US drug companies are preparing for new draconian provisions for reporting on financial relationships with academia. Will efforts to increase transparency prove burdensome to researchers and the industry?
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Archives for category: Politics
Last year, the two primary government agencies that fund scientific research — the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation — invested more than $47 billion in promising projects. Given our sinking economy, taxpayers should reasonably ask: What’s the return on that investment?
The government last week announced a $1 million multi-agency initiative for evaluating how many new ideas, jobs and medical advances that money has generated. The scheme is called STAR METRICS, or rather less catchily, Science and Technology for America’s Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science.
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More than 300,000 children with autism will reach adulthood in the next five to ten years. Yet we know very little about how they will face the challenges of the working world — and how they can best contribute to it.
How do we find jobs for adults with autism? That’s the focus of a special issue of the April Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation. With the right training and tools, the articles suggest, it’s possible for many people with the disorder to be gainfully employed.
Unfortunately, that’s not the case now: between 50 and 75 percent of all adults with autism are jobless. Even adults with high-functioning autism are less likely to have jobs than those with severe language disorders or other learning disabilities. And those who are employed tend to make less money than others, and are more likely to switch jobs.
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Because behavioral and brain imaging studies have shown that individuals with Williams syndrome don’t show fear when appropriate — such as when they see an angry face — the study supports the controversial idea that racial stereotypes are based partly on fear, researchers say.
Scientists have long debated about whether stereotypes — which are often unconscious and immediate, and arise in children as young as 3 years — have evolutionary origins, or are cultural constructs.
“We have a very bad understanding of how our stereotypes originate, but I think this paper has made a really significant advance in this,” notes Uta Frith, emeritus professor of cognitive development at University College London, who was not involved in the work.
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We’re making rapid strides in understanding the brain, but we still know little about what genetic or molecular problems cause mental illnesses.
There hasn’t been a new schizophrenia drug in 50 years, or a depression drug in 20. Nor are there any drugs to improve thehallmark symptoms of autism.
This “frustrating lack of progress” has prompted several big names in psychiatry and genetics — including Nobel Laureates Eric Kandeland Jim Watson — to call for a 10-year international scheme that would combine the latest in genetics and animal research to combat psychiatric diseases.
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You may have seen autism in the headlines lately, and not just about a remarkable research advance. The past couple of months have uncovered shocking scandals about two high-profile autism researchers.
The most recent concerns Danish epidemiologist Poul Thorsen, who has allegedly gone missing with a wad of cash embezzled from his research funds.
This time last year, I reported on Thorsen’s autism studies, which rely on the massive stores of data in Scandinavian national registries. Perhaps most notably, he collaborated a few years ago on two major reports showing that there is no link between autism and vaccines.
Thorsen has held various academic appointments at Aarhus University, Emory University and Drexel University in Philadelphia. Last March, he resigned from Aarhus. In January, the university announced that it was missing money — reportedly some 10,000 Swedish kroner or about $1.4 million — from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant designated for one of Thorsen’s research programs. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer Thorsen resigned on 9 March from Drexel. No one has heard from him since.
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Brian Dugan, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and shackles, shuffled to the door of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago, accompanied by four sheriff deputies. It was the first time that Dugan, 52, had been anywhere near a city in 20 years. Serving two life sentences for a pair of murders he had committed in the 1980s, he was now facing the prospect of the death penalty for an earlier killing.
Dugan was here on a Saturday this past September to meet one of the few people who might help him to avoid that fate: Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Dugan, Kiehl and the rest of the entourage walked the length of the hospital, crossed a walkway to another building, and took the lift down to a basement-level facility where researchers would scan Dugan’s brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Todd Parrish, the imaging centre’s director, offered plastic zip ties to replace the shackles — no metal is allowed in the same room as the scanner’s powerful magnet — but the guards said they weren’t necessary. Dugan entered the machine without restraints, and Parrish locked the door — as much to keep the guards and their weapons out as to keep Dugan in.
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There’s good news for autism research tucked into President Obama’s 2011 budget proposal: $222 million of it, to be exact.
That generous sum is part of the $32.1 billion the president has allocated to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Last year, the NIH received about $31 billion, plus the one-time gift of about $10 billion from the hefty stimulus package.
The new NIH budget calls for autism funding “to expand research, detection, treatment, and other activities” related to improving the lives of individuals with the disorder.
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On Saturday, a top government official resigned from the Interagency Autism Coordination Committee (IACC), the body of scientists and advocates that’s responsible for guiding all autism research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Story Landis, director of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, stepped down from the IACC after notes that she had passed to someone else at a September 30 IACC meeting were leaked to the Age of Autism blog. The blog published the text of her notes and called for her resignation.
According to the blog, Landis’s notes questioned whether Lyn Redwood, a parent member of the IACC “is pushing autism as multisystem disorder to feed into vaccine injury?”
In her letter to the other members of the committee, published by the Huffington Post Sunday, Landis wrote that her actions were “unprofessional” and “eroded trust at a time when we need to build stronger ties across government and the community.”
The next day, at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, SFARI asked Landis’s boss, NIH head Francis Collins, for his take on the incident. Collins replied that this is “just one example of the tension and lack of trust” within the autism community.
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