73rd Skeptics' Circle

The 73rd Skeptics' Circle is up at Holford Watch. Go have a gander.

Animal rights nuts trash researcher's home

Via Mark Hoofnagle at Denialism:

The latest pathetic assault on a scientist came from ALF against UCLA scientist Edyth London. Using a garden hose they flooded her home, causing tens of thousands in damage. However, rather than intimidating her out of performing research in addiction she has written an article for the LA Times, defending animal research.

She writes:

For years, I have watched with growing concern as my UCLA colleagues have been subjected to increasing harassment, violence and threats by animal rights extremists. In the last 15 months, these attempts at intimidation have included the placement of a Molotov cocktail-type device at a colleague's home and another under a colleague's car -- thankfully, they didn't ignite -- as well as rocks thrown through windows, phone and e-mail threats, banging on doors in the middle of the night and, on several occasions, direct confrontations with young children.

Then, several weeks ago, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the work I have been doing to understand and treat nicotine addition among adolescents informed readers that some of my research is done on primates. I was instantly on my guard. Would I be the next victim? Would the more extremist elements of the animal rights movement now turn their sights on me?

The answer came this week when the Animal Liberation Front claimed responsibility for vandalism that caused between $20,000 and $30,000 worth of damage to my home after extremists broke a window and inserted a garden hose, flooding the interior. Later, in a public statement addressed to me, the extremists said they had been torn between flooding my house or setting it afire. Maybe I should feel lucky.

Having come to the United States as the child of Holocaust survivors who had lost almost everything, I appreciate that perhaps "only in America" could I have fulfilled my dream of becoming a biomedical scientist, supported in doing research to reduce human suffering. But it is difficult for me to understand why the same country that was founded on the idea of freedom for all gives rise to an organization like the Animal Liberation Front, a shadowy group identified by the FBI as a domestic terrorism threat, which threatens the safety of researchers engaged in animal studies that are crucial to moving medicine forward.

I have devoted my career to understanding how nicotine, methamphetamine and other drugs can hijack brain chemistry and leave the affected individual at the mercy of his or her addiction. My personal connection to addiction is rooted in the untimely death of my father, who died of complications of nicotine dependence. My work on the neurobiology of addiction has spanned three decades of my life -- most of this time as a senior scientist at the National Institutes of Health. To me, nothing could be more important than solving the mysteries of addiction and learning how we can restore a person's control over his or her own life. Addiction robs young people of their futures, destroys families and places a tremendous burden on society.

Animal studies allow us to test potential treatments without confounding factors, such as prior drug use and other experiences that complicate human studies. Even more important, they allow us to test possibly life-saving treatments before they are considered safe to test in humans. Our animal studies address the effects of chronic drug use on brain functions, such as decision-making and self-control, that are impaired in human addicts. We are also testing potential treatments, and all of our studies comply with federal laws designed to ensure humane care.

While monkeys receive drugs in the laboratory, they do not become "addicted" in the same sense that humans become addicted. Still, we are able to see how changes in brain chemistry alter the way the brain works -- knowledge that is vital to the design of effective medications.

My colleagues and I place a huge value on the welfare of our research subjects. We constantly strive to minimize the risk to them; however, a certain amount of risk is necessary to provide us with the information we need in a rigorously scientific manner. Since the incident at my house, our research has gotten a lot of attention. Some anti-smoking groups have raised questions about the fact that our work was funded by Philip Morris USA. Is it moral to allow the tobacco industry to fund research on addiction? My view is that the problem of tobacco dependence is enormous, and the resources available for research on the problem are limited. It would, therefore, be immoral to decline an opportunity to increase our knowledge about addiction and develop new treatments for quitting smoking, especially when teens are involved. Few people are untouched by the scourge of addiction in their friends or family. It is through work like ours that the understanding of addiction expands and gives rise to hope that we can help people like my father live longer, healthier lives.

Thousands of other scientists use laboratory animals in other research, giving hope to those afflicted with a wide variety of ailments. Already, one scientist at UCLA has announced that he will not pursue potentially important studies involving how the brain receives information from the retina, for fear of the violence that animal rights radicals might visit on his family. We must not allow these extremists to stop important research that advances the human condition.

Bravo to her for standing up to these bullies.

Friday beautiful science

In honor of Hallowe'en (just passed) I present to you this photo of the oldest known bat fossil and is between 30 and 60 million years old. This fossil was found in the Green River Formation in the area that now makes up Colorado and Utah.

What is their problem?

This is a quick post to plug ERV's latest post: "The Discovery Institute LOATHES smart college students". What I find the most relevant portion is highlighted below:

These supposed 'professionals' act nothing like real professionals. Though behind-the-scenes mentoring might not be intuitive to a layman, the actions exhibited by professional organizations should be. When is the last time you saw the American Physical Therapy Association release an official rebuttal of a college students opinion piece on her half-marathon training in her college newspaper1? Does Aaron Beck respond to his critics in a sexist, condescending manner on his 'Amazon blog'2? Does Sigma Xi send PR reps after students who critique the activities of a professor who happens to be a Sigma Xi member3??

The Discovery Institute, a group of grown men desperately wanting to be taken seriously as 'scientists', has engaged in all of those behaviors in the past six months. What the hell is their problem??

Indeed. What is their problem? Why don't they engage us in practicing science?

Friday beautiful science

I'm recycling an old image for today's Friday Beautiful Science. I'm on vacation, and am spending *very* little of it online. It's a shot of a sunset taken from one of the Mars Rovers. I'm currently enjoying the sunrises and sunsets in the mountains of Quebec, Canada. A little less desolate than Mars, but just as beautiful.

Back next week...

72nd Skeptics' Circle

The 72nd Sceptics' Circle is up at the Quackometer Blog. Go have a gander.

A personal story on cause and effect

I recently posted this comment on the "Autism debate" at Salon.com:

No doubt I will be accused of being an arrogant scientist, but here goes... Which of the following sentences makes sense to you?

"Cosmologists have found several planets rotating around stars quite a distance from earth, but parents disagree."

"Geologists have found that plate tectonics underlies the formation of mountains and the occurrence of earthquakes, but parents disagree."

"Medical scientists have found that thimerosal and vaccines have nothing to do with autism, but parents disagree."

This was a trick question. All 3 statements are nonsensical.

*That's* why rationalists call parents who campaign to ban vaccines the "mercury militia". Right or wrong, it's out of frustration with the lunacy of it all.

(As an aside, I'm a biomedical scientist and new parent. My son has been having *all* of his vaccines on schedule.)

Several commenters took me to task as being a lousy scientist, because I ought to know that parents watch their children and know their children well. I thought I would expand on this thought, as it's clear that many people don't understand how science arrives at particular conclusions. People are really, really lousy at arriving at cause and effect, and it takes very careful controls to demonstrate cause and effect.

As an example of how I (a scientist) arrive at a conclusion:

I have recently been diagnosed with occipital neuralgia. It's a rather painful disorder that's caused by damage to nerves in the back of my scalp (running up over my ear). Basically, the nerves fire inappropriately, and so I experience severe pain in my head like I'm being struck by lightning (repeatedly) even when there's nothing physically wrong with my head.

My neurologist has prescribed for me a drug called gabapentin that is supposed to help numb the nerves. On my last visit, he asked me the question, "Is the medication working?" Me being a scientist, I literally replied, "I don't know, I haven't done the control." My pain is mostly gone, but occipital neuralgia often spontaneously goes away. So I can't tell if my pain has been reduced because I'm taking the medicine, or if it's been reduced because the neuralgia is receding. (That said, given that the medicine has been shown in clinical trials to reduce the pain of neuralgia, I am going to continue with my dosage for a while before I experiment with reducing my dose). It may be that the medicine is no longer doing anything for me. Or it could be that it is the only thing between me and searing pain. Until I experiment with reducing the dose, I really have no idea.

It's an awful lot more difficult to determine cause and effect if you only have one sample (yourself). In science, we refer to this as n equals 1 (n=1). You have 1 sample. One. One sample tells you very, very little.

Same thing goes with determining causation with a disease in your child. If my son gets sick, I could say, "Well, he caught it at the daycare." He may have caught it at the daycare. Or at the grocery store. Or from the child next door. Or from his grandmother. I don't have enough information, even though I am his father and I watch him carefully. And when his cold resolves, I could say "It's because I gave him orange juice". Or vitamins. Or holy water. Or sunshine. But really, I don't know how quickly he would have gotten better if I had done none of these things. Or all of them.

This is why it is very important to determine things with larger groups of people. Larger groups allow you the power of controls. Using controls are how we determine causation.