I'm gonna be a first author! (with bonus rant)

First order of business: yay for me! My first-author paper was finally accepted for publication by a pretty good journal and it's coming out next month! I'm so proud of it, and it's so adorable!

However, I have to say, my first foray into publishing has thoroughly disillusioned me concerning how review, publishing etc. works (not that I was all that illusioned to begin with).

One of the scammy things is the money (of course). You (and I) pay taxes. Some of these go to the NIH. The NIH funds my research with our tax money. In order to keep getting NIH funding and to advance my career, I have to publish the work I do with the NIH money. To publish, I have to pay the journal money (page/figure charges). Then if you, who payed the taxes that pay for my research, want to see what I did within a year of publication you have to pay the journal to access the content. Somehow the publishers are winning here.

And the winning keeps happening – because scientific journals are “peer-reviewed.” The people who review papers are other scientists who (in the vast majority of cases) are not being paid for their review work. In some cases, most of the editors are also unpaid scientists. While journal editing may give a bit of a resume boost, as far as I can tell, reviewing mostly doesn’t.

Now, the non-payment of reviewers makes the review process rather annoying. For this journal, I got to suggest 4 reviewers I wanted and 3 that I did not want. The journal may ask these people, but they might be too busy. So then they keep trying to find someone else competent and available to review. Once a reviewer accepts a paper, it’s probably not at the top of their to-do list, because they have their real job. So sometimes this takes a while and the results may be less than stellar.

Take my first set of reviews (which got the paper rejected)

·      Reviewer 1: Liked the paper, had a few questions/suggestions, about 1.5 pages

·      Reviewer 2: did not read the legend for the graphs in figure 1, consequently drew totally erroneous conclusions about our data vs. conclusions. Hated the paper. All this in half a page of comments.

·      Reviewer 3: Thought the paper was ok. But really wanted us to play up the specifics of another paper that was barely relevant. We suspect this reviewer was the author of said paper, given how specific he/she got about it. We had cited this paper, mainly to say that they did their experiments under non-physiological conditions, which prevented direct comparison to our work.

Happily, pointing out the reviewer 2 hadn’t even read the legend to figure 1 allowed us to resubmit to the same journal. We did one additional experiment based on comments from reviewers 2 and 3, and our resubmission was accepted (yay!). And on a positive note, it really is a better paper thanks to some of the revisions and the additional experiment (so thanks, reviewers 1 and 3!).

However, even before submission, there was an experiment I KNEW we should have done. In fact, while we waited for review, I slaved away trying to make this additional experiment work, certain that at least one reviewer would see this hole and want it addressed. Not one reviewer noticed. (N.B. I still think it matters, and I’m still working on the experiment, my initial attempts failed, but I have now taken a different approach to testing the same hypothesis).

How drugs you don't take can hurt you

Most of us have heard of the placebo effect: something makes you feel better because you think it will. Like how that first sip of coffee wakes you up in the morning, though the caffeine hasn’t hit your bloodstream. And how your headache feels better 10 minutes after popping some Advil, even though the biochemical effect won’t set in for another 20 minutes. What you might not know as much about is the nocebo effect - or how drugs you didn't take can cause side effects and even death!

The Placebo Effect

The placebo effect (Latin for "I will please") is extensively used in clinical trials. The most common setup for testing  a drug is to divide subjects into two groups, one of which gets the test drug for their condition, the other of which gets a sugar pill. The individual patients and the doctors monitoring the trial don’t know which people got which treatment.

The efficacy of placebos is sometimes called the “expectancy effect.” I.e., if a patient really believes it will work, it does (at least for a while). Researchers have shown that you can give the same placebo to two groups, telling one group that it will have one effect (such as muscle relaxation) and the other group that it will have the opposite effect (muscle tension) and you will observe relaxation in the first group and tension in the second. Another contributor to expectation is size and cost of placebo drugs – the more a patient pays for a placebo, they better it will work!

How does this work? An interesting hint comes from a study showing that the placebo painkiller effect can be blocked by using an opioid antagonist. This suggests that endogenous (i.e. genetically produced) opioids like endorphins are released because you  expect pain relief, but this effect tends to wear off over time, because you’re not receiving real drug to relieve pain.

The placebo effect can last for a long time, depending on the condition. Placebo painkillers have been reported to last as long as 8 weeks, and placebos for rheumatoid arthritis for as long as 2 years!

The Nocebo Effect: 

But the flip side of the expectancy effect is the “nocebo” effect (Latin for "I will harm"). In a clinical trial for painkillers, for example, the placebo group will often display side effect from the drug as well as pain relief – even though they only took a sugar pill!

A retrospective study in Pain looked at 73 studies of painkiller vs. placebo trials for migrains that used three classes of pain drugs (NSAIDS, triptans and anticonvulsants). This study analyzed side effects experienced by placebo patients in all trials, and found that the side effects they experienced matched the drug they believed they were receiving!

Another nocebo study assessed subjects who believed they got headaches from cell phone radio frequencies. Subjects were then allowed to watch TV and received calls from researchers on a cell phone. Some subjects had a phone that output normal cell phone radio waves, while others had a sham phone that did not emit radio waves. In fact, subjects with sham phones reported worse side effects than people with the real phones!

Yet another nocebo effect is “MSG sensitivity.” Certain people reported migraines, hyperactivity and other symptoms in connection with MSG consumption. However, a double-blind placebo-controlled study found only one reaction to MSG – but wait! That patient had eaten placebo! Expectations strike again!

The nocebo effect can be more sinister, for example patients who know they are diagnosed as terminal may die faster than those who don’t know. Some researchers believe that the nocebo effect may also explain why curses from black magic can adversely effect those who believe in it and know they have been cursed.

Should evolution be taught in schools?

I almost cried watching the Miss USA contestants address whether evolution should be taught in schools. The predominant answer are "No!" and "Children should be exposed to all belief systems and theories about how life arose." Because, of course, "Students should be knowledged about different options."

Why teach only two sides of the creation story? The world may have hatched out of an egg! So I guess biology class will soon become mythology class.

Personal favorites: California, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Nevada (OK, I kind of <3 New Mexico!), and what is Miss Washington even saying?

Note: Candidates are in alphabetical order by state if you want to hit the highlights.

After you've seen all you can stomach of the first video, watch the parody!

White privilege

I enthusiastically agreed to go with my husband to an a capella gospel concert at the church he attended as a child. I love a capella, I love gospel. It's gonna be great!

Then, as I looked at the Facebook event page, I thought, "I wonder if I'll be the only white person there..." Then I realized that the converse is my husband's situation at least 80% of his life, if not more. And I kept my mouth shut.

I heart our tech

Subtitle: "How I ended up doing surgery with a shoe-cover on my head."

Our tech/lab manager type person is away this week. Our tech is a 20-something who didn't get into pharmacy school and makes beer in his parents' basement. I didn't like him at first. But he is astonishingly long-suffering and good-natured, and even though I don't think he gives a darn about the science we do, everything always runs smoothly.

But, as previously stated, he is away. So is one of the other grad students and our research assistant is sick. Thus, I am somehow in charge. In charge of ordering. In charge of the frogs. In charge of making my own solutions and electrodes. And stuck with frog surgery.

So, I go up to anesthetize the frog. This rarely works in the time-frame described in our protocol. 45 minutes later the frog is still kicking. At an hour it's not. But then I flip it over, and I can see it's throat pulsing. Back in the anesthetic. Meanwhile, my surgery suite reservation is running out of time. (N.B.: I did not reserve the suite, our blessed lab manager did, I didn't even know we needed to reserve it!). Finally, the frog is out. I realize I have no gauze for dabbing blood. I figure, oh well, I'll just deal. I start the surgery.

As soon as I start extracting eggs, the person who had the surgery room reserved starting 5 minutes before pokes her head in. I say I need 15 more minutes, she says no problem, she'll use a different room. It's all good. Then I go to stitch the frog back up. I swear to goodness, that thing had HIDDEN the other side of the muscle layer (it could have been all the blood that I couldn't mop up sans gauze). I was stressing. My new (very professional hair) was in my face and sticky. This is because I had no hairnet (they're not required in this situation, but are helpful for hair restraint). For some reason, the little supply station on this floor was out of hair nets. Finally, in extreme frustration, I leave the suite in search of a hair retainer. The little supply station is just outside the door. I grab a shoe cover and stick it over my head and return to fishing around for the muscle layer. When I eventually put the frog back together and start hauling all my supplies (and the frog) back to where they belong, I get strange looks in the hall. This is when I realize I still have a bright blue, waterproof shoe-cover on my head.

Thank heavens he's only gone a week. I will remember to be extra-nice to him when he comes back (until I forget).

Race bias in science funding

It's a fairly well accepted fact that there are pipeline issues in getting racial minorities into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) careers in the US. But it turns out that even once you get there, there are still hurdles.

A recent study published in Science (see the News and Views here) found that black PhDs have lower R01 funding rates than any other ethnic group (they note that there was also a disparity in NSF funding). While there are (due to the above mentioned pipeline issues) many fewer black applicants, 29% of white applicants were funded, 25% of Asian applicants were funded and only 16% of black applicants were funded. When only US citizens are included (to minimize language barrier bias), the funding gap between Asian and white applicants disappears, but the funding rate for black applicants was still 10% lower.

Why the disparity? They controlled for as many variables as possible (training, publication record, etc), but the gap remained. One theory was that better mentoring allowed whites and Asians to submit higher quality applications, but one would then expect a lower funding success rate for Hispanic applicants as well, but this was not observed.

Obviously, the NIH is working to determine what is causing this gap so that it can be closed. Reviewers do not have access to information about an applicant's ethnicity, but perhaps it is being inferred from the name, location, or college attended. My personal guess is that there's a bit of an old-boys-club effect going on, in addition to other factors such as not having access to high-quality mentoring and grant-writing training in their early career.

PS - There are also programs that try to address the minority pipeline issues by supporting STEM students from a very young age with high-quality mentoring and research opportunities. I recently became aware of the extremely rigorous physician-scientist training program, and there are many others.

Yes.

This seems to be entirely accurate at all levels with which I am familiar (click to enlarge).

Had some viewing problems, hopefully fixed. If you still can't see it, try clicking here.