 |
| |
 |
|
 |
| |
One of the Leading Scientists in the World?
Posted by Pete Shanks on March 15th, 2010
| Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) is not short of self-confidence. His magnum opus (written with Bob Berman) is called Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe, which he modestly describes it as "a new book that lays out his theory of everything." He's no stranger to puffery and he's recently been described as a "rock star scientist" who bolsters the reputation of ACT. But he may just need all the self-assurance he can muster.
The company, which is routinely described as "struggling," has been notorious for years for "science by press release." So when Lanza and others published a paper in February comparing iPS unfavorably with embryonic stem cells, it was not surprising that ACT boasted that the research was "featured in several leading news media outlets: Scientific American, USA Today and Newsweek." What Lanza told Scientific American, however, was extremely pessimistic:
"We were devastated to find this out," Lanza adds. He notes his company had planned this year to apply to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to use red blood cells and platelets derived from iPS cells in clinical trials, but "at this point, therapies with these cells are years off."
Why would Lanza say they were "devastated" when the company's line was that the paper was "supporting the use of ACT’s embryo-safe single blastomere-derived human embryonic stem cell lines, which do not exhibit these problems"? ACT's official position is understandable -- they have intellectual property in ESCs to protect -- but Lanza's is a little surprising. He has previously both praised iPS technology as potentially "one of the Holy Grails of medicine" and highlighted their potential ethical shortcomings. Could it be that he was hoping to jump in front of the iPS bandwagon, perhaps even leaving ACT behind? Or might he have been disingenuous?
Is this the end of ACT? Not so fast. The company's stock price may be trading perilously close to zero, down from $8 a few years ago, but it keeps raising money -- another $2.8 million in November. And two recent government decisions have given them new hope: The NIH proposed in February to expand its definition of human ESCs to include cell lines derived from blastomeres, a move widely seen as benefiting ACT in particular; and in March, the FDA "granted orphan drug designation for the company's MA09-hRPE cells for use in the treatment of Stargardt's Macular Dystrophy (SMD)." That led CEO William Caldwell (who just negotiated himself a base salary of $480,000, with a retention bonus of $100,000) to assert to Bloomberg Radio [mp3 here] that they will eventually also treat the age-related macular degeneration that affects 10 million Americans -- and make big bucks.
So what's going on? It's hard to tell, but a lot may depend on Lanza, whose reputation is squarely on the line. He has pushed his qualifications hard, claiming to be "considered one of the leading scientists in the world" in his bio at the Huffington Post, which opens with this diffident assessment:
"Robert Lanza was taken under the wing of scientific giants such as psychologist B.F. Skinner, immunologist Jonas Salk, and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His mentors described him as a 'genius,' a 'renegade thinker,' even likening him to Einstein himself." - US News & World Report, cover story.
The "cover story" was not on the man himself, but rather part of ACT's extraordinary publicity coup in 2001, when they claimed to have cloned a human embryo, though it failed to develop beyond the six-cell stage. The news of "this ludicrous, outrageous, failed experiment" was published in an obscure on-line journal (from which three board members resigned as a result, one saying it was "of little or no scientific value"), simultaneously with a feature Lanza and colleagues themselves wrote in Scientific American and the US News & World Report story.
Biocentrism may have been intended as Lanza's ticket out of ACT, as well as being the final formulation of ideas he has been mulling for two decades. But it doesn't seem to have worked. His ideas were ridiculed in 1992 and called "kind of dopey" in Wired in 2007, when he published an article in American Scholar, but he finished the book and promoted it with blog posts and articles, some co-written with Deepak Chopra. More ridicule and debunking followed, and the publisher's press page is notably short on serious reviews, though it lists some rather strange references.
Lanza's genuine science is sometimes obscured by his promotional efforts. If he can pull off what ACT is promising, he really will have a claim to be a world-class scientist. So far however, skepticism seems to be in order.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
|
| Eugenics: Remembering History and the Living Victims
Posted by Pete Shanks on March 12th, 2010
|
The legacy of 20th-century eugenics is still with us, and two complementary new initiatives have just been announced to help us confront it.
North Carolina, which has been slowly addressing the moral obligation to compensate victims of involuntary sterilization, has appointed an advocate for them: Charmaine Fuller Cooper is the new executive director of the N.C. Justice for Victims of Sterilization Foundation, which has start-up funding of $250,000. "I aim to give them a voice," she wrote, "so nothing like this ever happens in state government again." Her official charge is "to develop a plan to provide justice and compensate victims of the so-called eugenics program, which forcibly sterilized more than 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974."
In Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada has awarded a million-dollar grant for "Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada" [pdf]. A team of 24 researchers from 14 institutions, plus 12 other partner institutions, will explore the history of Alberta's eugenics laws, which operated from 1929 to 1972. Institutions involved range from local universities to the Edmonton Police and the Edmonton Public Library, as well as the Universities of Copenhagen and North Carolina, the Public School Boards' Association of Alberta, the American Association of People with Disabilities, and many more.
They intend to accumulate documents and place them in the public domain, along with first-hand testimony from sterilization survivors. The lead investigator, University of Alberta professor Robert Wilson, says they don't yet know what they will discover:
"A number of us think it's really timely to look at these things now we've got an appropriate amount of distance. But it's important that this work be done in the next five or 10 years because the people who we could use as major sources and the people who want to tell their own stories [...] are getting old."
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, said George Santayana. The surviving victims deserve help, and we all need to remember what happened.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
|
| Missing Girls in Asia: Two Frameworks
Posted by Marcy Darnovsky on March 11th, 2010
| In the United States, "missing girls" usually refers to runaways or kidnap victims. In the Asia-Pacific region - especially China and India - the phrase takes on a different meaning. There, tens of millions of girls have died as young children due to neglect, have been killed as infants, or were never born due to sex-selective abortions.
Two publications released to coincide with the March 8 celebration of International Women's Day discuss these tragedies. The first, the weekly British news magazine The Economist, carries a characteristically thorough collection of articles [1, 2, 3, 4] about sex selection in China and India, and then takes its analysis in a characteristically conservative direction. The second, a United Nations Development Program report, presents sex selection as a pressing matter of gender inequality.
The Economist put a pair of little pink ballet slippers on its March 4 cover, and titled its lead article "Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls." It is clearly going for shock here - though on this topic, one doesn't have to reach much to accomplish that. The article's opening vignette, drawn from a just-released book by Chinese writer Xue Xinran, describes a newborn infant being tossed head first into a slops pail. As a horrified Xinran watches, the baby's legs stop moving. An older woman in the home tells her, "It's not a child. It's a girl baby, and we can't keep it. Around these parts, you can't get by without a son. Girl babies don't count."
The Economist's articles provide much useful data and tackle the thorny question of why son preference seems to be gaining strength rather than fading away with modernization and rising incomes. (In a number of Chinese and Indian jurisdictions, there are now more than 120 boys for every 100 girls.) But its main story hews to an understanding of sex selection that centers on the security threats posed by "surplus men," and approaches a demography-as-destiny view of politics.
According to this perspective, the security problem begins with the skewed sex ratios produced when strong son preference combines with modern technology. As the "unbalanced" cohorts get older, large numbers of young men are unable to find wives. This is indeed the case - there are now many reports of falling prices for dowries and trafficking of young women for brides.
The final link in this chain of logic is the projection that large numbers of unmarried young men will lead to explosive societal violence and militarism. This speculative and troubling end point was popularized by a 2004 book called Bare Branches, cited by The Economist in its article. The book's authors warn that large numbers of unmarried young men pose a "threat to society" that will force governments to take authoritarian measures to "crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth."
As Betsy Hartmann wrote in a review of Bare Branches, "[D]eclining sex ratios are certainly an extremely serious problem with many negative ramifications, especially for women and girls. But do they pose a threat to national and global security?" She points out that the many women's rights advocates in Asia who challenge sex selection do so to improve the lives of women and girls, not to demonize young men. The "bare branches" framework, Hartmann argues, lends strength both to biological determinism and to alarmism about what the book terms "disruptive behaviors" by unattached "transients."
The second recent account of sex selection in Asia, published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), takes a much different approach. It pulls no punches: The press statement leads with the stark statement that "more women than ever are `disappearing.'" And the report, titled Power, Voice and Rights: A Turning Point for Gender Equality in Asia and the Pacific, points out that "China and India together account for more than 85 million of the nearly 100 million `missing' women estimated to have died from discriminatory treatment in health care, nutrition access or pure neglect ― or because they were never born in the first place."
But the UNDP report puts sex selection in the context of justice and equality. It analyzes legal and social obstacles to improving the status of women, which remains disgracefully low in many parts of the Asia-Pacific region. "Pervasive gender inequality remains a barrier to progress, justice and social stability, and deprives the region of a significant source of human potential," it says.
Power, Voice and Rights focuses on the need for greater educational and paid work opportunities for women; for more effective laws in the areas of property entitlement, divorce and violence against women; and for more women in positions of political leadership. Its recommendations focus on changing both policies and attitudes in order to "foster a climb toward gender equality." And to put an end to the tragedy of missing girls.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
|
| DNA Ancestry Testing on TV
Posted by Pete Shanks on March 10th, 2010
| Ancestry research is one of the flavors of the season on TV, and DNA testing is featured in one of the offerings. "Faces of America," with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., just finished its run on PBS, while "Who Do You Think You Are?" has just started on NBC. The programs share a focus on selected celebrities, though "Who Do You Think" is "glitzier and less high-brow" -- the New York Post clearly considers that a compliment.
Both include a substantial amount of good old-fashioned document-based research, with the inevitable "wow" factor. (The 24th great-grandfather of Elizabeth Alexander, the chair of African-American Studies at Yale, was King John of England!) But where the NBC program seems to stick with that process, Gates took a higher-tech route; his program partnered with -- you guessed it -- 23andMe.
"Faces" promoted itself with a sweepstakes for "the 23andMe Complete Edition, retail value $499." The company's Health Edition is currently $429 and includes 21 carrier-status reports, 12 on disease-risk, 8 on drug-response, 10 on traits such as HIV resistance and muscle performance. The Ancestry Edition includes mtDNA and Y-Chromosome tests, plus various bells and whistles, and retails for $399. The Complete Edition includes both, but wait, there's more -- you also receive the ability to download your raw data, for nearly 600,000 DNA positions.
Despite this promotional emphasis, the first three "Faces" episodes (of four) concentrated on conventional research, and rather movingly portrayed aspects of the immigrant experience. Only in the fourth did DNA analysis become a topic. Gates himself and his 96-year-old father had their whole genomes sequenced -- the first African-Americans, the first father and son, and the oldest individual so far. Gates recruited Eric Lander to explain about the "heirloom" that is your genome, the "patchwork quilt" that is passed down through the generations.
"So you're saying, this is the ultimate form of genealogical analysis," said Gates, "the ultimate family tree."
"Exactly," Lander replied. "This is the family tree."
That, of course, is both true and somewhat misleading, since it ignores all social and cultural issues -- not least, who we count as our family. Later in the program, George Church and colleagues introduced Gates to his genome, which "predicted" various things he already knew, such as his lactose intolerance, and the likelihood that he would not go bald. Gates was dubious about this, and lowered his head to show his bald spot, but the scientists each insisted, "I see hair."
The others on the show, however, had to settle for the much less informative analysis of mtDNA and Y-chromosomes done by 23andMe. (For more about the limitations of this approach, see Chapter 2 of Playing the Gene Card? by my colleague Osagie Obasogie.) The results were mostly less than stunning:
The show mentioned but rather skated over the fact that the test does not distinguish between Asian and Native American ancestry. Gates used this to claim some relationship with Ma, since Gates has some genes that are assigned to the Asian/Native American pool. Generally, however, they used the commonsense simplification -- Ma is Asian, while Eva Longoria has some Native American genes, though to her surprise she actually had more European ones.
The show then played some games of who-is-related-to-whom, genetically. Gates himself is a distant cousin of Malcolm Gladwell (hundreds of years ago, on the white side). Yo-Yo Ma bears some relationship to Eva Longoria ("He's Mexican?" she retorted). Meryl Streep is related to Mike Nichols. And so on.
This sort of thing is a purely frivolous use of DNA technology, but it would be a little harsh to deny Gates (or the rest of us) that small pleasure. Still, the idea that we are defined by our DNA rather than by our personal experience and our cultural upbringing is potentially dangerous. To be fair, the main thrust of the series was that we are each individually connected to a broad and deep community over time, a much more subtle and inclusive message.
There was one dissenter in the program -- Louise Erdrich, who refused to take the DNA test. She is Ojibwa, and that identity is vital to her:
"I really feel that identity is a very complicated mixture, of what you grow up with, what you find out about yourself. I didn't want to add any confusion to it. It wouldn't do me any harm, but when I asked my extended family about this -- and I did go to everyone -- I was told, 'It's not yours to give, Louise.'"
"Interesting," commented Gates, and it is. He could, of course, have left that refusal out of the program, and it's to his credit that he did not. But it's worth a little more consideration. (The website has a somewhat longer version of the interview.) Erdrich has received some criticism for her decision, suggesting that she is so attached to her self-identification as a Native American that she is not willing to doubt it, much as racist whites have been known to hide any "taint" of blackness or "Jewish blood."
This misses her point completely, not least because Erdrich also embraces her German ancestry. What is vital is the concept that the genetic heritage she shares is exactly that: a shared heritage. As such, no individual has an untrammeled right to give it away, or expose its secrets. One may disagree with that assessment, just as one may choose to visit the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, despite the request (published at the entrance) of some Native Americans that you let their past lie undisturbed; but this is not a simple matter.
The idea of familial susceptibility to disease is acknowledged to be controversial: If I am at risk, should I tell my brother if he does not wish to know? How do we handle uncertainty in these predictions? The more general question raised by Erdrich's family is less often examined. Many minority groups around the world are extremely worried by the idea of "biopiracy" -- and the conventional western academic view that all knowledge is beneficial should not be allowed to ride roughshod over these concerns by default.
Finally, Elizabeth Alexander, the African-American poet and professor, came up with another of the most interesting comments in the series, when she discovered that she is, by DNA, 66% white:
"It just gets curiouser and curiouser. But of course if all of us were only known by our DNA, then we'd have a whole different American history."
Indeed we would. It might, however, be no less prejudiced than the one we already know. "Know Thyself" is the motto Church and company took from ancient Delphi and stamped on the box containing the DNA listing they presented to Gates. "Nothing in Excess" would a good companion from the same source.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
| |
|
