Category: blogposts

In the latest issue of the NU Sci Magazine, Adrianna Graziano composed a piece on the exciting discovery of skeletal stem cells within the human body.

Stem cells, as they have come to be known, have the remarkable ability to differentiate into any type of cell such as a brain cell or blood cell. These cells have commonly been used in cancer therapy, with the goal of targeting tumors within the body and preventing their spread.

The research for human skeletal stem cells began at Stanford University’s School of Medicine roughly three years ago when scientists discovered these stem cells in mice. Since mice contain a similar genetic composition as humans, there existed a possibility in which skeletal stem cells could be discovered in humans as well.

Once the researchers identified a batch of cells with a similar gene structure as mice in the human body, a more intricate investigation into these cells were taken until the Stanford scientists isolated the CD164+, CD73+, PDPN+ and CD146- cells. After the group of cells were cultured (grown or propagated in a medium) , the researchers found that these cells were indeed self-renewing and marked them as human skeletal stem cells.

The discovery of these human stem cells provides a wide area of discovery and treatment, specifically relating to healing ailments such as bone fractures or preventing the aches and pains that come with arthritis. Since skeletal stem cells have just been discovered, the future of clinical treatment still remains uncertain.

As a reader, I found this article to be very engaging as I have had some knowledge of stem cells through high school research. While I do not recall the science as well as I used to, the concept of cell differentiation had always interested me especially pertaining to the area of stem cells.

As we progress through the course, I hope to to focus more on stem cells as scientists consider to study the characteristics of skeletal stem cells. Perhaps, by the end of the year, treatment will have begun on patients who are affected with arthritis or perhaps senior citizens who have issues with bone aches.

My parents are against the Cape Wind project, which was killed in December for good after many years of confirmation, approval, hearings, more approval, committees and protests. They don’t work for big oil companies, and they do believe in climate change. They even both voted for Hillary, and my father considers climate change to be the most important topic in the all the elections to come.

But they are landowners on Cape Cod, and my family frequents Nantucket Sound, where the proposed wind-farm would have founds it home. Wealthy landowners on Cape Cod are those primarily opposed to the wind-farm. Some notable opponents are the Kennedys, Massachusetts’ own political family, and the Kochs.

But first some background on the project. The wind-farm would look to be placed on Horseshoe Shoal, a site with an average wind speed of 19.5 miles per hour. This area was chosen not only to its lack of vulnerability and high wind speeds, but also because it has the ideal depth for the wind turbines to be placed. The site that Cape Wind wants is deemed the most effective place in the continental United States by researchers from the University of Delaware and the Stanford University. These experts claim that the meteorological advantages of the Nantucket Sound wind farm site are tremendous, with winds there being fast and consistent enough to rival anywhere else in the world (Geophysical Research Letters). In addition to this, the projected benefits of the wind farms are enormous, with Cape Wind projecting that the wind farm will be able to produce 75 percent of the energy used on Cape Cod, and that winds will be strong enough for the blades to produce energy around 88 percent of the time (Cape Wind). In addition to this, the experts from Delaware and Stanford have proposed that connecting Cape Wind to a number of other offshore wind farms stretching down to Long Island, New York would be largely beneficial to the United States’ northeast; “a region that accounts for 34 percent of the nation’s electrical demand and 35 percent of its carbon dioxide emissions” (University of Delaware). The farm would be composed of “130 Siemens 3.6-megawatt offshore wind turbines with a capacity of 468 megawatts” (Cape Wind). It has also gotten the approval of the Secretary of the Interior, and the project would be carried out in Federal waters. So, with all that in mind, the question remains: Why has Cape Wind had so much trouble getting their project up and running, especially since there seem to be a lot of positives?

To answer that question, we have to look at the people that the wind farm affects. The main critics and the people that initially held up the operation are a group of people known as the “Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound”. The Alliance is mainly composed of property owners that believed the wind farms would degrade the ocean view and drive property prices down (Huffington Post). They came into existence in 2001 when Cape Wind first submitted a proposal for their project. The opposition’s, or the Alliance’s, argument is that the wind farm could be placed in another area, or in deeper waters out of view. Nantucket sound is a tourist attraction with a very picturesque view. The islands at the end of the Sound, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Cape Cod’s economy depends largely on tourism and vacationers, with the population increasing from 200,000 people to 500,000 during vacation season (USGS). The argument is that the wind farms ruin the view, a view that increases property value and promotes tourism. This fight to stop the Cape Wind project has been championed by the Kennedys, the progeny of the late president John F. Kennedy.

In addition to this, there were concerns over the implantation of wind turbines negatively affecting the environment. Cables would have to be run under the ocean floor and the turbines themselves would have to physically be placed on the shoal. This caused dispute due to Horseshoe shoal being an extremely popular and lucrative fishing site, and there were worries that the project would disrupt the commercial fishing industry run out of the south coast of Cape Cod. However, as a rebuttal to this worry, the Mining Management Service’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement stated that the wind farm would have little to no environmental impact on Nantucket Sound. This was in January of 2008 (Huffington Post). So why is there still no wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts?

 If you look back at the history of the Cape Wind project and the restraints it has had to fight through, the Kennedys are right there the entire time. In 2001, the most powerful critic of the project and the leader of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound was the late-Senator Edward Kennedy. Later, as the project began to develop steam, environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy wrote that he supported clean energy projects, but that he did not support the Cape Wind project. Then, in 2008 after the Mining Management Service’s report found there to be little evidence to support the argument that the farm would hinder tourism, navigation, or the environment, Senator Ted Kennedy reacted negatively. Senator Kennedy stated that he did not “believe that this action by the Interior Department will be sustained. By taking this action, the Interior Department has virtually assured years of continued public conflict and contentious litigation” (Huffington Post). This statement has large connotations beyond the obvious. By releasing this statement, Ted Kennedy is all but promising more fighting of the proposed project. He is stating that by releasing that report, and reporting what they did, they are asking for more rebuttals and more pushback from the residential Cape Cod community, especially from the Kennedys.

The Kennedys are a small example of a larger problem. There are plenty of examples of the rich and powerful looking out for self interest instead of the world. In the 80s and 90s the oil company British Petroleum, or BP, invested billions of dollars into low-carbon and green energy technology. This effort was dropped however, when it garnered less profits than the oil industry, and the company returned to focusing of fossil fuels (The Guardian). In 2015, it was reported by The Sunday Morning Herald that Australia’s green energy investments had come to a halt, with only one 6.6 million dollar project getting financed. These accounts reflect the unwillingness of people to sacrifice for environmental sustainability. It is no secret that it will cost something to create green energy, and it is not as lucrative as the fossil fuel market. However, with special interests and the rich disregarding the environment because it is convenient, the world will struggle to create enough sustainable clean energy.

People are also unable to see the bigger picture, and realize that one project will create a domino effect. The creation of a wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, which would be America’s first offshore wind farm, would set a precedent for the rest of the the country. It would show people that projects like that are possible, and if it works then it would show the people that it is a feasible way to garner energy. One action leads to another, and people and governments must start leading by example.

Sources

Grandia,​ ​Kevin.​ ​“History​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Cape​ ​Cod​ ​Offshore​ ​Wind​ ​Energy​ ​Project.”​ ​​The​ ​Huffington​ ​Post​,

TheHuffingtonPost.com,​ ​28​ ​Apr.​ ​2010,

www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/history-of-the-cape-cod-o_b_555725.html. Jacobsen​ ​,​ ​Mark​ ​Z.​ ​“Massachusetts​ ​Offshore​ ​Wind​ ​Future​ ​Cost​ ​Study.”​ ​​Geophysical​ ​Research

Letters.​
Kempton,​ ​Willett,​ ​and​ ​Christina​ ​Archer.​ ​“A​ ​Place​ ​for​ ​Offshore​ ​Wind.”​ ​​UDel,​ ​​University​ ​of

Delaware,​ ​24​ ​Apr.​ ​2012,

www1.udel.edu/udaily/2012/apr/offshore-wind-farms-042412.html. “Land​ ​and​ ​People:​ ​Finding​ ​a​ ​Balance.”​ ​​U.S​ ​Geological​ ​Survey​,

online.wr.usgs.gov/outreach/landpeople/students/capeCod.html.
“Past​ ​Learning​ ​for​ ​Future​ ​Plans.”​ ​​Timesfreepress.com,​ ​​Times​ ​Free​ ​Press,​ ​4​ ​May​ ​2009,

www.timesfreepress.com/news/news/story/2009/may/04/past-learning-future-plans/2181

58/.
“Why​ ​Nantucket​ ​Sound​ ​Is​ ​Right​ ​for​ ​Cape​ ​Wind.”​ ​​Why​ ​Nantucket​ ​Sound​ ​Is​ ​Right​ ​for​ ​Cape​ ​Wind​ ​|

Cape​ ​Wind​,​ ​Cape​ ​Wind,​ ​www.capewind.org/where/location.

Ever since I found this tweet and subsequently ranted about it on Twitter, I’ve been thinking a lot about health and medical journalism. If you’ve read my rant, you know that Jezebel piece did a lot of things wrong when it comes to medical journalism, and just journalism in general — not in the least by upholding an old-school gender binary and using cheap stereotypes to try and make an already bad and overused joke.  

I’m a frequent reader of The New York Times Magazine’s “Diagnosis” series, written by Lisa Sanders, a contributing writer for the magazine who is also a doctor. She wrote a book called “Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis.” Each column focuses on one medical mystery faced by a patient. Throughout the column, she relies on anecdote just as heavily as medical documentation including test results, scans, medications, and more. She makes it engaging by posing interesting questions throughout the piece, often based on her own medical knowledge. And, for the unsolved cases, she always asks if there are readers out there with answers the patient, their doctors, and Sanders haven’t thought of yet.

Given how nasty the Jezebel piece was, sometimes it’s nice to know there are real doctors writing real medical journalism. But how do regular journalists fare when covering sticky topics like health care or new medical studies? Often, the medical journalism I come across most frequently are op-eds written by scientists or doctors, like this one from The New Yorker. But there’s also been a lot of cross-disciplinary coverage on health, given a major issue going on in the political sphere in the past few years has been health care.

One thing I’ve noticed is that often, health stories are not written by health reporters — astonishingly, I don’t think that will surprise many people. While writing this, I came across this piece from BuzzFeed News where the reporter also had bylines about the government shutdown, federal housing loans, and Anthony Scaramucci. The article itself isn’t bad: It has a lot of links and uses a lot of statistics to explain what’s happened. But it doesn’t *feel* like a health story. It feels like a news story that mentions a health issue.

In The Washington Post, however, with a much bigger team comes more beat writers. In the last three months, Amy Goldstein, a health care policy reporter, wrote about the birth control mandate, New York City’s health care for all plan, and NIH’s funding commitment for fetal tissue research. Generally, her beat seems to be a combination of health care, abortion/fetal research, and miscellaneous medical research. All of her articles *feel* like health stories, even when they focus on health policy rather than a clear medical issue or study.

There’s something to be said for the resources WaPo has that maybe BuzzFeed doesn’t, but also BuzzFeed often just feels like clickbait rather than hard news. That could be my bias talking. I do prefer established media outlets first, before going to BuzzFeed. I like places where editors value beat writers and value the expertise they can provide on an issue. This is, of course, even more relevant in light of the “designer babies” incident in China that we discussed in class. When do you put a technology/genetic engineering/medicine/something else expert on a story, and when do you turn to the first breaking news reporter you can find? It’s something I don’t think we’ve quite figured out yet.

If you are versed in health issues in any capacity, or even if you just keep up with the news, the opioid epidemic is something you’re familiar with. The CDC reports that each day an average of 130 Americans lose their lives as a result of opioid overdose, a statistic that puts this important issue into an alarming perspective. Understanding this crisis and wanting to provide a solution, scientists at the University of Washington have proposed a potential answer in the form of smartphone technology.

Lead researcher Rajalakshmi Nandakumar and her team have developed a smartphone app that they hope could save lives in a unique way. According to the study in Science Translational Medicine, the main intention of this app, appropriately named “Second Chances”, would be to play a role in the time-sensitive nature of Naloxone. This drug is what emergency services administer to treat and reverse narcotics overdoses, and to be effective it needs to be delivered as soon as possible. The app that Nandakumar’s team has devised monitors physiological irregularities that are key overdose signs, like changes in breathing. These irregularities are fed into the smartphone and to the app via sonar technology. If an overdose is recognized, an alert is then sent out to friends, relatives or emergency services that are equipped with the all-important reversal drug in hopes of reducing the time between overdose and treatment.

While on paper this seems like an important technological breakthrough targeting one of the biggest health crises in the country, there are definitely questions behind its effectiveness and applications. One major catch is that it has to be downloaded if it’s going to work. This means that addicts have to make a conscious decision to not only have the app in case of emergency, but to turn it on prior to abusing narcotics. Another issue to be concerned with is false positives. While the app has been developed, it has yet to be deployed and truly tested. Researchers still have work to do in terms of algorithm sensitivity in order to limit the number of false positives that are flagged and emergency services that are called accidentally.  

Overall, this app could definitely be a step in the right direction. It could theoretically cut down on the critical time between an addict overdosing and receiving appropriate care. However, only time will tell if the app lives up to its name and provides the second chances that it promises.

Nearly one in ten Americans – over 30 million people – suffers from diabetes, a disease in which cells cannot absorb enough glucose (sugar), causing it to accumulate in the bloodstream. To test whether their blood glucose levels are too high, diabetes sufferers regularly use diabetes test strips. These small plastic segments are coated with a chemical mixture that reacts with blood glucose to generate electricity that is then measured by a meter. Unbeknownst to many, reselling unused diabetes test strips is legal, and the resale trade is thriving.

While test strips cost little to produce, pharmaceutical companies add huge markups, making this necessary equipment a financial burden for those who are under- or un-insured. One option for those who cannot afford to buy their test strips from pharmacies is to buy them from re-sellers, who obtain their merchandise from those whose insurance covers much of the cost and who end up buying more strips than necessary. A lucrative market for the resale of test strips exists, both in person and online.

This market may help patients more easily afford essential medical equipment, but it does not come risk-free. Re-sellers are not regulated, meaning that the strips may be improperly stored or sold despite damages or expiration. Also unlike pharmacies, re-sellers do not receive recall notices when defects are found, resulting in the continued use of faulty equipment that could give users inaccurate blood glucose readings. Inaccurate readings could prompt a change in medication that would dangerously alter a patient’s blood glucose.

The risky but thriving industry of resale test strips is one of many side effects of the unaffordable American healthcare system. If manufacturers of test strips cut the markup by even 50 percent, they would still make a profit while giving millions of people financial relief for something they may literally be unable to live without.

What are we writing about in this class? In one of our first sessions, we mapped a news article in the New York Times on gene editing into three categories: “science”, “sources” and “why it matters.” Within this taxonomy, pieces of science journalism stand to be comprised of three separate things: simplified explanations of scientific phenomena, first-person or epistolary perspectives on the news surrounding those phenomena, and their social context and consequences. But, as the academic discipline of Science, Technology & Society points out: these three categories are much more convolved than we might think.

Ava Kofman’s fantastic profile of Bruno Latour in the New York Times magazine last Fall brought out the language used by the French philosopher, a founder of STS, to describe this convolution: “Facts, Latour said, were “networked”; they stood or fell not on the strength of their inherent veracity but on the strength of the institutions and practices that produced them and made them intelligible. If this network broke down, the facts would go with them.” Latour’s point is that the scientific “sources” that journalists use for reporting are not just “discovering” facts about phenomena, but producing them in a social context that validates them as true. Journalists are part of this context.  

Scholars of science communication (including our department’s Matthew Nisbet) theorize about the joint role that journalists and scientists fulfill in building up these fact-supporting networks. Dietram Scheufele drew this figure in 2014, illustrating the progression to something resembling Latour’s point of view. Starting with a one-way “knowledge deficit” model of science communication, where successful communication required only for the public to simply be exposed to scientific statements, proved to be inadequate, as was just moving to a “public engagement” model, where admittedly productive but still  insufficient two-way public dialogues between scientists and the public predominate. A more accurate picture of what is really happening comes in the third model, where scientists, journalists, and other professional/institutions come together within a socio-political context to create “mediated realities” that influence public understanding.

Science journalists recognize their role mediating reality, in creating the “news” that they are reporting on. Describing his flagship NPR show, Joe’s Big Idea, in an interview on The Open Notebook, Joe Palca writes that: “The “big idea” is to stop trying to pretend that science is news in the same way politics or crime or sports are news… Deciding what’s important enough to report on is tricky.” Yes, it definitely is.