Dateline Today

Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian

The plot of Robin Cook’s new thriller on medical nanotechnology is unfolding now – April 2013. Unlike several other science-fiction narratives on the tinier than microscopic realm of nanotechnology, this page-turner is not set in some distant future. The dateline is today.

The prolific novelist’s latest offering Nano emphasises the here and now of a technology that a lot of people still imagine to be futuristic.

The plot of course has many of the ingredients of a popular thriller – an attractive and headstrong woman scientist determined to bring to light the unethical practices of a billionaire playboy businessman who heads a secretive nanotech corporation; international business deals; gangsters; spies; security devices; and the usual rollercoaster twists and turns of the storylines. But it’s not so much the story that hooks the reader but the possibilities of nanotechnology in curing medical conditions – Alzheimer’s, for one.

That the author dedicates the novel “both to the promise nanotechnology brings to medicine and to the hope that any downside will be minimal”, points to the potential of the new and emerging technology. The disclaimer about the dodgy ethics of human experiments notwithstanding, this novel is more upbeat about the ability of tiny nano-robots to destroy bacteria, viruses, and other disease-inducing organisms. This is in sharp contrast to the work of another bestselling science fiction novelist Michael Crichton who presents a far more dystopic view of nanotechnology in his novels Prey and Micro. The more recent Micro not only outlines the possibilities of nanobots annihilating the vital organs of a person without leaving a trace of the causes of death but also talks of bio-prospecting of natural resources at levels unseen by the human eye.

As we said in an earlier blog, regardless of its utopic or dystopic potential, nanotechnology is now entrenched in the present and nanoparticles are ubiquitous in several products of everyday use. Even tiny robots are already in use in medical surgeries. Yet, public understanding of this new technology is still extremely limited and this is something that science communicators and researchers alike have to take up.

Neuroscience and personhood

Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian

The eternal Nature Vs Nurture debate keeps re-surfacing in many different ways. Is social behaviour determined by our biological architecture or is it a result of the social, cultural, and political environment we are exposed to? Is the human brain pre-programmed with genetic circuitry or can it be trained to adapt to social influences?

The escalating interest in neuroscience in the last decade has put the spotlight on the brain, its intricate pathways and its sophisticated signalling systems that control physical and emotional responses. Graphic full-colour images of the brain are now ubiquitous in the media.

But is the proliferating coverage of neuroscience in the popular media radically changing the way people think of notions of Self or personhood? In other words, is the public engagement with neuroscience making significant changes in the way people think about the brain and its influence on the complexities of human agency? This is a topic that Cliodhna O’Connor and Helene Joffe grapple with in their forthcoming article on “How has neuroscience affected lay understandings of personhood?” in Public Understanding of Science.

In a thorough review, O’Connor and Joffe conclude that the propagation of radical neuroscientific explorations has come through “in ways that perpetuate rather than challenge existing modes of understanding self, others and society”. This is because “people selectively attend to and interpret science in ways that cohere with their pre-existing values, identities and beliefs.”

In the course of their review, the authors touch upon what they call the “philosophical battle” between conceptions of every human being as a “free agent” and conceptions of a human whose character, behav­iour and life-course are pre-patterned by their biological constitution”. The latter conceptions, the authors say, paint “neuroscience research as the definitive refutation of the notion of free will, which is cast – in Nobel Laureate Francis Crick’s words – as ‘no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules’.”

Talking of Francis Crick, news has just come in of the decision of his family to sell his Nobel medal and give the proceeds to research institutions – see LiveScience. Crick, of course, was not only credited, with his colleagues, of mapping the structure of the DNA but also for his discovery of the molecular structure of nucleic acids and the role this structure played in the transfer of information in human beings. 

Commenting on the news of the sale, blogger Grant Jacobs, in the blog Code for Life, draws attention to one other item for sale – a letter written by the Nobel Laureate to his 12-year-old son to explain the Double Helix structure of the DNA. “It’d be interesting to see his efforts at science communication from the time of suggesting the model for the structure of DNA”, Jacobs says. It would indeed. As James Borrell says in his blog on How to communicate science and not be boring: “There’s a saying that if you can’t explain your research to a child, then you don’t understand it well enough yourself.”

Bitter pill to swallow

Debashish Munshi & Priya Kurian

The bestselling author of Bad Science and physician-turned-writer Ben Goldacre has taken the gloss off the sugar-coated world of pharmaceutical research with his latest tome Bad Pharma. Goldacre’s sensational expose of the suppression of negative data from drug trials hit the news when a chapter from his new book was published in The Guardian in September this year. Since then, the mediasphere and the blogosphere have been agog with commentaries on and reviews of the book, including in The Telegraph and the New Statesman.

So what are the key charges Goldacre levels at pharmaceutical companies? According to him, they publish and publicise only positive results from trials; cover up results they don’t like; carry out tests on relatively small samples of what he calls “unrepresentative patients”, analyse data with flawed techniques statistical analysis, and “exaggerate the benefits of treatments”. What is perhaps worse is that, as Goldacre alleges, such practices have gone unchallenged by regulatory bodies and academic journals, leaving frontline physicians none the wiser.

In a letter to the New Statesman, the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, on its part, denies that negative trial data are deliberately hidden and insists that 90 per cent of medicines now in use have been developed by the pharmaceutical industry through “incremental innovation”. The industry does acknowledge though that there is “still work to be done in ensuring the publication of negative trial data within journals, and in ensuring greater transparency all round within the industry”.
The ongoing controversy has of course put question marks around the integrity of drug trials and the vulnerability of physicians and patients alike to risks associated with real or perceived distortions of trial data. But it has also raised some red flags on the culpability of academic journals in the dissemination of such data.

Goldacre takes academia to task in the chapter excerpted in The Guardian  saying: “Finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies”. This charge echoes the charges made in the award-winning documentary Inside Job against some business school academics, economists, and state officials who knowingly or otherwise condoned the practices that led to the catastrophic financial crisis in the world.

Connected to this issue of appropriate communication of research results, a recent study in France published in PLOS Medicine found that around half the press releases on randomized controlled trials contained “spin” that inaccurately represented the findings of the actual trials, and were subsequently reproduced in media coverage. A significant finding of this study was that such spin in the press releases and media coverage, which distorted the actual findings of the research, reflected the spin in the published journal articles, namely in the abstract conclusions. The study called for journal editors and reviewers to take greater responsibility to ensure that research findings were accurately presented in article abstracts and press releases.

It seems clear that without open access to raw data, and given the continued conflict of interest between some researchers and those sponsoring the drug trials, it will be difficult for journalists to ask hard questions of the press releases that come their way.

Science rumblings

The conviction of six scientists and a government official in Italy for failing to warn the public about an impending earthquake has sent tremors down the scientific community in general. 

According to reports published in the international media, the scientists were given a six-year prison sentence for manslaughter for their negligence in keeping people informed about the risks of the earthquake which killed over 300 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila in 2009.

The conviction has, predictably, generated a huge controversy with a Guardian headline “From Galileo to the L'Aquila earthquake: Italian science on trial” comparing the recent trial of the six seismologists to the infamous trial of the legendary astronomer Galileo nearly 400 years ago.

For readers of the Public Understanding of Science, the key issue is that the trial of the seismologists is more about communicating science than about science per se. As the New Scientist reports: “The prosecution made it crystal clear all along that their case was about poor risk communication; it was built on an accusation of giving out "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information".

The issue of communication itself is rather murky. A more recent New Scientist article reports on the discovery of taped conversations at a risk assessment meeting in which a senior civil protection official “ordered one of the defendants to issue a reassuring statement.” This is another example of the power tussles among politicians, bureaucrats, and scientists given the diversity of their respective constituencies.

Predicting an earthquake is obviously not an exact science and many scientific bodies have rightly taken exception to the perception that the seismologists may have failed in their scientific endeavours. Two senior scientists in Italy, including the physicists in charge of the National Commission for the Prediction and Prevention of Major Risks, have also resigned in protest against the convictions. But as many commentators have pointed out, the convictions were not about the failure to predict the tremors but the failure in communicating the risks in a timely manner. So the challenge that the case throws up relates to the pitfalls of not communicating science appropriately.

Should scientists get media training to communicate their findings of public interest directly to the media? Are there ways in which science, policy, and media can work together to make sure scientific data and findings are understood clearly by people at large? One such initiative to give scientists training to be media savvy has recently taken off in New Zealand. Learning to communicate in an accessible and jargon-free language is of course important for scientists. But having institutional mechanisms to resist political bullying is perhaps even more important.

Are you my Mummy?

Without words to mean what we say, how do we say what we mean? In her last post, our guest blogger Rebecca Bollard discussed new reproductive technologies that create the space for ‘three-parent babies’. In this post, she talks about the linguistic gymnastics required to clearly convey what the notion of three-parent babies might mean.

The word ‘mother’ is typically used to refer to a person on whom the biological, legal, and social aspects of parenting rest.  Adoption splits the biological from the social and legal aspects. Egg and sperm donations open up such divides too. Divorce and remarriage can split social and legal parenthood from each other while surrogacy adds another layer of complexity by splitting the biological from the gestational. But now pronuclear transfer (PNT) and maternal spindle transfer (MST) offer ways to further divide the biological down into nuclear DNA and mtDNA donors.

So now the word ‘mother’ has five components – social mother, legal mother, gestational carrier, mtDNA donor, and nuclear DNA donor. Some of these are complex concepts that can barely be conveyed in easily understood plain English words. So, in addition to understanding the relatively complex science behind modern reproductive technology, the public must also grapple with concepts that have no clear semantic expression.

The term ‘mother’ also carries a load of normative values and social connotations, not easily defined. We have long been aware that words are not value neutral. When I write ‘gestational surrogate’, I mean the women who carries a foetus and then gives birth to the baby. This woman is generally the legal mother until adoption procedures are completed. That relationship is considerably more complex than the almost mechanical one suggested by the technical terms ‘gestational surrogate’ and ‘gestational carrier’.

So how do we conduct public debates on issues where there are no words to convey what we are talking about? And can we deal with a situation where words are not neutral descriptors of a common concept, but rather value-laden parts of a broader discourse?

Let us know what you think – in plain English, if possible.

Too many parents spoil the child?

When does a genetic donor become a biological parent and how many biological parents are too many? In this post, our guest blogger, REBECCA BOLLARD, looks at the recent technological developments around the possibility of three-parent babies.

In human fertilisation an egg cell is fertilised by a sperm cell, and each has 23 chromosomes. The fertilised cell has 46 chromosomes (the standard number for a human) and develops into an embryo. Chromosomes are made of DNA and exist in an area of the cell called the nucleus, and contain genes. This is what most people think of when talking about DNA – half comes from each biological parent and combines to form a new person. Every person has two biological parents no matter how complicated the legal or social arrangements may be.

This is, however, not quite the full story. Human cells also contain mitochondria, tiny organelles responsible for making a specific chemical that the cells need to function. Human mitochondria contain a small amount of DNA (often called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA) in the form of a single chromosome. This chromosome is inherited exclusively from the egg cell and therefore the biological mother. mtDNA consists mostly of genes devoted to the maintenance and running of the mitochondria. Defects in these genes can lead to a range of serious diseases, including a range of incurable heart and muscle problems.

Several technologies may overcome mitochondrial disease. Pronuclear transfer (PNT) and maternal spindle transfer (MST) both allow the nucleus of the mother’s egg to be placed inside the egg from a woman with no mitochondrial issues. Thus, the resulting embryo would have three genetic donors – the man who supplied the sperm, the woman who supplied the egg nucleus, and the woman who supplied the egg and therefore the mtDNA. The first two of these would have supplied most, but certainly not all, of the DNA in the embryo (and resulting person). So, perhaps that person would have three genetic parents?

These techniques could also be used in other circumstances, such as where an intending mother has no eggs or has gone through menopause. Scientists believe they can take a cell from elsewhere in a woman’s body and halve the chromosomes using electricity. This cell could then be used with the egg cell (and mtDNA) of another woman.

The UK Human Fertilisation Embryology Authority (HFEA) recently began a consultation on whether such techniques could be used to help the 1 in 200 children born every year in the UK with mitochondrial diseases. This has led to much discussion in the press, including in the Daily Mail and in The Guardian. This follows earlier works by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics that such techniques would be ethical once proved safe and efficient.

Bioethics professor John Harris argues that mtDNA donors would not be genetic parents as “DNA contained in the donated mitochondria comprises much less than 1% of the total genetic contribution and does not transmit any of the traits that confer the usual family resemblances and distinctive personal features... No identity-conferring features are transmitted by the mitochondria”. He then goes on to argue that he would be more upset at having a mitochondrial disease than “having some third-party DNA in my genome”.

So, when does a genetic donor become a biological parent? The two people donating nuclear DNA are obvious candidates, but what about mtDNA donors? What about gestational surrogates, particularly as the evidence builds that gestation is not a simple relationship (see e.g. the research article by Chen et al in Plos One)? Does it matter, when the biological, social, and legal aspects of parenthood are split more than ever?

Should the number of parents in technology-driven reproduction matter? Or is it irrelevant when we’re talking about serious and otherwise incurable disease?

Do images colour perceptions?

With the increasing use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the activities of a human brain at work are now routinely depicted in three-dimensional colour images. These attractive pictures of the brain are near mandatory appendages to news stories on neuroscience in the popular media and have been shown to have a persuasive effect on readers.

In an article in Cognition a few years ago, David McGabe and Alan Castel had famously shown how brain images had a hugely persuasive influence on public perceptions of stories on neuroscience. These images affected people’s judgements of scientific reasoning because they provided a tangible physical representation of brain activity.

One of the reasons of this appeal of brain images is, as John Grohol says, quite simply because “the pretty, compelling pictures of fMRI” add a colourful layer to otherwise boring psychological research – they “seem to illustrate a direct, causative relationship … even if one doesn’t exist.” This is, of course, a major challenge and, as Grohol points out, fMRI images are not always an accurate reflection of a brain’s activity and does not capture “the complexity of human behaviour.”

So yes, fMRI brain images have a persuasive influence on readers of popular science stories. But do these images have a greater persuasive effect than other kinds of images on how readers perceive a story?

Not really, going by a new study by David Gruber of the City University of Hong Kong and Jacob Dickerson of Georgetown College, USA. In an article forthcoming in the Public Understanding of Science, the two researchers report on a study in which they monitored the effect on participants of a variety of images attached to news articles on neuroscience. The images shown to the participants included fMRI images, artistic drawings and still images from science fiction films. “There is no significant difference between readers’ evaluations of an article regardless of the associated image,” the researchers say.

What this means is that each image may be persuasive in its own right. But there’s no way to predict if one kind of image is more persuasive than the other at a general level. This then is a significant extension of the McCabe & Castel study.

As Gruber and Dickerson point out, research would need to explore how images interact with a specific text and the specific context of a particular reader to affect understanding of a news story on neuroscience.

In another study focused more broadly on the impact of pictures accompanying true or false claims, Eryn Newman, a PhD student from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, with researchers from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, found empirical evidence for the notion of “truthiness”— popularised by US comedian and satirist Stephen Colbert. Colbert defines truthiness as “the truth that you feel in your gut regardless of what the facts support.” The research, published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, found that people are more likely to believe a claim, even if it is untrue, if it is accompanied by decorative pictures:

In a series of four experiments in both New Zealand and Canada, Newman and colleagues showed people a series of claims such as, “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium” and asked them to agree or disagree that each claim was true. In some cases, the claim appeared with a decorative photograph that didn’t reveal if the claim was actually true—such as a thermometer. Other claims appeared alone. When a decorative photograph appeared with the claim, people were more likely to agree that the claim was true, regardless of whether it was actually true.