Notebook

On June 14, a House Appropriations subcommittee gave some researchers cause for celebration when it surprisingly voted to remove a provision in a government spending bill that extended a ban on federal funding of human embryo research. However, their glee was short-lived. The full panel turned around on June 25 and adopted an amendment to continue the research ban. John Eppig, senior staff scientist at Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, doubts that the ban will be overturned anytime soon, particularly in an election year. "I don't think anyone is going to get votes if they say they will remove a ban on this research," he comments. "It's not in anyone's interest politically because it's difficult to explain to the public the potential research benefits" in cancer and immunology, for example, resulting from such work. According to the Washington Post (J.E. Yang, June 26, 1996, page A4), the House Appropriations Committee voted to continue the federal funding ban as part of a $65.6 billion spending bill to fund health, labor, and education programs for the year beginning October 1. The original reversal effort was championed by Rep. John Porter (R-Ill.), who is chairman of the subcommittee. In December 1994, President Clinton announced that no federal funding would be used to support the creation of human embryos for research purposes, despite an NIH panel's recommendation that carefully designed studies should receive support. The issue, however, never seems far from view. An article in the May 16 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, reignited arguments over federal support of embryo research (S. Benowitz, The Scientist, June 24, 1996, page 1). While the current bill means more frustration for scientists who favor such research, Eppig notes that "it's hopeful that Congress is talking about it-that's a positive sign. Maybe next year, in a non-election year, something can happen." Harvard Medical School celebrated the opening of what it is calling "the first center in the country focusing on human health and global environmental change" late last month. According to Harvard officials, the Center for Health and the Global Environment was founded to encourage awareness of human health considerations in the development of global environmental policies. The center aims to educate such groups as physicians, environmental scientists, and the media-in addition to Harvard students and faculty-about the human health-environment connection. It will focus its activities in four research, education, and policy areas: serving as a clearinghouse for environmental health research via the World Wide Web; defining and promoting a research agenda for the next decade; developing and teaching a course entitled "Human Health and Global Environmental Change" (the first of its kind to be offered at a medical school); and undertaking a public education campaign. Eric Chivian, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a staff psychiatrist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the center's director. Chivian, who studies the human health consequences of species extinction and biodiversity loss, is a cofounder of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, a Boston-based group that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. SERVING SALK: Thomas Dean Pollard, Salk Institute's new president and CEO. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., has a new president and CEO, after a search that lasted almost a full year. Thomas Dean Pollard, former director of the department of cell biology and anatomy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, became the institute's ninth president on the first of this month. The search began last September, when Francis Crick had to resign from the presidency because of a heart condition (B.V. Bigelow, The Scientist, Oct. 30, 1995, page 1). It will take several months to complete Pollard's move; half of the 12 investigators in his Hopkins lab are also transferring to Salk. Pollard is well-known for his research on the proteins actin and myosin, which make up molecular motors. His expertise is in cell biology and biophysics, two areas that the institute had tagged for expansion. "They actually targeted these areas before the search," notes Pollard. Currently the institute's main focus is on neuroscience and molecular genetics. Although Pollard plans to maintain an active research lab, his primary duty will be to ignite fund-raising efforts. Increasing the private institute's endowment is a "major goal," according to Salk officials. "One thing that I would like to work on is raising money to increase the number of endowed chairs at the institute," Pollard remarks. Pollard, 53, received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. Biotechnology is growing. That, in a nutshell, is the message of this year's "Biotechnology Medicines in Development" survey, an annual study conducted by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), based in Washington, D.C. The survey says the total number of biotech medicines now in development has risen 21 percent over the 1995 level, from 234 to 284. The primary target is various forms of cancer, which accounts for 40 percent of the developing medicines. The number of companies researching those 284 medicines has increased 11 percent, to 113 firms. "There's a lot of optimism out there," Gillian Woollett, PhRMA's vice president for biologics and biotechnology, tells The Scientist. "This stuff is reaching the phase of really producing." For the first time, according to the survey, biotech drugs are being tested against the common cold, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, sickle cell anemia, and osteoporosis. Woollett says she's not surprised by the growth. "The technology is reaching that level of maturity, that you would expect it," she notes. "A lot of these techniques have been there for a while. It's a matter of pulling them together to get products, and they build on each other. . . . I wouldn't see this leveling off anytime soon." DRUG DILEMMA: Penn's Lazar has found a down side in new drugs. A new group of promising diabetes drugs, some of which are in late-stage clinical trials, may also need to include a caveat emptor label. The drugs-called thiazolidinediones-may encourage obesity, reported Mitchell A. Lazar, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, and M.D./Ph.D. student Caleb B. Kallen June 11 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (C.B. Kallen, M.A. Lazar, 93:5793-6, 1996). Because obesity is a risk factor for diabetes, the drugs may pose a treatment dilemma. Early trials have shown that the medications dramatically raise the body's ability to control its blood sugar levels, countering the main problem for type-2 diabetics. Such individuals make enough sugar-controlling insulin, yet their bodies for some reason ignore the hormone. At the same time, the drugs promote fat cell differentiation and inhibit the body's production of leptin, an anti-weight-gain gene first isolated in mice in December 1994 by researchers at Rockefeller University (Y. Zhang et al., Nature, 372:425-32, 1994). "We think of leptin as a drug that stimulates metabolism and reduces appetite," Lazar says. "If leptin levels go down, there is the theoretical possibility of increased appetite and lowered metabolism-and weight gain. That's the potential down side." Yet there may be some hope for patients. Lazar points out that the biochemical mechanisms behind the potentially beneficial and harmful effects of the drugs may not be linked. "There's the possibility of [creating] a second generation of these drugs that still lower blood sugar but doesn't have the unwanted effect on fat." He's unsure whether or not the mechanisms are dissimilar, but if so, modified versions of thiazolidinediones could be created that help reduce the blood sugar without encouraging weight gain. 'TURNING POINT': Thomas S. Kuhn influenced many. Thomas S. Kuhn, the science philosopher who made his mark with a pioneering theory of scientific revolution, died in his Cambridge, Mass., home on June 16. He was 73 and had battled cancer in recent years. A professor, emeritus, of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a science historian, Kuhn was best known for his work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962). Initially published in 1962 as a monograph in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, the book theorized that science is less a continuous, gradual process of knowledge gathering and more a series of prolonged, stable periods of "peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" in which "one conceptual world view [replaces] another." Recalls sociologist Robert K. Merton, University Professor, Emeritus, at Columbia University: "Tom Kuhn finally published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions only after 15 years of concentrated thought. It was surely worth waiting for-a turning point in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science." A million-copy seller in 16 languages, the book stirred considerable controversy and went on to influence scientists, historians, philosophers, economists, and sociologists alike. "Like other pivotal works, the main thesis of that great book has often been abused, not least by those vociferous nihilists who deny any trace of objectivity to scientific knowledge and claim it to be no more reliable than any other claims to knowledge," Merton states. "Tom himself pointed out that this kind of extreme subjectivism and relativism simply abandoned his own distinction between science and pseudoscience. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions remains its own monument." NONBELIEVER: SUNY'S Kurtz hosted skeptics. Following a theme of "Science in the Age of (Mis)information," self-described skeptics from across the globe gathered at the State University of New York in Buffalo June 20-23 for the first World Skeptics Congress. It was sponsored by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). The congress celebrated CSICOP's 20th anniversary as an international organization that explores the fringes of science. More than 70 scientists and skeptics discussed the role of the mass media in forming public opinion, the growth of anti-scientific sentiment, and recent developments in areas such as parapsychology, alternative medicine, UFOs, astrology, and the creation-evolution debate. "We're concerned about the growth of pseudoscience in the media-particularly television and films-and the confusion between science and pseudoscience," explains Paul Kurtz, a professor, emeritus, of philosophy at SUNY and chairman of CSICOP. Kurtz adds that the group also monitors negative attitudes toward science and scientists, which he believes are on the rise. Recent television programs have perpetuated inaccuracies regarding human evolution, he notes, and talk shows occasionally discuss the paranormal. "This seems to be a period in which these so-called docudramas are appearing on all the networks and which are sending these inaccurate messages," he observes. As a result, CSICOP has formed a Council for Media Integrity, which includes such scientific luminaries as Harvard zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Cornell University astronomer Carl Sagan. The new council will monitor television programs and attempt to persuade producers, directors, and writers to "allow room to appreciate scientific inquiry." Kurtz contends that "a democratic society cannot afford scientific illiteracy and a fictionalized view of the universe that ignores tremendous strides in scientific inquiry. We think the scientific community should mount an information campaign against these shows."

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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