Category: Scientific Evidence

The Ebola “Czar”

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By David Orentlicher
[Cross-posted at Health Law Profs and PrawfsBlawg.]

In the wake of Craig Spencer’s decision to go bowling in Brooklyn, governors of three major states—Illinois, New Jersey, and New York—have imposed new Ebola quarantine rules that are inconsistent with national public health policy, are not likely to protect Americans from Ebola, and may compromise the response to Ebola in Africa, as health care providers may find it too burdensome to volunteer where they are needed overseas. Don’t we have an Ebola czar who is supposed to ensure that our country has a coherent and coordinated response to the threat from Ebola?

Of course, the term “czar” was poorly chosen precisely because Ron Klain does not have the powers of a czar. He will oversee the federal response to Ebola, but he cannot control the Ebola policies of each state. Unfortunately, on an issue that demands a clear national policy that reflects medical understanding, public anxieties will give us something much less desirable.

Facebook Announces New Research Policies

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By Michelle Meyer

A WSJ reporter just tipped me off to this news release by Facebook regarding the changes it has made in its research practices in response to public outrage about its emotional contagion experiment, published in PNAS. I had a brief window of time in which to respond with my comments, so these are rushed and a first reaction, but for what they’re worth, here’s what I told her (plus links and less a couple of typos):

There’s a lot to like in this announcement. I’m delighted that, despite the backlash it received, Facebook will continue to publish at least some of their research in peer-reviewed journals and to post reprints of that research on their website, where everyone can benefit from it. It’s also encouraging that the company acknowledges the importance of user trust and that it has expressed a commitment to better communicate its research goals and results.

As for Facebook’s promise to subject future research to more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people within the company, with an enhanced review process for research that concerns, say, minors or sensitive topics, it’s impossible to assess whether this is ethically good or bad without knowing a lot more about both the people who comprise the panel and their review process (including but not limited to Facebook’s policy on when, if ever, the default requirements of informed consent may be modified or waived). It’s tempting to conclude that more review is always better. But research ethics committees (IRBs) can and do make mistakes in both directions – by approving research that should not have gone forward and by unreasonably thwarting important research. Do Facebook’s law, privacy, and policy people have any training in research ethics? Is there any sort of appeal process for Facebook’s data scientists if the panel arbitrarily rejects their proposal? These are the tip of the iceberg of challenges that the academic IRBs continue to face, and I fear that we are unthinkingly exporting an unhealthy system into the corporate world. Discussion is just beginning among academic scientists, corporate data scientists, and ethicists about the ethics of mass-scale digital experimentation (see, ahem, here and here). It’s theoretically possible, but unlikely, that in its new, but unclear, guidelines and review process Facebook has struck the optimal balance among the competing values and interests that this work involves.  Read More

Are we appropriately framing the risks of brain trauma in contact sports?

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By Christine Baugh

The recent concussion and sport special issue of the Journal of Law Medicine and Ethics (generously made available free by the American Society of Law Medicine and Ethics: HERE), edited by new Bill of Health contributor David Orentlichter,  includes a number of important works discussing legal and ethical issues related to mild traumatic brain injury sustained through sport. One of the most thought provoking articles in the issue is a piece by Kathleen Bachynski and Daniel Goldberg titled Youth Sports & Public Health: Framing Risks of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury in American Football and Ice Hockey. This piece delves into the important issues of cultural and normative influences on the framing (and thus public understanding) of the risk of brain injury in sport. At the heart of the paper is the assertion that, “The framing of risk is not a neutral, apolitical enterprise,” and that in the United States and Canada highly influential institutional actors such as football and ice hockey leagues have played a formative role in the cultural valuation of the risks inherent in these activities.

Bachynski and Goldberg provide a variety of examples where the overarching questions such as “Are contact sports too risky?” or “What is an appropriate level of risk?” are deferred for easier alternatives. Addressing more focal issues are: State concussion laws which mandate secondary prevention measures, advancement in protective equipment which promises to mitigate risk of injury, rule changes made by sports leagues which aim to make inherently dangerous activities somewhat less dangerous. Rather than addressing the broader risk questions, the implicit assumption in these more focused efforts is that risks are acceptable as long as they are managed. Through what Bachynski and Goldberg assert are concerted efforts on behalf of major stakeholders (e.g., major sports leagues), this has been the predominant frame for risk assessment in contact sports.

Unfortunately, this method of framing risks is not without consequences. Bachynski and Goldberg argue that this framing may alter our understanding of the scope of the problem as well as the most appropriate interventions or solutions. This frame may also inappropriately downplay the need to address the broader moral, social, and political questions that arise from concussions in contact sports. For example, the authors pose the following question, “At what age can players consent to risks of head trauma and associated elevated risks of chronic degenerative neurological disease?”

Answering this question could require a complex weighing of the scientific evidence of the long-term risk of neurodegeneration and balancing it against a variety of factors such as the paternalistic desire to control the population’s ability to partake in self-injurious behavior and the need to protect an individual’s autonomy. (We do, after all, regularly let individuals partake in other dangerous activities—e.g., downhill skiing or driving a car.) We would need to think about questions such as: Should we treat the risk of brain injury differently than bodily injury? Should the risk of delayed or chronic injury be weighed differently given humans’ known difficulty in assessing risk in the distant future? What does scientific evidence have to say about the nature of the risk across age ranges? However, under the current framing these questions are not the ones being addressed. Bachynski and Goldberg’s article elucidates the first step toward addressing concussions from sport: appropriately framing the problem.

[This post reflects my own views only.  It does not necessarily represent the views of the Petrie-Flom Center or the Football Players Health Study at Harvard University.]

Fall Facebook/OKCupid and Future of Research Tour

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Sept. 18 Tweet Chat

By Michelle Meyer

I’m participating in several public events this fall pertaining to research ethics and regulation, most of them arising out of my recent work (in Wired and in Nature and elsewhere) on how to think about corporations conducting behavioral testing (in collaboration with academic researchers or not) on users and their online environments (think the recent Facebook and OKCupid experiments). These issues raise legal and ethical questions at the intersection of research, business, informational privacy, and innovation policy, and the mix of speakers in most of these events reflect that.  Read More

Separating Fact from Fiction

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By Joanna K. Sax
[Ed. Note: Cross-posted at HealthLawProfBlog]

Rhetoric that misconstrues scientific knowledge to garner support for political positions is troubling. For many years, my scholarship has focused on the debate surrounding embryonic stem cell research.   One of the things that I have experienced is an incomplete understanding about what embryonic stem cell research is, what the starting material is, and why it might be different than adult stem cells. One reason that the public may be confused is because some of the information fed to the public is incomplete or, even, incorrect.

To understand the type of information that the public receives regarding a controversial type of research, in this case, embryonic stem cell research, I conducted an empirical study.  By way of background, in 2001, an intense debate about the federal funding for stem cell research occurred. One of the arguments against federal funding for stem cell research was that there was no need for it because scientists could use adult stem cells (which didn’t have the same ethical concerns) instead of embryonic stem cells. The problem with this proposition, however, was that it had no scientific merit because the scientists had not yet conducted the studies to compare human adult and embryonic stem cells. The call for the need for these studies was loud and clear in the scientific community. But, it seemed that some in the non-scientific community already came to the conclusion that these cell types were interchangeable.

I compared the type of information that was being conveyed to the public in major newspapers to the statements made by scientists in the scientific literature. I confirmed that information in major newspapers was statistically more likely than the scientific literature to say that adult stem cells give the same or similar results as research with embryonic stem cells. A more detailed explanation of the study along with the results is available here.  Read More

The Regulation of Dietary Supplements

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By Joanna K. Sax
[Ed. Note: Cross-posted on HealthLawProfBlog.]

How have the massive amounts of dietary supplements on the market evaded significant regulatory oversight for so long? Dietary supplements are regulated as food, which means that for practical purposes the FDA only has the ability to pull them off the shelves upon a showing that they are harmful.

Many consumers use dietary supplements for the same purposes that someone may use a non-prescription drug. Some consumers actually feel safer using a dietary supplement because it is labeled as “natural,” rather than using an FDA approved over-the-counter drug. This doesn’t and shouldn’t make sense. Many natural things are harmful – would you eat any wild mushroom? Tobacco in in cigarettes is natural. Just because something is natural doesn’t mean that it is safe. Conversely, just because something isn’t “natural” in a drug doesn’t mean it is unsafe.

One of the main problems with regulating dietary supplements is that they are not all the same. We probably don’t need heavy regulation for Vitamin C, except maybe in formulation/content. We know, for example, that it is water soluble, so it is hard to take too much. So, maybe Vitamin C doesn’t pose the same safety concerns as other supplements. However, a recent article in Nature, vol. 510, pages 462-4, described different scientific viewpoints about the efficacy of vitamin supplements in healthy populations. So, unless you have a Vitamin C deficiency, then there is probably little reason to take it.

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Is Fracking Good or Bad?

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[Ed. Note: Cross-posted at HealthLawProfBlog.]

By Joanna Sax

It probably depends on who you ask. Proponents of fracking laud the energy independence, creation of jobs, environmentally friendly nature of natural gas, national security and economic benefits. Opponents to fracking have concerns about the impact to the environment, public health issues, and water use. Each side dismisses the other side’s arguments.

Perhaps a primer on hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, is helpful. Fracking is the process of creating long vertical wells below the earth’s surface and then horizontal wells that break open the shale and allow the natural gas to be released and captured. Fracking uses millions of gallons of water to create these wells. A proprietary mix of chemicals in the water is used to create the fissures in the shale. Since the shale is far below the surface, proponents of fracking were able to convince Congress to exempt the industry from the Safe Water Drinking Act, which is now affectionately called the Halliburton Loophole.

The problem with assessing proponents and opponents positions on fracking is the lack of scientific data. While it may be true that the fracking wells are far below the surface, leaks in the fracking wells could impact the aquifers. The EPA is conducting a large scale drinking water impact study, with results that are eagerly anticipated to be released later this year. It could be that, for example, drinking water is/has been contaminated, but that with new regulations and novel innovations, these wells could be made safe such that drinking water is not contaminated. But, we don’t know if there is a problem without the scientific studies and if there is a problem, we need to determine if science/innovation can address the problem.

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What are GM Foods?

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By Joanna Sax
[Ed Note: Cross posted at HealthLawProfBlog.]

I read a lot of press and listen to the politics surrounding genetically modified (GM) foods; but it appears that there is a lack of understanding that almost all of our food supply is integrated with GM crops. I imagine that many readers of this blog already know this, so this may simply be background for some of you.

The focus of the debate appears to be on GM foods that contain some sort of exogenous genetic modification that allows them to be pest or insect resistant, either through DNA or RNAi. That is, a specific DNA or RNAi sequence is inserted into the seed that is known to interfere with a biochemical reaction that allows, for example, the crop to be resistant to a specific type of pest.

But, the reality is that almost all of our crops are genetically modified, if not through the insertion of exogenous DNA or RNAi, then through various husbandry techniques. For example, seeds may be hit with UV radiation, which causes double stranded DNA breaks and subsequent mutations. These seeds are then selected for desired traits, such as pest resistance or other hardy characteristics. So, then through husbandry techniques, the seeds are grown into crops with mutations to the endogenous DNA. For these crops, we know that they demonstrate some sort of feature that is desirable to the farmer (or consumer), but we have little idea about what other mutations they may carry.

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My Slate Article on the Importance of Replicating Science

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By Michelle Meyer

I have a long article in Slate (with Chris Chabris) on the importance of replicating science. We use a recent (and especially bitter) dispute over the failure to replicate a social psychology experiment as an occasion for discussing several things of much broader import, including:

  • The facts that replication, despite being a cornerstone of the scientific method, is rarely practiced (and even less frequently published) not only in psychology but across science, and that when such studies are conducted, they frequently fail to replicate the original findings (let this be a warning to those of you who, like me, cite empirical literature in your scholarship);
  • Why replications are so rarely conducted and published, relative to their importance (tl;dr: it’s the incentives, stupid);
  • Why it’s critical that this aspect of the academic research culture change (because academic science doesn’t only affect academic scientists; the rest of us have a stake in science, too, including those who fund it, those who help researchers produce it (i.e., human subjects), those who consume and build on it (other scholars and policy-makers), and all of us who are subject to myriad laws and policies informed by it); and
  • Some better and worse ways of facilitating that cultural change (among other things, we disagree with Daniel Kahneman’s most recent proposal for conducting replications).

The U.S. Supreme Court vs. The American Psychological Association

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By Dov Fox

The U.S. Supreme Court has not in recent years held the views of the American Psychological Association (APA) in so high regard as it did this week.

In 2012, the Court set aside the APA’s arguments for why due process requires the exclusion of eyewitness testimony obtained under suggestive circumstances that rendered it especially likely to be unreliable.

And in 2011, when the Court struck down on free speech grounds a state regulation on violent video games, it gave short shrift to the APA’s warnings about those games’ connection to violent behavior in young boys.

But in its recent death penalty decision, Florida v. Hall, the Court relied heavily on important APA insights in declaring it unconstitutional for states to set an IQ cutoff to determine whether a prisoner is eligible to receive capital punishment. Read More