Annals of Science

Going Viral

The Pentagon takes on a new enemy: swine flu.

by David E. Hoffman

On the Fox News Channel

January 18, 2011

Col. Randall Larsen, a former director of the Congressional Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, talks about the threat of a bio-terror attack on the U.S., and why the FDA is as critically important to national security as the Army and Air Force.

Click Here to view video

Sunday January 2, 2011

Retired Colonel Randall Larsen, CEO of The WMD Center, talked about the state of U.S. homeland security including combating and preparing for potential terror attacks using weapons of mass destruction. He also responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.

Click here to view video

How some politicians stumble on science

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

“All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots,” Mark Twain wrote in his once-again hot-selling autobiography, “… on account of personal experience and heredity.” Twain didn’t much care for politicians. Scientists might soon be feeling the same way, if they didn’t already, spurred by recent signs of budget-cutting headed straight at them.

Last month, National Institutes of Health chief Francis Collins warned genetic researchers, for example, that promised budget cuts would likely drop their chances from a historically low 1-in-5 chance of winning federal grant money in half, to 1-in-10. Science magazine’s executive publisher, Alan Leshner, last week urged researchers to educate their congressmen on the benefits of their research.

Whom to start with? Well, perhaps Rep. Adrian Smith, R-Neb., who last month joined a hoary political fraternity of elected officials unhappy with National Science Foundation grants. “Many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences,” Smith said in a recent budget-cutting video, noting NSF’s roster of Nobel winners. “But recently NSF has funded some projects I want to know your thoughts on,” he added, citing two grants:

•”University academics,” he said, had been awarded a $750,000 grant “to develop computer models to analyze the on-field contributions of soccer players.”

• Another $1.2 million grant went “to model the sound of objects breaking for use by the video game and movie industries.”

Suggesting the average family pays $10,000 in taxes, Smith asked whether “75 families should work all year to support soccer research” and called for folks to plow through the $6.9 billion NSF’s website to look for similarly dodgy-sounding grants, using keywords such as “success, culture, media, games, social norm, lawyers, museum, leisure, stimulus.”

Smith joins a long tradition of politicians, going back at least as far as the late Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., who in 1975 kicked off the Golden Fleece awards, with one given to a federally funded study of “The Sex Life of the Screw-Worm Fly.”

Other notable members of the fraternity are South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who in 1998, as a congressman, tried to freeze NSF’s budget after complaining the agency was funding study of ATMs, automatic teller machines. Only two years ago, then-presidential candidate John McCain, R-Ariz., blasted a $3 million study of bear DNA in a campaign ad.

The other part of this tradition is the public learning, after someone has taken the trouble to ask, that these studies are actually something much different than the complaints would suggest. Proxmire later admitted the screw-worm fly grant had been of major significance to study of this major livestock pest.

Long before he wandered off the Appalachian Trail to somehow arrive in Argentina, Sanford wandered away from explaining how the “ATM’s” he complained about were actually references to ” Asynchronous Transfer Mode,” the backbone technology underlying the Internet.

And McCain’s DNA study turns out to be essential to preserving grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act.

So, as you might expect, when we asked the National Science Foundation about the two grants that Smith mentioned, we learned a little more about them.

For example, the soccer study turns out to be computer scientists studying how remotely connected teams form to conduct “nanoscience, environmental engineering, earthquake engineering, chemical sciences, media research and tobacco research.”

And the “breaking things” study turns out to be acoustics experts ” pursuing fundamental advances in computational methods while solving several particularly challenging sound rendering problems,” so that the U.S. military, among others, can create more realistic combat simulators for troops.

“These aren’t about soccer research,” says the NSF’s Maria Zacharias. “All of these projects go through our very rigorous peer-review process,” she adds, part of what made the NSF the only one of 26 federal agencies to receive a “green” rating from the Bush administration in its initial rating of government management practices.

“First, Congressman Smith supports the NSF and its mission,” says Smith spokesman Charles Isom by email. He notes the NSF touted a soccer player study conducted by Northwestern University researchers under the first grant, and says Cornell promoted the second one as of use to the movie industry. “This video reflects his dedication to give taxpayers the opportunity to judge how their hard-earned money is being spent.”

Smith’s district, interestingly enough, has received more than $5 billion in corn subsides since 1995, according to Agriculture Department data, enough taxpayer-handout money to fund nearly a whole year of National Science Foundation grants. By his taxpayer accounting, that’s 500,000 families working all year long to hand out their money to farmers who saw corn prices reach about $7.88 a bushel in 2008, and who have enjoyed an ethanol boom, another federal handout, in the most recent of those years.

“Science grants are an easy target for politicians, frankly,” says science budget expert Al Teich of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The acoustics study is a classic example, he suggests, of politicians ridiculing a study based on an incomplete explanation, while ignoring its more fundamental purpose.

“Politicians and their citizen constituents have an essential role in deciding the allocation of federal funds,” Teich adds, but when they try to judge which grants are best individually, they usually end up in trouble.

“These kind of attacks are just anti-intellectualism, a blast at eggheads, basically,” says science historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego.

Since 1950, when NSF was founded, a tension has existed between the decision made then that peer review — scientists scoring each other’s work to fund the most worthy efforts — would be the way to fund research, rather than doling it out as earmarks from politicians, which was the other big idea favored by some then. “Experts are in a better position to know what’s worth the money and what isn’t,” Teich says.

Zacharias suggests that researchers need to work harder to let the public know “lab mice, soccer players, other critters” are just tools for scientists trying to answer complex questions, not an end in themselves.

“In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies,” wrote Twain, putting it a bit more elegantly. “The domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals.”

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-12-05-politics-science_N.htm

Deeply Rethinking Defense

by Joel McCleary and Mark Medish

Reflecting on the Great War, Clemenceau said war is too important to be left to the generals. Likewise, defense budgets are too important to be left to the accountants.

As the US and its allies attempt to exit from two protracted wars, it is necessary to undertake a deep rethink of post-Cold War and post-9/11 defense realities in the context of post-Meltdown economic constraints. Nowhere has the conflict between defense hawks and budget hawks been louder than in the UK where a rumble between Defense Minister Liam Fox and Chancellor George Osborne spilled into public view. Fox accused his Treasury colleague of proposing reckless cuts in the name of austerity. Opposition leader Ed Miliband sensibly countered, “The government’s defense review was a profound missed opportunity.” Despite the decision for eight percent cuts over five years, he said the Cameron government’s plan failed to offer a “strategic blueprint for our future defense needs.”

Washington should take note. A similar budget storm is brewing in the US where midterm elections have produced a sharply divided Congress. In the Republican camp, a three-way debate is under way among traditional defense boosters, ardent budget balancers, and Tea Party isolationists. For its part, the Obama administration has hewed to critical thinking, with Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushing for some controversial cuts from the roughly $1 trillion annual security budget.

Together, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia and other major allies account for over two thirds of world defense spending. The US alone spends about 45% of the global military purse, with defense consuming more than half of the US discretionary budget. Despite the appetite of defense hawks, these levels are not sustainable.

The challenge is to base defense expenditures on an accurate assessment of threats and to develop effective defenses against those threats. Rather than perpetuating the status quo or cutting programs willy-nilly, we should be investing in security from 21st century threats. It is the policy hawks – those seeking a defense budget based on a coherent, forward-looking security strategy — who should prevail in this debate.

As Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon has said, “Just because something is called defense spending doesn’t mean it’s doing an effective job of promoting national security.”

It is time to move beyond the outdated Cold War paradigm. A prime example of such thinking was the Pentagon’s 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, which postulated “the Long War” against Muslim terrorism. Its author, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, otherwise a revisionist favoring leaner force structures, virtually cribbed the Cold War script of a civilizational struggle, substituting Sino-Soviet communists with Islamic extremists.

Secretary Gates’s 2010 QDR avoids this Manichaean trap, focusing instead on the two Middle East wars at hand, but it is almost bereft of a strategic plan for our future needs. Given how fundamentally security dynamics have changed in the last twenty years, we must make systematic adjustments.

First, large-scale territorial wars and long-term occupations have proven counter-productive and unsustainable. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have made manifest the lesson that should have been learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and our tragedy in Vietnam. These wars demonstrate the power paradox: credible military power is needed to deter, however if force is used unwisely, it can diminish power.

The full economic costs – direct and indirect – of such wars are enormous. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates the cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars over $4 trillion. The price in casualties and ruined lives is stunning. The long-term health care costs for soldiers’ traumatic brain injuries alone are estimated to be above $1 trillion.

In a classic case of imperial over-stretch, the US maintains more than 800 military sites around the world. A central issue in Iraq today is whether the US will be allowed to keep five large permanent bases. As former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski observed of the Iraq war: “It is essentially a war of colonialism, attempted in a post-colonial age.”

We should remember that the long decline of the Roman Empire started during the plague-ridden reign of Marcus Aurelius. Rome became a military empire perennially enmeshed in frontier wars, desperate to recruit more soldiers and to raise taxes. The US is not Rome, but it would still be prudent to reduce our global military footprint and to practice strategic economy.

Second, recognizing emerging threats and better understanding old ones, we must upgrade systems of readiness on massive scales. This means preparing for asymmetric threats and developing systemic resilience to protect nations — doing what ‘homeland security’ should be all about.

President Ronald Reagan got one thing right about ‘Star Wars’: it would be far better to defend populations than to threaten their annihilation. Even if Reagan initially pursued missile defense in destabilizing ways, he was right, morally and practically, about focusing on civilian defense rather than mutual assured destruction. This point is even more relevant today when powerful new asymmetrical technologies make attribution and thus deterrence increasingly less assured.

Cyber threats, for example, are now getting much attention. This concern is entirely warranted, although as Seymour Hersh and Misha Glenny point out, it is important to distinguish between the real annoyance of cyber-espionage and the more murky threat of cyberwar.

A computer hacker can harm your interests; a germ hacker will almost certainly kill you. No threat is more poorly understood than biological weapons. Before Nixon ended the US offensive bio-weapons program in 1969, the Pentagon and CIA had worked together to create tools of germ warfare with nuclear lethal equivalence. The Soviets did the same.

These super-weapons were tested, but the public and even most national security leaders do not understand their destructiveness because the results remain highly classified and buried. Advances in biotechnology over the last 40 years have made the threat more potent, and the know-how has moved from state players to sophisticated non-state players.

We must realize that a biological attack on Singapore, Hong Kong, Istanbul, London, or New York would have crippling international consequences for all.

Third, there is a need for new technological solutions and multilateral approaches to defense. The national model alone cannot work.

The recent security and nuclear cooperation treaties between the UK and France should serve as a model. Pooling resources will be key to affording the defense we need. But we are still fighting the last war, if not the one before that.

The recent NATO summit at Lisbon raised awareness of emergent threats. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned, “NATO must have capacity to anticipate and protect against shifting security challenges from terrorism to ballistic missiles, from cyber attacks to the proliferation of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Relying on strategies of the past will not suffice.”

For example, a meaningful civilian defense against biological weapons is possible, but it will require vast reserves of medical countermeasures for all threatened nations. To overcome the orphan drug problem, a global vaccines and therapeutics program must pioneer ways for participants to share development costs, stockpiles and intellectual property rights.

Today’s budget pressures will mean axing some defense sacred cows, as the UK has begun to do, however it is up to the policy hawks to ensure that cuts serve the interests of a strategic rethink. We can achieve more security with less Cold War-style defense spending.

If our leaders do not define a new security paradigm, the accountants will unilaterally disarm or the generals will keep fighting old wars while new threats deepen. We must adapt to new realities, lest we go the way of old empires.

About the authors

Joel McCleary is a consultant in the defense industry and was an advisor to President Jimmy Carter and President Bill Clinton. Mark Medish, a lawyer in Washington DC, served at the State Department, the Treasury, and the National Security Council between 1994 and 2001.

In the field of biodefense, I hear conflicting claims about various scientific issues. Being a non-scientist/non-physician, I had assumed this was in part due to the lack of significant research during the past 40 years. After reading the November issue of The Atlantic and the story about Dr. John Ioannidi, I discovered the problem is not exclusive to the field of biodefense.

Like many others, I sometimes question the results of “new medical discoveries”, particularly when they suggest I can’t eat one of my favorite foods, but I had not realized the extent of this problem within the medical science community.

Here is a short excerpt from the article. I suggest you click on the link below to read the entire article. As for me, I am going out for a cheeseburger.

“He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.”

John P. A. Ioannidis is a professor and chairman at the Department of Hygiene and Epidemiology, University of Ioannina School of Medicine as well as tenured adjunct professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Professor of Medicine and Director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

If you missed this recent article in the New York Times, it is also worth reading.

Wrapped in Data and Diplomas, It’s Still Snake Oil
By KATHERINE BOUTON

Rumor has it that there was a time when it was stylish for Robber Barons to light their cigars with $100 bills, and this was at a time when a $100 was serious money.

In the not to distant future, your federal government is going to revive this practice, except this time it will be burning up 6.9 million doses of anthrax vaccine, valued at $150,000,000. That will be your tax dollars (1,500,000 $100 bills) going up in smoke. If the story ended there, it would be troubling, but wait, it gets far worse.

Anthrax is generally considered one of the most likely pathogens bioterrorists will use. Destroying 6.9 million life-saving doses is not just an incredible waste of money, it means your federal government will be reducing America’s capability to respond to a biological attack. It means your family will be less secure. Surely, this won’t happen.

Don’t bet on it.

It is critically important that America maintain supplies of vaccines and antibiotics to protect us against what the WMD Commission called the most likely threat. Everything the federal government buys to defend us, whether it is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a stealthy bomber, main battle tank, or vaccines and therapeutics have an expected life span. Sometimes they are extended, like some USAF airplanes that have been flown by three generations of pilots. On the other hand, there are limits to service-life and shelf-life extensions. In that case, we send them to the bone yard or the incinerator. That is part of the cost of national defense. Personally, I like it when we don’t have to use these offensive and defensive devices.

On the other hand, destroying vaccine on its expiration date when the feds could have found better solutions is disturbing. What options exist?

1. Could the shelf life be extended? If not, I would like to know why. Is it really ineffective or dangerous to use one day after its expiration date? Is the science that exact?

2. If shelf-life extension is not possible, could we keep the vaccine in the stockpile to use in case of emergency? There is precedence for emergency use medical countermeasures. Maybe vaccine that is one or two years beyond the normal shelf life would only be 80 percent effective–that would be better during a crisis than no vaccine at all.

3. Could we offer it to first responders–on a strictly voluntary basis–prior to the expiration date? Most of the U.S military have their anthrax vaccines and will be able to respond into a city that is contaminated with anthrax spores. (Anthrax is virtually the only pathogen that presents a long-term contamination problem.) But the military is awfully busy these days. Wouldn’t it also be helpful if public health and medical personnel, police, and fire fighters are protected and able to respond during a crisis?

The House Homeland Security Committee introduced a bill this spring calling for a serious look at option 3, but so far, the legislation is stalled, and time is running out.

Bottom line: It appears as if the federal government is fiddling while good vaccine will be burning and America will be less prepared.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps there is a perfectly good reason why the government will soon destroy 6.9 million doses of life-saving vaccines. If so, I hope someone in the government will write back to explain the reasons to this taxpayer. I will most certainly publish it. I would like to be proven wrong.