enlightened approach to treating this disease implies taking a very different, more personalized approach to medicine itself -- one that may well prove impossible in an environment where physicians are under constant pressure to cut costs, boost efficiency, and handle larger patient loads with smaller resources. In those conditions, it seems, it's just a lot easier to prescribe a pill and hope for the best.

Morning Rant: Standard Operating Chaos

One interesting thing about this past weekend's explosion in North Korea is that everyone pretty much assumed from the outset that it was a nuclear test. Later, of course, Colin Powell and others in the Administration were at pains to "reassure" us that it wasn't a nuclear blast after all, though, um, they still didn't know just what it was. But before that, we all initially and immediately accepted the news reports as indicating that the loony government of North Korea now had The Bomb -- in other words, we have come to believe that it's just a matter of time.

Yet the Bushites, with their usual doublethink, continue to laud their own hastily improvised approach to North Korean diplomacy over the "failed" policies of their predecessor. One almost gets the impression that, once North Korea does test a real nuclear bomb, the first thing we'll see is Powell explaining to us that it's all part of the Administration's master plan for making the world safer. And that we should just trust them.

Meanwhile, continued carnage in Iraq (though the victims were "only" Iraqi civilians, so I guess we're not supposed to care). Can anyone look at this pair of stories and conclude that the Bushites are doing a good job? (A piece in Salon today sums up nicely the "opportunity costs" implicit in the Iraq war, and outlines the tangible, dollars-and-cents case that the war has made the U.S. less secure rather than more so.)

All I can say is that, notwithstanding the apparent press attempts, on the basis of several recent polls, to tag Bush's November coronation as inevitable, I hope, for the sake of the country and the world, that this election isn't over yet. But even amid all of the bad news, foreign and domestic, we still see stories about how Bush seems to be pulling ahead, about Kerry's uphill battle, etc., etc. A large slice of the electorate seems to have concluded that the Bush Administration's approach to basic governance -- Standard Operating Chaos -- is somehow the way things are supposed to be.

And it's not.