Monthly Archives: June 2009

New international nanotechnology safety study and a Canadian synchrotron conference

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There’s a new report on nanotechnology safety studies, the ‘EMERGNANO report‘. The researchers surveyed environment, health, and safety studies internationally, determined which ones fit their criteria, and have  now provided an assessment of the findings. Short story: there are no conclusive findings which is troublesome given the number of nanomaterial-based products that are making their way into the international marketplace. Michael Berger on Nanowerk News offers an excellent assessment of the situation vis a vis technophobic and technophilic approaches to emerging technologies and their attendant safety issues,New technologies are always polarizing society – some only see the inherent dangers, others only see the opportunities. Since these two groups usually are the loudest, everybody else inbetween has a hard time to get their message across and with objective information and facts. Nanotechnologies are no different. The nay-sayers call for a total moratorium everytime scientific research with concerning conclusions is published while opportunistic hypsters are only interested in selling more products or reports and ridicule even the faintest objections and concerns as uninformed panicmongering.

For more, please go here. I notice that Andrew Maynard (mentioned frequently here due to his 2020 Science blog and his position as Chief Science Advisor for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies) is one of the authors.

There’s a nanotechnology-type conference being held in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada this week (June 17 – 18, 2009). They have a big synchroton facility there and, I believe, it is the only such facility in Canada, which according to their video, is one of the most advanced such facilities in the world. The 12th annual meeting features a public lecture, ‘Science Fiction as a Mirror for Reality‘, by  Robert J. Sawyer, an internationally renowned Canadian science fiction author. For details about the conference,go here. For information about the synchroton in Saskatoon, go here. For information about Robert J. Sawyer, go here. (Media release noting the event can be found on Nanowerk News.)

UK government minister twitters about science; science festival in Canada, and open source synthetic biology

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Last week, June 10, 2009. Nature’s Richard van Noorden posted a news piece about changes for the UK government’s science portfolio. (The article itself is behind a paywall but if you can access it, it’s here.)

Business department expands its remit as government department is scrapped.

It’s a little confusing as I’ve found some comments on Andrew Maynard’s 2020 Science blog which indicate that Lord Drayson, the UK Minister of Defence Procurement will now also have responsibility for science. I’m not sure how this all fits together but what it makes quite interesting to me is that Lord Drayson recently discussed issues about the merger with concerned individuals on Twitter. If you want to see some comments about and a transcript of the Twitter convo, go here to the I’m A Scientist, Get Me Out Of Here blog. (Thanks Andrew, for leading me to ‘I’m A Scientist’.)

I found it quite unexpected that the minister would engage directly with citizens and quite refreshing in comparison to our situation here in Canada where our Prime Minister and his ministers seem to insulate themselves from direct and unmediated (no communication flacks managing a ‘spontaneous’ event) contact with the people they are elected to represent.

The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (actually it’s a spinoff called, Synthetic Biology Project)  sent a notice about their Synthetic Biology event coming up on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, which I announced here a few weeks ago. From the invitation,


When
Wednesday, June 17, 2009, 12:30-1:30 PM (light lunch available at 12 noon) (NOTE: 9:30 – 10:30 am PT)

Who
Arti K. Rai, Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law, Duke Law School
Mark Bünger, Director of Research, Lux Research
Pat Mooney, Executive Director, ETC Group
David Rejeski, Moderator, Director, Synthetic Biology Project

Where

5th Floor Conference Room, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

If you’re planning to attend you can RSVP here or you can watch the webcast live or later at your leisure. I find it interesting that a representative from the ETC group will be there as they are fierce critics of many emerging technologies. I’m glad to see that as the organization provides valuable information inside their research papers although some of their communication can by hyperbolic.

I’m pretty sure the folks at the Perimeter Institute are not stealing ideas from this blog but following on last Friday’s (June 12, 2009) post where I mentioned a science festival in New York, they’ve announced a science festival, Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future. It will be held in October 15 – 25, 2009 for 10 days in an around Waterloo, Ontario and will commemorate the institute’s 10 anniversary.  You can get more details here on the festival website or you can see the media release here.

Nanotechnology, toxicity, and sunscreens

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You don’t expect to read about nanotechnology in a fashion magazine but there it was — in an article on sunscreens by Sarah Nicole Prickett. (The article titled, ‘Overprotected‘ can be found in the Summer 09 issue of a Canadian magazine called ‘Fashion‘.) The piece highlighted for me some of the constraints that writers encounter when writing about science issues in articles that are not destined for popular science magazines and the concerns that scientists have with how their work is represented in popular media.

I enjoyed the article but this caught my attention immediatedly,

But there’s another potentially dark side to sunscreen: nanotechnology.

For nanotechnology, you could substitute the words science or chemistry. The word covers  a lot of ground as Victor Jones, consultant and former chair of Nanotech BC, noted in part 2 of his interview here where he described it as an enabling technology.

There are any number of reasons why the writer might have chosen this approach. She’s trying to keep your attention (I’ve done this myself); she doesn’t understand nanotechnology very well (Note: there are competing definitions and narratives which makes it time-consuming to sort things out); she thought the readers would not be interested in a more technically accurate and dull description (well, it’s not a science magazine); she didn’t have the editorial space; etc.

The problem for scientists is that a lot of people get their science information in this casual, informal way and it’s not understood by the general audience and scientists that writers are under a great many constraints when they’re producing their articles (or their tv or movie or game scripts for that matter) and I’ve only named a few possible constraints.

To give the writer credit, she does explain some of the potential issues with nanoparticles clearly. Personally, I would have liked to have seen where she got information from because I don’t know which type of particles she’s talking about.

Coincidentally, I just found a story about nanoparticles and lung problems. The type of particles discussed in the news release are new to me (from Physorg.com),

In a study published online today (Thursday 11 June) in the newly launched Journal of Molecular Cell Biology [1] Chinese researchers discovered that a class of nanoparticles being widely developed in medicine – ployamidoamine dendrimers (PAMAMs) – cause lung damage by triggering a type of programmed cell death known as autophagic cell death. They also showed that using an autophagy inhibitor prevented the cell death and counteracted nanoparticle-induced lung damage in mice.

Back to the article in ‘Fashion‘, she’s right there are a lot of questions about the impact about all these particles potentially entering our cells. The Canadian Council of Academies’ Expert Panel that she refers to in her article produced a report in 2008 and I thought their recommendations were rather tepid (you can see my posting here) but the quote she has from the chair of the committee, Pekka Sinervo, puts a different face on it.

I’m glad a chance to see the article and learn from it. Now, I’m going to be looking for more information about the particles in sunscreens and more cautious about what I put on my skin.

As for scientists getting their message out, maybe they could have a ‘Sexy Scientists’ article in a poular magazine and more accurate information about nanotechnology and other emerging technologies could be sausaged in somehow. In New York, there’s an annual World Science Festival going on. It looks like they’ve managed to move out of the science museum and into the street.

Guest blogger on hormones, Suzanne Somers, and Oprah

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Sorry for the delay in getting this up but here at last are my guest blogger’s comments on issues about estrogen and women’s health. First, I should introduce her, Susan Baxter, PhD. is co-author with Jerilynn Prior, MD of the newly published Estrogen Errors. Now for her comments,

In believing that hormones – pills, patches, injectables, bioidentical, you-name-it – will somehow keep you young and vibrant Suzanne Somers and Oprah are part of a long and undistinguished history, one that places estrogen front and centre. Progesterone, the other natural (post-ovulatory) hormone that crucially balances out estrogen during each menstrual cycle, an afterthought, if mentioned at all.

From the synthetic estrogen DES (diethylstilbestrol) in the 1930’s to the estrogen derived from pregnant mares’ urine, Premarin, since the 1950’s, estrogen “replacement” has morphed in our collective imaginations into the fountain of youth. And where it really started was with a 1966 bestseller, Feminine Forever.

Secretly produced by drug companies eager to market their estrogen pills, written by a kindly New York gynecologist Robert Wilson (his son later admitted to the drug company connection), Feminine Forever was blatant propaganda that took America by storm. In no time at all menopause became cemented in the popular imagination as a “deficiency” disease that estrogen could cure. And during an era where midlife women, no longer beautiful or fertile, were losing any status they may have had (as the TV series Mad Men depicts), Wilson’s song was one they wanted to hear. Really, it wasn’t age or the culture treating women badly; it wasn’t economic or social, it was medical. Then, once a handful of epidemiological studies linked taking estrogen with being healthier (bearing in mind that such studies can only show correlation, not cause), millions of women began taking hormone “replacement” therapy or “HRT”.

I use quotes for “HRT”, incidentally, because – as my coauthor endocrinologist Jerilynn Prior has accurately pointed out – how can hormones at menopause be a “replacement” when all women’s hormones naturally wane at this stage of their lives. The term suggests parity with a diabetic taking insulin – except it is not.

The estrogen-is-good-for-you argument should have died, once and for all, in 2002 when the largest clinical trial in history, the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was stopped early because the women who were taking the hormones were found to be suffering from ridiculously high levels of breast cancer, heart disease, stroke, blood clots and more. For those women whose perimenopause (the transition into menopause during, usually, the forties) is onerous, progesterone works for symptom relief and doesn’t cause anything dire. But no, here we are again, stuck in the inane and superficial: Oprah, Somers, Newsweek. What we are not hearing is how these women, along with everyone else, have so internalized the fallacy that a woman’s true nature is to be fertile (and with high levels of estrogen) that all else is forgotten. So we continue to argue about the what and the – when the real issue is the why. But, as the late Stephen Jay Gould once said, we believe most fervently in those facts that allow us to believe our social prejudices are true. And there is no prejudice as thoroughly engrained as that of the value of women being equal to their being young and fruitful.

That is the real story.

(My thanks to Frogheart and all the other bloggers – e.g., http://trueslant.com/womenomics/2009/06/08/did-anyone-else-think-the-newsweek-photo-of-oprah-was-mysogenistic-and-just-plain-dumb/ – and other commentators, many linked to on this blog, who have criticized the Newsweek story thoughtfully. However, as a social scientist and medical writer who has studied the subject, I continue to be appalled at our societal love affair with hormones, in general; estrogen, in particular; and our blithe disregard for the natural cycles and stages of a woman’s life.)

As I said in Part 2 of my post, titled Synchronicity, Oprah, Newsweek, and Hormones, it’s not necessary to denigrate someone personally to critique what their ideas. Thank you Susan!

Deepak Chopra chimes in on Oprah and Newsweek

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Over on the Huffington Post, Deepak Chopra has written a commentary on the Newsweek article about Oprah and her health shows. I notice that while he supports her overall position on alternative therapies he steers clear of the hormone, face lift, and iodine/thyroid stories that were cited in the Newsweek article. He does some telling points about modern medical practice and some of its attendant issues. If you want to read the article for yourself, it’s here.

Later today, guest blogger, Susan Baxter (who’ll be talking about hormones and current medical practice).

Synchronicity, Oprah, Newsweek, and hormones: Part 2

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Back to my main programme, hormones are popularly believed to make people, particularly women, crazy.  Teenagers are hormonal (i.e. difficult and crazy to deal with) with females often being considered the more difficult. How many times have you heard, “Boys are easier.” Then there’s PMS, that’s when a menstruating woman’s hormones make her crazy. Finally, we have menopause (when hormonal output changes again) is well known as a time when women get difficult or crazy.

Coincidentally, Oprah is at that age, the menopausal age. Having difficulty swallowing this? Take a look at p. 37, the page I mentioned in yesterday’s with the original or working title for the article. There’s an image there of Oprah in 1972 when she was crowned Miss Black Nashville. What possible reason is there to run an old beauty pageant picture? The only way it makes any sense within the context of the piece is as contrast. Had they gone with original title they would never have been able to justify using that image. Take a good look at the images they use with the article and ask yourself why they included a picture of Oprah seated in a back seat of a car with curlers in her hair.

The article itself is bookend by the hormone story. It starts with Suzanne Somers and the January 2009 hormone show and ends with a mention of Suzanne Somers lest we forget that this is really about the hormones and aging.

One last thing, there are 20 pages of advertising in the Newsweek issue. Two advertisers from the pharmaceutical sector purchased 10 pages of advertising. The other 10 pages are spread between a travel magazine, telecommunications company, beer, audio equipment, non profit, church, automotive, coffee, automobile software, and an insurance company. Oh, Newsweek itself also has a page.

I don’t think the pharamceutical companies dictated the cover story but the folks at Newsweek had to know that the attack on crazy, wackadoodle alternative therapies would not put any future advertising in jeopardy.

No one element puts the article over the top; it’s the combination of elements. Some of them deliberate and some of them serendipitous. Unfortunately, in the end we’re left with a peculiarly vicious attack on aging and being a woman. In Oprah’s case, a powerful and successful woman.

It’s not necessary to denigrate someone when you’re critcising them. For a more thoughtful critique of Oprah’s health programmes, you can check Dr. Rahul Parikh’s article on Salon.com, here.

Tomorrow, Susan Baxter, author of Estrogen Errors, on how the medical establishment (just like Oprah and Suzanne Somers) has had a longtime infatuation with estrogen.

I’m quite surprised, I just checked Rob Annan’s blog, Researcher Forum: Don’t Leave Canada Behind to find some major changes taking place with regard to the science ministry in the UK and science funding in Germany.

Synchronicity, Oprah, Newsweek, and hormones: Part 1

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In one of those odd coincidences, I’d been working on a publicity project for a book called Estrogen Erors; Why Progesterone is Better for Women’s Health by Susan Baxter, PhD, and Jerilynn C. Prior, MD for the last few months when the Newsweek (June 8, 2009) issue featuring Oprah and her health advice  hit the newstands last week.  It really hit hard because an important chunk of the article is about hormones and women and I just have to unpack at least part of the article and the imagery.

I’m going to devote at least the first few days of this week to health information because whilst I was reeling from the Newsweek article I found a misleading discussion of nanotechnology in a fashion magazine. But that’s for later this week.

I should mention I’m not an Oprah fan. I found her programme mildly interesting years ago but these days, I find her programme unwatchable for more than five minutes. In fact, it has to be at least one or two years since I watched even that much.

I think the Newsweek article is the result of a perfect storm. First, I’m assuming that Newsweek is in serious financial trouble and somebody made a business decision to incite people to purchase the magazine. After all, Oprah sells. Second, celebrities are regularly built up and torn down. Oprah has been at the top for a long time and has been relatively unscathed, ’til now.

So, I’d been waiting for some kind of Oprah teardown process for a while and thought the problems with the school in South Africa might start it off. I never guessed that it was going to be health programmes. Now onto the unpacking.

The article itself is laced with cheap shots but it probably wouldn’t have seemed so vicious if the editors had used the working title, Why Oprah may be hazardous to your health (p. 37 on a page called Feature; The First Rough Draft). The title they did choose, CRAZY TALK; Oprah, Wacky Cures & You superimposed over an image of Oprah with mouth open, hands open, palms out, and by her face, and ‘crazy’ curly hair is disturbing. If you were quickly scanning the title and registering the image, you might think it was an article about Oprah going crazy.

The article itself begins on page 55 and it starts with a hormone story. In January 2009 Oprah had a programme about hormones and aging women which featured the actess, Suzanne Somers and other guests.

(Aside: The authors, one of whom has a book on menopause which is being published in September 2009 [it is disclosed in the story although I can’t find exactly where right now], offer some misleading information of their own.

Outside Oprah’s world, there isn’t a raging debate about replacing hormones. p. 55

Pick up a woman’s magazine and you’ll find that there are still people out there who are arguing for adding estrogen in the firm belief that you can never have too much despite evidence to the contrary. [Wednesday this week, Susan Baxter, the lead author for Estrogen Errors, will blog here about the level of misinformation still circulating.]) Part 2 of the unpacking tomorrow.

Water molecules are made up of water clusters!?! and Academic Pride

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Kudos to Michael Berger at Nanowerk News for picking up on a very funny (and sad) piece of copywriting. It’s advertising for a nutritional supplement which makes use of nanotechnology (supposedly). According to the copywriter, water molecules are made up of water clusters which adhere to a particle in the middle. It’s funny because it’s so wrong (and if you read the article here, because of Berger’s colour commentary). It’s sad because I suspect there’s a fairly sizable portion of the population that doesn’t realize how very wrong the science is.

There’s an interesting interview with Jim Flaherty, [Canada] Minister of Finance in MacLean’s Magazine here. (Thanks Rob Annan, Researcher Forum, Don’t Leave Canada Behind). Here’s a quote that Annan singled out from the article,

Q. If Canada’s fiscal fundamentals are strong, these are still unsettling times. For instance, R  &  D by Canadian companies is perennially weak. And now the future of two of the very biggest research spenders, Nortel and AECL, are in doubt. Should we be worried about our innovative capacity shrinking?

A. As a government we are among the largest funders of R & D in the world. We’re low on the private-sector side, which has been a persistent concern. One of the things I’ve talked about with my Economic Advisory Council, which is important to me, is that in the IT sector we have a tremendous success. We have more than half a million people working in that sector and it has not gone into recession. It’s a tremendous source of research and development innovation. In the financial services sector we have sources of innovation. [this is not the full text for the answer, you can see the full text in Annan’s posting [and his take on the interview] or in the interview itself).

What I find puzzling in the answer is Flaherty’s claim that that the Canadian government is one of the largest funders of R&D spending in the world. (Unfortunately, Flaherty does not cite sources to support his claim.) According to Peter McKnight’s article, which I mentioned yesterday in another context,

…  Statistics Canada has estimated that federal funding for research and development will decline three per cent in 2008/2009 — a troubling prediction given that R & D funding as a percentage of gross domestic product decreased to 1.88 in 2007 from 2.08 in 2004.

Given that Canadian business has been historically weak in terms of its R & D spending, it seems to me that the big drop in R&D spending must be largely the consequence of decreased funding by the government.  By the way, I’d be interested to know if Obama’s declaration that science funding would grow to 3% of US gross domestic production includes business investment or only includes government funding. If someone knows offhand, please do let me know. Otherwise, I will try and track it down.

Meanwhile, there was a demonstration in France yesterday (Academic Pride, June 4, 2009) about the research situation there and in Europe generally. It was marked as a failure because only 800 researchers showed up. (By Canadian standards, that would be a success.) Rob Annan has a pre-event writeup here, but it’s in French so the event is referred to as, La Marche de tous les Savoirs. My French is rusty so I can’t offer a translation with any confidence but I can say that the situation in Europe cetainly bears some resemblance to the situation in Canada.

I found something amusing (to me) in Science Daily about soap sniffing. Apparently some doctors have created a device that can sniff hospital workers hands and determine if they’ve been washed recently. My favourite bits,

Call it a Breathalyzer for the hands. Using sensors capable of detecting drugs in breath, new technology developed at University of Florida monitors health-care workers’ hand hygiene by detecting sanitizer or soap fumes given off from their hands.

…

“This isn’t big brother, this is just another tool,” said Richard J. Melker, M.D., Ph.D., a UF College of Medicine anesthesiology professor who developed the technology along with professors Donn Dennis, M.D., and Nikolaus Gravenstein, M.D., of the anesthesiology department, and Christopher Batich, Ph.D., a materials science professor in the College of Engineering. [emphasis mine]

There’s more here.

Finally, poet Heather Haley is hosting a poetry event, June 9, 2009 at her home in Bowen Island.

VISITING POETS on Bowen Island Reading/Salon<!– blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 } –>

POETRY READING/SALON with visiting poets Allan Briesmaster and Clara Blackwood

Please join us for a lovely evening of stellar verse with father and daughter poets Allan Briesmaster and Clara Blackwood from Ontario.

7:30 pm
Tuesday, June 9
At the home of Josef Roehrl and Heather Haley
Bowen Island, BC
Information: 778 861-4050
hshaley@emspace.com

Allan Briesmaster is a freelance editor and publisher, and the author of ten
books of poetry, including Interstellar (Quattro Books, 2007). He was
centrally involved in the weekly Art Bar Poetry Reading Series in Toronto
from 1991 until 2002. As an editor Allan has been instrumental in producing
more than 70 books of poetry and non-fiction since 1998. Last year he
co-edited the 256-page anthology Crossing Lines: Poets Who Came to Canada in
the Vietnam War Era for Seraphim Editions. Allan lives in Thornhill, Ontario
with his wife Holly, a visual artist with whom he has collaborated several
times.

Clara Blackwood

Born and raised in Toronto, Clara Blackwood has been writing poetry for 15 years. Her first poetry collection, Subway Medusa (2007), is the inaugural book in Guernica Editions¹ First Poets Series, which showcases first books by poets thirty-five and under. From 1998 to 2004, Clara ran the monthly Syntactic Sunday Reading Series at the Free Times Café in Toronto. Her poetry has appeared in such magazines as the Hart House Review, Misunderstandings Magazine, Surface & Symbol and Carousel.

Using light to power movement and some philosophy

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You know how sunflowers track the sun and move with it? They are powered by light. Well, researchers at the University of Florida have used a single molecule of DNA to create a molecular nanomotor powered only by particles of light (photons).  It’s not the first photon driven nanomotor but it is the first made entirely of a single DNA molecule. There’s an artist’s illustration and more detail about the work here.

On a more philosophical bent, a physicist at Canada’s Perimeter Institute, Lee Smolin who, based on his work with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian philospher, suggests that the timeless multiverse (beloved of physicists and science fiction writers) does not exist. The article by Smolin was written for Physics World and is available here.

Some thoughts on science funding and policy in Canada: Part 4 of 4

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This series was inspired by a column by Peter McKnight in the Vancouver Sun newspaper about commercializing scientific research (here). At the time, there was a kerfuffle about Gary Goodyear (Minister of State–Science and Technology) and comments of his which suggested that he does not understand scientific principles of evolution. McKnight’s article posits the commercialization of scientific research as a larger problem for Canadian science than Goodyear’s beliefs about evolution.

The big debate is about how far should we go in commercializing science research. Basic or curiosity-driven research does not hold immediate rewards and yet it forms the basis for applied research. The problem with basic research is that there’s no way of telling what is  going to be fruitful or when. If you’ve ever looked at James Gleick’s book on Chaos, you’ve noticed how weird (at the time) some of the thinking was and how long it took before those weird thoughts coalesced into chaos theory.

As far as I can tell, this debate about commercializing is being carried on internationally. A lot of countries, not just Canada,  are placing more emphasis on commercialized (or applied) research than ever. What I’ve been trying to point out is that commercialization is influencing more than just the funds being given to applied research rather than basic research.

In part of one of this series I mentioned an issue about access when funds are given to a university for research facilities which are also intended as revenue streams. This would seem to set up a competitive situation between the academic scientists trying to do research (basic or otherwise) and local businesses who are willing to pay for the use of the facilities.

As well, there’s the whole question about how grant funds are allocated. The UK project mentioned in part two of this series got its direction through public engagement exercises. Members of the public were instrumental in deciding what types of projects would get funded. As I noted, this could be a problem because the really innovative work is not usually achieved through consensus. This particular approach seems to be confined to the UK bnt if it’s deemed successful, I imagine we’ll see it here too.

Part three is where I pointed out that the government bureaucrats disbursing the grants are not likely to have business or commercialization experience of their own. Yesterday’s brief about the CREATE fund where science students will be getting supported as they develop skills for commercialization of their research pointed to a similar issue with academics. How are you going to learn about commercializing your research from your professor? As far as I know, most academics don’t have any or much experience themselves with commercializing research (well, not yet in Canada).

I didn’t have any grand plan when I started this series but I’ve since discovered that commercialization of science has a more insidious nature than I realized. Having said that, I don’t think commercializing science is bad. I just wish that there was some consideration given to the impact of how this is implemented.