A cluster of recently published papers details the progress that is being made engineering stem cells. It is simultaneously bolstering the critics of Bush’s embryonic stem cell ban by showing the potential of this technology, and also bolstering Bush’s supporters by showing that harvesting ES cells from fertilized embryos may not be necessary. The progress is further ironically based upon research with ES cells – so scientists have used ES cells in research that hast the potential to render ES cells obsolete.

Regardless of the ethical and political twists – the developments are very cool and are likely to pull us out of this political morass (but also likely to throw us into others).

The first paper is authored by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and is published in Nature, the second is by Rudolf Jaenisch at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is also published in Nature, and the third is by Konrad Hochedlinger at Harvard and is published in Cell Stem Cell. (Here is a summary of the three papers.)

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Science has a very troubled relationship with the legal system in the US. So I am less than optimistic about the outcome of a hearing that begins today regarding a claims made by 9 families that their child’s autism was caused by thimerosal – a mercury based preservative that until around 2002 was found in childhood vaccines. The claim has no scientific basis, but that unfortunately does not mean we can predict the outcome of the hearings.

The hearing will take place in a U.S. Court of Federal Claims presided over by three “special masters” appointed for the purpose. The Federal government maintains a fund to compensate those who are injured by vaccines. It’s a fair system – vaccines are mandated for entry into the public education system (although most states protect parents who opt out). And, even without this, society basically asks that its citizens get vaccinated not only to protect themselves but to protect everyone else. In exchange we set aside a fund to compensate those who are injured by vaccines.

Over the past 8 years 4,800 families have filed claims for compensation based upon the belief that their child contracted autism as a direct consequence of their vaccines. At first autism was linked to the MMR vaccine, and when the scientific evidence shot this down claims shifted to the mercury in thimerosal in some childhood vaccines (but not the MMR vaccine). A grassroots phenomenon emerged, and has been at increasing odd with the scientific evidence.

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The purpose of the Intelligent design (ID) movement is to put a new face on old-fashioned creationism – like spraying a rotting carcass with air-freshener, but it doesn’t even cover up the odor. The cornerstone of ID is irreducible complexity, which is literally just a new name for the old god-of-the-gaps nonsense. ID’ers say that there are structures in biology that are too complex to have evolved, because they could not function if they were any less complex. Their complexity is irreducible, so evolution has not path it could have taken to get there, and chance alone is too improbable.

The weakness of this argument is that it is an argument based upon ignorance – what we currently do not know. Saying something is irreducibly complex, in practice, amounts to pointing at the current gaps in our knowledge of how certain structures evolved, and saying that those gaps are irreducible and therefore they are the product of an intelligent designer. God of the gaps is now ID of the gaps, and irreducible complexity is the gaps.

But this line of argument is dependent on what we currently do not know, and that is a moving target, because biologists are discovering all the time new information which reduces the allegedly irreducible. In the Dover trial of 2005 evidence was presented that essentially all of the examples of irreducible complexity presented by Michael Behe had since been reduced. The gaps were filled in. That Behe still maintains his position was branded by the conservative judge as intellectual dishonesty.

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I have been asked multiple times to discuss the whole issue of peer-review, so here it is. Peer-review is a critical part of the functioning of the scientific community, of quality control, and the self corrective nature of science. But it is no panacea. It is helpful to understand what it is, and what it isn’t, its uses and abuses.

Overview

When the statement is made that research is “peer-reviewed” this is usually meant to refer to the fact that it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Different scientific disciplines have different mechanisms for determining which journals are legitimately peer-reviewed. In medicine the National Library of Medicine (NLM) has rules for peer-review and they decide on a case by case basis which journals get their stamp of approval. Such journals are then listed as peer-reviewed.

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Michael Egnor, the neurosurgeon who has made a series of embarrassingly ridiculous claims about evolution and intelligent design (ID), now has turned his sights on consciousness and materialism. Actually, he is revealing the true underlying beef that ID proponents/creationists have with modern science – methodological materialism. It’s really just whining about scientists not letting supernaturalism play in their sandbox. They fail to recognize (or care) that methodological materialism is not just an arbitrary choice. Rather, supernaturalism won’t fit in science’s sandbox – the two are fundamentally incompatible.

Egnor has chosen as his latest topic that of human consciousness. This is a favorite topic for the woo crowd, and it is interesting that the fundamentalist Christians, who traditionally are at ideological odds with new age and occult beliefs, are finding common ground over consciousness. It is not a surprise as the phenomenon of consciousness is poorly understood and even more difficult to articulate, and pseudoscience thrives in the fertile ground at the edges of current scientific knowledge (witness the other favorite woo topic of quantum mechanics).

Egnor writes:

“There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism. Material substances have mass and energy. Ideas have purpose and judgment. There is no commonality. The association between brain function and ideas is fascinating, and the association of ideas with regions of the brain is a proper object of scientific study. But where there is no commonality of properties, association cannot be causation. Ideas must be caused by substances that have properties common to ideas- such as purpose and judgment.

“Materialist neuroscientists confuse association with causation.”

This is utter rubbish on many levels. Egnor’s basic point is that the material brain cannot cause mental activity, which is immaterial. But he does not establish that premise, he merely assumes it and his justification is nothing more than semantics. He then accuses material scientists of assuming that mental functions are brain functions, while essentially dismissing a huge chunk of modern neuroscience as “interesting” but irrelevant by falsely invoking the “correlation is not causation” argument.

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Shark cartilage, despite a long subculture of belief, has no effect against cancer. A new study presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology showed no effect of shark cartilage on non-small cell lung cancer.  Previous well-designed studies have also shown no benefit from shark cartilage.  If only this were real medicine (and not “alternative”) the story would be all-but over. Unfortunately shark cartilage as a cancer treatment is going the way of laetrile – immune to evidence, propped up by true believers and conspiracy theories.

The notion that shark cartilage might be an effective cancer treatment apparently stemmed from the observation that sharks (who do not have bones but whose skeletons are composed almost entirely of cartilage) do not get cancer. This dubious observation was followed by the even more dubious logic that it must be their cartilage that has magical anti-cancer properties. A liberal dose of wishful thinking, biased observation, and exploitive marketing then led to the belief that consuming shark cartilage could treat or cure cancer in humans.

In fact, sharks do get cancer.

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This is one of those claims that seems a bit far-fetched at first glance. Dr. Elion Kirson and his colleagues used a device developed by Professor Yoram Palti of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology to deliver electrical fields through direct contact electrodes to treat the worst forms of brain cancer – glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), and found that survival time doubled over historical controls.

I had a skeptical eyebrow half-cocked over this story – this is an impressive success over a very difficult to treat form of cancer, and the approach just seems a bit simplistic. But after reading the various papers I think there is some potential here. Like all preliminary data, this must be viewed with cautious optimism The GBM study was open-label, that means no control group, and was in a small number of patients (10). But any improvement in the survival time with GBM is impressive.

The putative mechanism of the alternating electrical fields is that they disrupt mitosis. When cells divide the chromosomes must go through a complex dance – they must line up precisely then duplicate and divide precisely, so that each cell gets one full copy of the genome. The hypothesis is that the alternating electrical fields, within a certain frequency range only, disrupt an important mechanism of signaling that is crucial to mitosis. This of course implies that electrical signaling is involved in the chromosomal dance of mitosis. An earlier study of the technology shows that the effect on mitosis is no thermal – the electrical energy is not just heating up the cells.
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