BRCA1

Nobody likes a good gene patent story like the New York Times, which published three stories in the two days following a recent federal court ruling.

The news: A federal district court threw out seven patents related to the breast cancer genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. The suit had been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, individual patients, medical organizations, and others.

The issue, debated for years, is whether patenting genes and thereby protecting profits will spur the biotech industry to more quickly develop diagnostic tests and treatments. The industry says yes. The plaintiffs say no. They argue that patents stifle innovation and make it difficult for researchers to build off of others’ discoveries. The disagreement couldn’t be clearer.

The legal case turns on whether the gene a biotech company patents is something found in nature, or something that’s been subtly altered by the company.

In its first story, on March 29th, veterans John Schwartz and Andrew Pollack report that the judge ruled that the genes in question were found in nature, and that the argument that they were slightly different was a “lawyer’s trick.” That’s a nice quote from the opinion; the phrase “lawyer’s trick” neatly encapsulates the judge’s view. Some sources quoted in the story said this could be disastrous for the biotech industry, because it would eliminate the financial incentive to work on a gene. Others said the loss of patent protection would open up and speed research. I’m not sure how I would have done the story differently, but it left me unsatisfied: I want to know whether the decision will hamper research or accelerate it. And the story didn’t tell me that.

Pollack did come back the next day with a follow-up story in the business section about “taking stock” after the decision. Because it was a business story, Pollack noted that biotech stocks fell on the decision, and he interviewed business people. This had the effect of making this story far less balanced than the Schwartz-Pollack story the previous day, which tried to balance competing views. The business people think the decision is a disaster. The follow-up story strongly reinforced that point of view, even if Pollack did end it with a quote from an academic who challenged that view.

The lesson here is that just because it’s a business story, that doesn’t mean the reporting should be limited to interviews with business people. The plaintiffs should have been represented here, too. That’s good journalistic practice, and it’s good for the readers. The business people who read the Times business section know what business people think. They need to know what outsiders think.

Hold this up next to the About New York column by the populist writer Jim Dwyer in the Times the same day. He interviewed the plaintiffs and their supporters. That led to an equally unbalanced story in the other direction. And Dwyer wasn’t shy about establishing the stakes: “This is a war over human nature,” he writes. That’s a nice rhetorical flourish, but it’s silly and should have been struck out by his editor. This is not a war over human nature. It’s an argument about research and how researchers should be compensated for the risks they take. And it turns on a technical question about alterations in isolated genes, not on whether “the traits we inherit from our parents…could become a company’s intellectual property,” as Dwyer puts it. I like the passion, but it’s out of order in this case.

Others:

Robert Langreth at The Science Business, a Forbes blog, isn’t shy about where he stands. The headline reads: Finally, Common Sense Prevails On Gene Patents. A decidedly anti-business position at a business magazine.

A brief AP story on the Bloomberg BusinessWeek website concerns itself exclusively with the fall in the stock of Myriad Genetics, the company that owns the patents in question. The AP–at least in this excerpt–doesn’t hint that the decision has any other importance whatever. It’s another example, like Pollack’s business story, of writing a story that is way off balance because it doesn’t include information from anyone other than business people. The excuse that this is a business story is no excuse.

A news story at Nature online quotes the geneticist Mary Claire-King of the University of Washington, who says the ruling would be good for breast and ovarian cancer patients and their families. First mention I’ve seen of that; others would have done well to include that perspective.

But Nature isn’t telling all here. Some readers might remember that Claire-King narrowly lost the race with Myriad Genetics to isolate the gene, and that’s why Myriad was able to claim the patent. Had she won that race, things might have been different.

- Paul Raeburn

Big splash of news today over the White House decision to ease US dependence on imported fossil fuels by, um, drilling, baby, drilling. And not just anywhere but via offshore oil and gas development – a topic that sends many environmental activist organizations and their members into conniptions.

Eventually we’ll get some smart reporting on this. Topics include the history of accidents and the long term damage to shorelines and marine ecoystems they leave behind, the possibilities of finding enough to matter, the possibility that big finds will, in the long run, boost carbon emissions even while easing imported gas and oil demand, and the subtle political calculus of this unexpected move.

Being of occasionally devious mind, The Tracker suspects that President Obama and his advisers are pulling a political fast one and it has little to do with expectation of (safely controlled) gushers off shore. It goes like this – first figure that, just as most big-picture analyses suggest, there’s not enough oil and gas offshore of the US, even in Alaska or along the southern Atlantic seaboard, to make much difference to ultimate CO2 levels or to American energy independence. Second, let the drillers explore anyway to show that the current administration, as with nuclear power, is closing off no options and making it more palatable to a bigger spectrum of the public and of members of the US Chamber of Commerce. Third, this is easy cash, better than raising taxes: those leases put money into federal coffers. It won’t balance the budget, but it can’t hurt. Fourth, if they do find oodles of oil and gas it will take decades to start production and it won’t be cheap to extract out there, helping renewables to compete. Fifth: There is always the carbon tax third rail to grab.

Those are some of the angles I’d check out, were I told to check this out at all.

A few stories already out there:

• AP – Chris Kahn : Offshore Drilling Could Tap Large Supplies ;
• NYTimes – John Broder: Obama’s Oil Drilling Plan Draws Critics From Both Sides ; Sober walk through the forest of disagreement and uncertainty – but not much analysis to help the reader sort them all out. It’s a start, and the analysis surely is to come.
• E&E Greenwire/NY Times – Noelle Straub: Obama Proposes Opening Vast Offshore Areas to Drilling ;
• Wall St. Journal – Matt Phillips: Drill Baby Drill (blog) : Obama’s Offshore Drilling Plan Lifts Explorers ;
• USA Today – David Jackson (blog): Obama’s energy pitch includes political fuel ; Obama, he writes, is drilling for votes.
• LA Times – Christi Parsons : Obama announces new offshore drilling: ‘There will be those who strongly disagree’ ; Yes, but for now the West Coast is not to be opened further.
• Houston Chronicle – Jennifer A. Dlouhy: Obama clears way for more oil and gas drilling off U.S. coasts ;
• Anchorage Daily News – Elizabeth Bluemink: New offshore drilling policy for Alaska prompts mixed reaction ;
• Miami Herald – Lesley Clark: Environmentalists attack Obama plan to allow oil drilling off Florida’s coasts ;

This news sits crossways on the usual political and technological divisions in the US. Reporters will need to stop and think hard about how to go at it – falling back on the usual tropes and bromides will not do. This will be fun to watch.

- Charlie Petit

....Greenhouse with transparency

A big expected but somehow leaden thud of news today from Britain, where looks like nearly every outlet is leaping upon it. Those fellows at the Climatic Research Unit who kicked off the so-called Climate Gate and wrote a bunch of snarky mean emails that got hacked and exposed may have been grubby about sharing data with skeptics, but they didn’t fool with the data in order to fool the world, the IPCC, or anybody else about which way the climate is headed.  So says, it appears, members of a Parliamentary inquiry into their their ethics. The science seems to have survived nicely, but their behavior toward fools..,  – er, skeptics of the bloggy rightwing sort – fell short.

Maybe it’s sort of like the Freedom of Information Act, a law in the US that has its counterpart in the UK. Just because it’s a communist or a fascist or somebody you just don’t like who is doing the asking is no reason to say no or to just say nothing. Initial news stories seem to be unsure whether to lead on the basic validation of mainstream climate science, or on the petty behavior of mainstream scientists under siege. Some do both.

Consider the contrast in these two headlines (and the accompanying stories providing the same essential news):

• Guardian – James Randerson: Climate researchers ‘secrecy’ criticised – but MPs say science remains intact; A left-leaning paper, generally supportive of action to slow climate change, lets readers know that the scientists’ behavior was not always the best when dealing with doubting adversaries – but it quickly moves on the declare their professional science as up to good standards.
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: University of East Anglia refused to share information on global warming / … behaved in a ‘reprehensible’ manner by refusing to relase research behind the science of global warming, according to MPs ; The more right-inclined newspaper hits the bad behavior of the researchers a lot harder. But, one must say, forthrightly tells readers that for all the tut-tutting, there is no evidence that the university or its affiliated Climatic Research Unit manipulated data.

One suspects this development will have little impact, at least not right off, on the Climategate express that continues to roar through popular culture, the media, and various levels of government around the world. For one thing, a gang of elected politicians is hardly the caliber of reviewers that will need to go through CRU and IPCC records and standards with any chance all factions will pay attention.

Other stories:

• The Economist: Climategate’s culture: British MPs are concerned about the way climate scientists have worked, but not about their results;
• NPR (blog) Mark Memmott: ‘Climategate’ Report Mostly Clears Scientists, But Raps Secrecy ;
• Register – Andrew Orlowski : MPs to Climategate boffins: Keep Calm and Carry On ;
• CNN: UK lawmakers take heat off “Climategate’ scientist ;
• Bloomberg – Alex Morales: UK Climate Science ‘Damaged’ by Leaked E-Mails ;  Focusses on intransigence, very little in this story on the clearance given the underlying science – which it does say is the target of a different, upcoming inquiry.
• BBC – Roger Harrabin: Climate science must be more open, say MPs ;
• Reuters – Peter Griffiths: Climate Unit Cleared of Data Manipulation, Criticized for Stonewalling Skeptics ;

Other Climate Science & Policy News:

• Reuters – Erik Kirschbaum: German film offers answers to Gore clmate concerns ; It says renewables can provide all the green energy we want.
• E & E ClimateWire/Scientific American – Evan Lehmann: Who Funds Contrariness in Climate Change? ; Greenpeace is the main source, and it has its finger pointed at one US industrial conglomerate.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker got a surprise yesterday that should not have been one. As news bloomed from the Swiss-French border that protons were colliding at record energy, and apparently smack dab into one another just like CERN’s gurus of magnetic steering hoped, I saw many pretty pictures of the careering debris. Like the one I plucked here from the CERN-Large Hadron Collider website. For no good reason I imagined that the detection of collisions would come from something dull, like a spike on the display of a little oscilloscope or other test instrument – not the full video panoply from the banks of crystals and scintillators or whatever is wrapped around the interaction chambers within those humongous camera detector things called CMS, LHCb,  ALICE and ATLAS. Rather than a blip or two, we get the whole colorized, digital versions of cloud chamber whizzings and corkscrewings of pions, bosons, muons, leptons, and other goings on like in the old days when cyclotrons and vacuum tubes were all the rage in atom smashing. Very slick. I just hadn’t thought through how terrific the first images would look.

I like’em so much I’m running two of them. This is the ALICE image, the one above is from LHCb. And for another, too big to appreciate in a thumbnail,  take a look at the ATLAS doing its heavy lifting, in hi-def. (found this at CNET, thx).

So the big galoot works. The pictures are in focus. The googleplex baud Niagara of data zipped through the processors and painted tapestries of subatomic mayhem as prescribed.  No tunnels suddenly chilled with spilt helium or filled with the acrid odor of fused electrics. As yet the LHC is not at full energy but the champagne bottles are open.

Reporters, many of whom have written overwrought LHC verbiage so many times their own brains were starting to fuse, finally get something concrete yet giddy to describe. So let’s get to it – and don’t expect much analysis or niggling on individual stories’ usages, exaggerations, or little Big Bangs where analogies smash head-on into metaphors, spraying cliches and perplexing turns of phrase in every direction.  That may come later. Today I’m going for quantity.

Stories from some of the Bigs:

• Reuters – Robert Evans: CERN pushes Big Bang machine to new science frontier ;
• AP – Alexander G. Higgins, Seth Borenstein: Atom smasher will help reveal ‘the beginning’ ; Datelined Geneva, where Higgins is. Borenstein from DC, plus assistance from Frank Jordans, also in Geneva, and John Antczak in Los Angeles.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: European Collider Begins Its Subatomic Exploration ;
• BBC – CERN LHC see high-energy success ; plus broadcast and interview by Matt McGrath: CERN Scientists celebrate Large Hadron Collider success ;
• NPR – Richard Harris: ‘Big Bang Machine” Smashes Energy Record ;
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: First high-energy collisions carried out in Geneva ;
• The Economist: Phew! The LHC is now operating in earnest ;
• Financial Times – Andrew Jack: Scientists hail ‘Big Bang’ experiment ;
• Voice of America – Lisa Schlein: Scientists: Atom Smasher Achieves Record Power ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Large Hadron Collider breaks high-energy records ;
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Large Hadron Collider achieves success with high energy particle collisions ; Plus tons more at the Telegraphs special LHC site.

And a few major regional, general outlets:

• Deutsche Welle – Wilhelmina Llyffyt: Large Hadron Collider smashes records ;
• Aljizeera – Oliver Varney: CERN opens up the world of physics ;
• Canwest – Margaret Munro: Collider’s first test a smashing success ;
• SwissInfo: First of Many “Little Big Bangs” Popo at CERN ;
• Toronto Globe and Mail - Sarah Boesveld: The Large Hadron Collider: A step closer to the beginning of time ;
• Toronto Star – Oakland Ross: Scientists move closer to finding the ‘God particle’ ;
• Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune – Amina Khan: Large Hadron Collider rewards scientists watching at Caltech ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Eureka! Large Hadron Collider first up, smashes protons ; Stephen Kurczy: What is Higgs Boson – and will CERN scientists find the ‘God particle’? ;
• Thainidian News – Meena Kar: Atom Smasher Creates Record ;
• Calcutta Telegraph – G.S. Mudur: After whimper, the biggest ever bang – From giant lab, journey to the unknown;

Plus,  specialty & on line pubs etc:

• Wired News – Betsy Mason: Phew, It Works! Science Begins at the LHC ;
• National Geographic News – Ker Than: Large Hadron Collider Smashes Protons, Sets Record ;
• Science News – Laura Sanders: LHC revs up ;
• Ars technica – John Timmer: The software brains behind the particle colliders ; Good explainer, with internal links to others in a series on particle accelerators.
• LiveScience – Clara Moskowitz: Atom smasher Could Reveal Fabled Monopole Magnet ;
• CNET: Stephen Shankland: LHC experiments run at highest energy level yet ;

There is more, much more. But imagine the press when some NEW science pops up, or out or whatever direction from which something pops when it’s been hiding in another dimension, and shakes physics to its very foundations and undermines the very laws of known creation while leaving mankind gaping gobsmacked slack-jawed flatfooted and stupefied into an immensity of revelation as the Standard Model shatters on the reefs of reality. It will be so much fun for gee-whiz reporters!  One can only hope.

Grist for the Mill:

CERN Press Release and First Physics media resources page.  Fermilab Press Release ; Lawrence Berkeley Lab Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Tomatoes are important crops, providing a flavoring to such things as sauces and sandwiches that few other fruits can. But they are not exactly staples like tubers, nuts, bananas, and grains on which national diets and caloric satisfaction can depend. Nonetheless, great excitement from several outlets greeted news this week that a mutant variant of the gene set that controls tomato flowering has been found, bred for, and revealed to exert powerful influence on yield and sweetness in several tomato varieties. Of some interest is that the work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island  and at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem used no transgenic modification, but only classic cross-breeding of spontaneously formed genetic variations, to identify the potential for more bounteous tomato harvests.  (CORRECTED: yikes – I wrote Maine for Cold Spring lab’s locale in an earlier version of this post, brain skipping to the Jackson Lab down east.) That means a lot in Europe, where opposition to trans-species,  genetically modified organisms has in some quarters a near-religious fervor. It illustrates a somewhat non-rigorous but well-pedigreed term in agricultural science: hybrid vigor, noted by Charles Darwin among others, or formally heterosis. You can guess which of those three tomato plants is the vigorous hybrid. The news is in a report in Nature Genetics;

As conventional tomatoes are tasty enough, and as far as The Tracker knows there is no shortage of tomatoes or any chance that tomatoes will avert future famines, it is as first striking to see such exuberant reporting on this.

But at, for one example, The Independent in the UK, science editor Steve Connor zeroes in on one reason to get worked up:  “The discovery could be applied to other food crops such as potatoes, peppers, and aubergines, the geneticists hope.” Wait a moment while I look up aubergine. Ah – eggplant. Connor uses several quotes off the release without identifying them as something he didn’t hear himself – but also has some not on the CSHL handout. So it looks like he made a phone call.

Hmmm. Wonder if this variant gene set – in which one and just one of the mutant gene is matched with a normal one – can be bred into those Farmers’ market specials, odd-looking but flavorful heirloom tomatoes, without screwing them up.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Joanne Allen: Single gene powers hybrid tomato plants ;
• Daily Mail: Why the super tomato is a sweet success ; It’s because they are like mules, it says here. Tidy and reasonably useful story but quotes are all courtesy, unacknowledged, of the handout.
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Key to sweeter tomatoes uncovered ; More press release quotes. The story reports that the better flavor and yield arose from “tweaking” the gene. Not sure if that verb works when the gene itself is not altered? The hybrid has just one copy, rather than the two of one of the first-generation cross’s parents. Is that a tweak, or a dilution? The story throws in unrelated news from France of the sequencing of a truffle gene.
• Newsday – Delthia Ricks: Cold Spring Harbor Lab creates sweeter tomatoes ; This site used to track Mzs. Ricks’s output regularly, but not since all but the first grafs of Newsday’s stories slipped behind a subscribers-only barrier. This one starts promisingly. I wonder if there’s a way to get selected stories to Tracker readers. Looks like time for a call to find out.
• Scotsman – John von Radowitz: Tomatoes to be tastier after experts discover a mutant gene ; Short piece, looks straight off the release ;

Grist for the Mill:

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press Release ;  Nature Genetics journal abstract ;

This headline on ScienceDaily caught my eye this morning:

Patients Shouldn’t Navigate Internet Without Physician Guide, Experts Say

I’ve already written and deleted half a dozen smarmy comments. Feel free to insert your own. Some of the headlines I’ve written looked equally dumb once they were published, so I’m not going to throw stones from this glass house. But let’s look at that attribution: Experts say.

A search of Goggle news this morning reveals that within the past week, “experts” were mentioned in 122,943 stories. So we might ask: Who are these “experts,” and how did they get to be that way?

Here are a few of the stories:

Frank Jordans of the AP: Outside experts to review WHO’s swine flu response.

The staff of CTV news in Canada: Gonorrhea risks becoming a superbug, expert warns.

Mike Lillis of The Washington Independent: Medical Experts Highlight Chief Flaw of Dems’ Health Reforms.

Jim Steinberg of the Contra Costa Times: Experts: Health system can handle new insured.

William March of The Tampa Tribune: Experts differ on merits, political impact of McCollum’s health care lawsuit.

From Melly Alazraki of AOL’s DailyFinance.com: Breast Cancer Screening: Why Can’t Experts Agree?

Good question, Melly: Why can’t they agree? If experts are people who really know something, shouldn’t what they know be beyond disagreement?

The experts in the ScienceDaily story (“adapted” from a press release) are Pamela Hartzband and Jerome Groopman, both doctors at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. The story is based on an article they published in the New England Journal of Medicine. They write that the Internet is unique because “previous technologies have been fully under the doctor’s control,” but “the Internet is equally in the hands of patients.”

The story doesn’t say what Groopman (a familiar name to many of us) and Hartzband specialize in. Let’s grant that they have expertise in some area of medicine. What makes them experts on the Internet?

We don’t know. The ScienceDaily story doesn’t say so. Neither does the New England Journal article.

I’m going to go out on a limb: I don’t think they are Internet experts. I come to that conclusion because I am not an expert on the Internet, and I already knew most of what I read in their piece. If I know most of what they know, and I’m not an expert, I’ll make the leap that they aren’t either.

I’m belaboring the point. In science stories, “expert” should be a word like “breakthrough”–as rarely seen as a Perigord truffle. Describe the people you quote in a way that tells the reader something. Save the meaningless “expert” for when you really need it. And you might find out that you never really need it at all.

- Paul Raeburn

Grist: Beth Israel press release.

It’s hard to read, watch, or listen to anything about guinea worm disease, one of the more miserable ailments in the world. Rural Africans have for millennia suffered the pain and misery of these slender parasites that break the body and torment the soul. But the BBC‘s radio show The World has posted, from Boston-based David Baron, a satisfying report. It’s not easy to sit through but its news, that full eradication of the disease seems plausible and in not such a long time, is welcome.

The show highlights both the general eradication campaign, and the intimate role played by President Jimmy Carter in pushing that effort to this day. Baron, microphone in hand, sat down with the 85-year-old Carter in Southern Sudan. This is heartfelt reporting.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Many people in Spain gather at bullrings to watch a animals repeatedly slashed with sharp iron points by horsemen, while men dressed on a funny costumes stick decorative banderillas 6 cm deep in their necks, and while brave toreros kills them by plunging 80 cm swords into their backs and through their chests. It’s culture and tradition for some. It is cruelty and barbarism for others – and some in the last weeks are trying to ban bullfighting in the region of Catalonia. Has science anything to say about this issue? Not really. But a veterinary professor from the Complutense University of Madrid says that he has done studies showing that these special bulls don’t suffer as much pain as other ruminants. One of the “proofs” is that when the picador punches the bull, the animal persists on attacking his horse instead of running away. The other evidence is that they seem to have 20% bigger thalamus, the brain structure that produces endorphins, the hormones than minimize the pain. He also has found that the brain signals in this region activates faster than usual. Suspiciously, these findings that could become important discoveries have not been published in any peer review journal. A story in the science Sunday section of El Mundo gives some credit to this research, and confront it with the critical views of other physiologists. The story is acceptable and very well written, but it ends up being a “one side says this, the other says that” without references to scientific data or judgment from third parties. We think it misses an opportunity for useful science reporting on a popular issue.

Desde hace varias semanas en España hay un encarnizado debate social y mediático a raíz de la solicitud que grupos antitaurinos han hecho llegar al Parlamento de Cataluña para que prohíba los toros en esa región. Para los abolicionistas las corridas son una crueldad innecesaria, vergonzosa, y disfrutar de ver cómo se tortura a un animal es un acto inmoral que puede ser calificado de sádico. Para sus defensores los toros son espectáculo, cultura, tradición, arte; y hay animales sufriendo mucho más en condiciones bastante peores. ¿Tiene algo que decir la ciencia al respecto? No mucho, la verdad. La ciencia informa, y la ética valora. Pero sí hay un subterfugio por el que la ciencia se ha colado en esta discusión: un profesor de veterinaria de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid asegura que los toros de lidia sufren mucho menos dolor que el resto de ruminates. El suplemento dominical Eureka de El Mundo presentaba ayer un reportaje de Miguel G. Corral explicando en qué sustentaba Juan Carlos Illera sus afirmaciones, y las críticas a su trabajo de otros veterinarios y fisiólogos.

Empecemos por un detalle muy importante: los estudios de J.C. Illera no están publicados en ningún peer review journal. Él se defiende diciendo que las revistas científicas no quieren ni oír hablar del término bullfighting, pero suena a excusa intolerable. Si sus investigaciones estuvieran bien realizadas metodológicamente, y los resultados sustentaran con claridad el punto que él defiende, sin duda sería un trabajo muy importante que las revistas querrían publicar. A nosotros, esto nos genera una incredulidad inicial.

Según explica Miguel en su pieza, Illera argumenta primero que si el toro sufriera tanto dolor, huiría al ser picado por el picador en lugar de continuar ensañándose con su caballo. Ehem. Luego llega el argumento científico: el tálamo de los toros de lidia es un 20% mayor que el resto de rumiantes. El tálamo es donde se producen endorfinas (hormonas que actúan como opiáceos), y por tanto, el toro segrega más de estas sustancias que minimizan el dolor. Además, dice haber medido la velocidad de respuesta cerebral ante el dolor y ser más rápido que en otras especies. Insistimos: si esto hubiera sido demostrado fehacientemente, ya debería estar publicado. En el artículo aparecen varias voces científicas discrepando de los estudios de Illera. Podéis leerlas en el original. Aquí más bien se trata de comentar el trabajo periodístico. Y a tal respecto, a pesar de valorar positivamente la intención de tratar desde la perspectiva científica este asunto, consideramos que el reportaje se queda a medias. No parece haberse tomado realmente en serio la aportación que puede hacer la ciencia al debate sobre el dolor del toro. Sobre la fisiología del dolor en mamíferos, o el papel del tálamo, debe haber mucha más literatura científica. Y además de buscar respuestas en los antitaurinos, hubiera sido la situación ideal para preguntar la opinión de expertos completamente neutrales, que analizaran mejor los peculiares puntos que defiende Illera. El lector se queda bastante indiferente. Lo percibimos un poco como una oportunidad perdida de demostrar de qué es capaz el periodismo científico riguroso: Dejar un poco de lado las opiniones individuales, analizar en serio si el toro de lidia puede sentir menos dolor que otro rumiante, y criticar duramente el trabajo de Illera si en verdad es fraudulento. Aunque lo sospechamos, nos quedamos con la duda.

- Pere Estupinyà

The people of the world do love the Hubble Space Telescope. None do so more than Americans who not only gobble up its phantasmogoric yet real (except for some useful color renditions) photographs, but embrace it as a triumph of what once was called Yankee ingenuity.

We’re just about at its 20th anniversary, plus a costly new IMAX: Hubble 3D movie is out, providing a double whammy of reasons to look fondly on this most scientifically revolutionary instrument of the space age and perhaps the most productive telescope in the history of astronomy – assuming there is a way to put a yardstick to that.

On my way through a roundup of recent coverage, it was therefore a surprise to find one reporter with the nerve to give the Hubble a less-than-rave notice. The Washington Post‘s Joel Achenbach didn’t give this astronomy movie very many stars. It ran about two weeks ago. The hed says it “ultimately fails.” Really? All I’ve seen is the trailer, shown as I waited for Avatar to start a month or two ago, but it had me by the guts just watching the launch of the shuttle that ferried it to orbit. Achenbach calls the movie disjointed and under-achieving. Yet, he also adds, “the footage from orbit of the Hawaiian islands is worth the trip to the theatre.” Oh, that kind of failure – like a traffic accident that you can’t take your eyes off? Not quite, but his quarrel is that the movie is over-ambitious, that its parts clash with one another. It takes gall, and we need gall in this world, to write anything less than worshipful that involves the Hubble. Hence a nod to into-the-wind temerity.

Elsewhere, the Hubble gets mainly and in some cases nothing but praise, for movie and birthday:

• CNN – Doug Gross: Hubble and the space shuttle in IMAX 3-D ;
• Huffington Post – Catharine Smith: Orion Nebula in 3D Will Take Your Breath Away ; A shorty, breathless, with art.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Happy 20th, Hubble ; Cover story for the April 10 issue doesn’t even mention the movie – but includes a well-selected gallery of Hubble greatest hit pics.
• Boston Globe – Mark Feeney: Hubble 3D ; He gives it a good review – but has something of a soulmate in Achenbach, sensing that part of the movie fail to mesh.
• Baltimore Sun – Frank D. Roylance: Hubble telescope to tackle the big questions ; With its time running out, Roylance reports that its biggest research project lies just ahead, a survey of distant galaxies. Neither movie nor birthday here, just the science on tap.
• Wall St. Journal – Joe Morgenstern: ‘Hubble’: Heavenly Ticket to Space ; A rave that calls the show “a perfect match of medium and subject.”
• Space Daily – Michael Potter: Zen And The Art Of Space Maintenance ;
• QMI/Toronto Sun – Jim Slotek : ‘Hubble’is out of this world ; Slotek wisely senses melancholy and shares it up top – the movie is great, but NASA is in sad shape and the Hubble’s end is near.
• NYTimes – Neil Genzlinger: Hubble 3D (2010) ; He loves it, except mainly for the narration and the narrator, Leonardo DeCaprio.

Grist for the Mill:

HST website, Movie IMAX Hubble 3-D (long load);

- Charlie Petit

This will take a while. No, not the tracking of today’s Science Times. That’s what the section says, boiled down, about the health care package that most Democrats welcome as a relief after decades of effort, and most Republicans say was jammed down the public’s throat without due review or process. The dozen-plus stories , in the course of explaining varioius aspects of the new law and compiling opinions on how important it is or not, congeal around one sensible theme: Actual change will come slowly, three years or more for many important provisions. The package does a superb job of explaining and dissecting why, for all the delay, the change will be substantial.

For my money – or rather, our money – I’d start any cruise through the package with Gina Kolata‘s piece. She channels the rage and frustration over the bill. Not the fear and loathing from the right and libertarian wings over this new pile of regulations. Rather, that arising from frustrations felt by many doctors and reformers over the sheer size of the health care Goliath now and in its coming variant, the inherent inability to eliminate waste by any effort (private or public) to rein in costs, and the intransigent behaviors of patients, doctors, and politicians alternately trying to get tough with one another and to avoid reality. A key word – rationing – comes up.

Among the chattering classes – no criticism meant, just a reference to people with education who keep up on news and talk about it more or less civily while scratching their heads in surprise or dismay – the Times remains the most influential source of science news in this country and maybe the planet. Flawed, sure, but not so much compared to the rest of the media. Prolific, doubly sure. I cannot give all its recent manifestations an analytical look – but once in awhile it is salutary to stand back and goggle at the sheer effort this paper puts into science, environmental, health, and related reporting.

Elsewhere in the NYTimes -  from the last few days here are stories that might have been saved for this section but found homes elsewhere:

• Busy man  dept - John M. Broder (Mar 29): EPA Delays Plants’ Pollution Permits ;  (Mar 29) : New E.P.A. Scrutiny is Set for a Chemical in Plastics (which would be bisphenol-A)  (Mar 25): Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice ;
• John Schwartz, Andrew Pollack (Mar 29): Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent ;
• Nicholas Wade (Mar 28) : Unearthing the Sex Secrets of the Périgord Black Truffle ; From Nature, news covered by several outlets.
• Leslie Kaufman (p. A1 today) Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming ; Nice job on a topic that has gotten regular attention – as see this recent cover story by Charles Homans at Columbia Journalism Review, plus an earlier post at ksjtracker.
• And this just in from CERN, via Pasadena – Dennis Overbye: Large Hadron Collider Finally Smashing Properly ; Will do roundup on this news tomorrow.

- Charlie Petit

Well whew. Word in the past week, not circulated (pun intended) too widely but out there, provides some reassurance against long-discussed concerns that a warming, freshening North Atlantic will choke the currents that drive  oceanic dynamics worldwide. It’s not that the the ocean is not getting a bit warmer, or that ice melt is not putting extra fresh, lower-density water in the sea that could upset the dynamics. It is simply that this thermohaline circulation, as it is often known in the journals, is not showing any overt sign of slowing down.

Among the more recent accounts is out today, from BBC‘s Richard Black, who reports that a recent series of encouraging reports got further cement from a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Its analysis of satellite data going back many years concurs that the circulation varies from time to time, but has no long-term trend.

That report came out last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, with writeups appearing a few days ago at several outlets. These include, at AAAS ScienceNOW a report from veteran Earth sciences man Richard Kerr, and at the NYTimes‘s Dot Earth blog site from its former reporter Andrew C. Revkin.

There ought to be no new “ThermohalineGate,” to join the other putative scandals in climate science, off this news. The case for a major risk of conveyor belt shut down has never been embraced by major review organizations, including the IPCC (which three years ago downgraded its already tepid worries). But the hypothesis has gotten deep attention in the press – and encouraged a few over-imaginative reporters to propose it would bring another ice age to Europe even while, perhaps, the Earth’s average temperature rises.

Such surmises made this a popular topic among  journalists.  Kerr’s report dates the scare headlines to 2005 when a Nature paper suggested a 30 percent decline in northward flow of the conveyor belt since the late 1950s. But I know the general meme goes back much farther than that. I don’t think I need to return it, but in my office is a plaque from the American Geophysical Union. I got it for a story that ran in US News & World Report in 2002 under the nice and balanced and careful hed Perilous Waters. I just re-read it. It’s well-couched in qualifiers. It expressly says that even with a rearrangement in ocean currents, no glaciers are going to slide down from Scandinavia. I reported however that  a recent influx of fresh water at Greenland’s latitude had been measured. Nobody knows, I wrote, if it is “a natural climate cycle, global warming due to human activity, or some mix of the two,” and nobody could say whether it might be enough to push the currents toward collapse either.

But still, the story had that edge of possible calamity. And much as it was illogical, it left a conscienceless part of me sort of rooting for more signs of a conveyor belt in trouble. That’s perverse – and an illustration why objective reporters have to force themselves to stay professionally disinterested no matter how much their crasser instincts want them to go down in history as  far-seeing prophets who had sounded the bell.

- Charlie Petit

Tired of gripes about science news only half-done, or badly done all the way through? Here’s a counter-example of a story that is cheering, is packed with the spirit of science, and has a strong populist (but not angry populace) flavor. In Time Magazine this week Jennifer Pinkowski catches us up on the blockbuster business at a site called Galaxy Zoo that astronomers set up three years ago – to considerable publicity at the time. The idea was to let members of the public could roll up their sleeves and help the professionals put pictures of galaxies into their correct categorical bins.

It paid off. Not only are the amateurs closing in on 60 million classifications by nearly 270,000 volunteers, but Pinkowski reports they have pointed out that the big boy and girl astronomers didn’t give them enough bins in which to put the thingies being supplied at a torrential place by telescopic images. They’ve added blobby things called green pea galaxies, red spiral galaxies (as in pic), and other oddities not in the previously  standard galactic bestiary. So successful is it that astronomers have opened other projects for the public’s participation, such as classifying supernovae and solar storms.

It’s a pleasant read, heavily detailed, reminding us that the noisy and sometimes ugly arguments in some corners over climate fraud or creationist anti-evolution mongering hardly reflect typical public attitudes toward science. Elsewhere, crowds of engaged lay people are happy to provide assistance to the people in the formal academies. Some, however, may be getting carried away. Pinkowsky tells us some are spending amazing hours on this – like those internet interactive video gamers that have been known to collapse of exhaustion, hands on mouses.

Grist for the Mill: Galaxy Zoo , includes links to the on line user community’s sites, twitter, blogs, etc.

- Charlie Petit