Beyond The Bench

Admittedly, science can seem mysterious. Scientists speak in cryptic abbreviations and write in even more obscure language. However, there has never been a more crucial time to educate the public about scientific research.

With issues such as climate control, environmental preservation, renewable energy sources, and healthcare at hand, nonscientists—politicians and their public constituents alike—need to know and understand the scientific research that goes into policy-making decisions. It therefore becomes essential that scientists communicate their findings with the public—a practice which has been traditionally neglected.

A number of individuals have already called attention to this area of neglect. James Wetmore, an Assistant Professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, AZ State University, recently wrote an editorial for Science entitled ”Scientists: Listen Up!”. In his editorial, Wetmore emphasizes the importance of scientists’ practicing two-way communication with their audience. By doing this, scientists in turn learn how their work is understood and applied, as well as how to become better communicators.

Another article, “Video in Science,” written by Matias Pasquali, argues in favor of using new technologies (i.e. video) to communicate science. While Pasquali recommends using videos to supplement protocols, others have found his idea applicable to public audiences. For instance, graphic artist/animator Peter Sinclair has created the YouTube series “Climate Denial Crock of the Week” in order to illustrate how human decisions about energy impact global climate change. Similarly, noted politician Al Gore filmed the documentary An Inconvenient Truth to educate the public about global warming, as well.

Video is an obvious and easy way to reach the public—it can make science visible and therefore more concrete (or at least less abstract than, say, a journal article entitled “A Pacific Interdecadal Climate Oscillation with Impacts on Salmon Production”). Moreover, video can make science potentially more entertaining. And the public likes nothing more than to be entertained.

This suggests that authors such as Greg Craven—who, as a high school science teacher (and not a research scientist at all), wrote the book What’s the Worst That Could Happen?: A Rational Response to the Climate Change Debate—may be some of the best people to convey scientists’ findings to the public. Alternatively, author Randy Olsen offers communication advice to scientists in his recently released book Don’t Be Such a Scientist.

The bottom line is: it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. And science needs to be said much more simply, no matter who you are.

Every time we turn on the shower, our intention is usually to get clean . . . not sick. However, according to research recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, stepping into the spray may mean dousing ourselves not just with water, but with bacteria, too.

Humans come into contact with 60,000 types of bacteria every day. In fact, the human skin alone is colonized by ~1,000 species of bacteria, and the human digestive tract contains trillions of bacteria. Therefore, it is safe to say that we certainly couldn’t live without bacteria. However—as is evidenced by all of the antibiotics we have developed—not all bacteria promote human health.

Enter Mycobacterium avium: the microorganisms that dwell inside your showerhead. Leah Feazel and her colleagues at the University of Colorado, Boulder discovered these bacteria by compiling, isolating, and sequencing the DNA from 45 different showerhead sites in 9 different U.S. cities. After matching their findings with a DNA database, the team determined that the water that came out of the showerheads contained 100 times more mycobacteria than pre-shower water.

Mycobacteria have a waxy exterior that enables them to stick inside the showerhead. The shower’s spray nozzle then creates the fine mist that “aerosolizes” the bacteria, allowing them to be inhaled deep into the lungs—the first step toward pulmonary disease.

For an ordinary, healthy person, this is not cause for concern. Only about 1 in 4,000 people suffer from lung diseases linked to environmental mycobacteria. However, people with immune-compromising conditions are obviously at greater risk of infection—and infection is permanent. “Once you’re infected, you’re always infected,” says Joe Falkinham, professor of Microbiology at Virginia Tech.

How do you keep your showerhead clean?

• Don’t scrub. Any organic matter left behind by the sponge will serve as food for mycobacteria.

• Don’t bleach. Mycobacteria are very chlorine-resistant. Feazel’s team tried cleaning a showerhead with bleach and found that it actually lead the mycobacteria to proliferate!

• Use a metal showerhead. Mycobacteria seem to adhere more easily to plastic showerheads than metal ones.

• Change the showerhead a few times a year.

Because our white blood cells cannot identify cancerous cells, they cannot attack them. Consequently, cancer has never been treated with a vaccine—until now.

Usually, we use vaccines to ward off potential diseases or infections like polio or HPV—something caused by a virus or bacteria. Our body uses white blood cells to identify these foreign invaders and then destroy them. Vaccines introduce our white blood cells to these microorganisms so that they can learn how to fight the diseases without our actually having to get sick. Cancer, however, is not a “foreign invader;” tumors are just collections of our own native cells that won’t stop dividing. Therefore, our white blood cells do not differentiate between cancerous cells and healthy ones.

The aforementioned problem poses a riddle scientists have struggled to solve. How do you make the body’s defense system attack its own—albeit sick—cells and leave the healthy ones alone? A great deal of recent progress has been made, particularly at The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Here, researchers have developed a number of different methods, all which lead toward the same end result: a cancer vaccine.

1. Ramp up the immune system
   Dr. Jeffry Molldrem took the tactic of fortifying the body’s immune system by isolating and amplifying PR1, the antigen produced by myeloid leukemia cells. The development of this vaccine was taken up by InvestBio, Inc., and trial results indicating that its effectiveness against three forms of leukemia were released at 49th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology last year.

   Similarly, Dr. Larry Kwak has developed a method of combating lymphoma by harvesting tumor cells from a patient’s lymph node and then fusing them to mouse cells, which act as “antigen factories” to produce large quantities of a patient’s unique cancer-marked antigen. Kwak then returns all of those antigens to the patient’s body with an immune system booster.

2. Make cancer cells look foreign
   Dr. Amy Heimberger led clinical trials that attempt to fight brain cancer by tagging glioblastoma cells with a protein to make them look foreign. This tricks the immune system into “recognizing” them and attacking them as foreign bodies.

3. Turn them into carriers
   Together with researchers at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. William Wierda found a way to turn tumors against themselves. In this technique, tumor blood cells are extracted and then infected with a virus that carries a special gene. When this gene fuses with the blood cell’s DNA, it causes the cell to manufacture a protein that activates the immune system—essentially creating a vaccine out of the tumor cell. “Leukemia cells efficiently stimulate T cells to react against them as well as against nearby leukemia cells that haven’t been infected by the virus,” Wierda says.

Read more about cancer vaccination breakthroughs at Time.com.

As you butter up your corn-on-the-cob on Labor Day, consider this: no matter how many ears you—or any of the other 300 million American picnickers—eat, you will still consume less than 1% of the corn produced in the United States this year. Which means if we’re not eating it as a side dish, it’s being used for a lot of other things. Unfortunately, these things are not improving human health—or the environment.

Corn has become the bumper crop in America. With production leaping from 4 billion bushels/year in 1970 to over 12 billion bushels today, it has become both farmers’ best friend and worst enemy. Planting and caring for a singular crop that is subsidized by the government is simple; however, swapping a farming system by which farmers planted varied crops to prevent pests, disease, and erosion has consequences. Monocrop planting depletes soil of disease-preventing nutrients and microorganisms, in turn prompting farmers to treat their fields with fertilizers. The nitrogen and oxygen molecules from these fertilizers then migrate down to waterways where they prompt algae growth, which kills off marine life.

Essentially, then, we are more-or-less trading fish for beef—a pretty unhealthy trade considering that fish has been proven to be the healthier choice on several accounts:

• Satiety (European Journal of Clinical Nutrition)

• Cancer (Journal of the National Cancer Institute)

• BMI (International Journal of Obesity)

all because of corn. More than half of the corn produced each year goes toward livestock feed. Ironically enough, cows’ and pigs’ natural diet is not corn. As grazing animals, cows and pigs are not physically equipped to digest grain. They naturally feed on grasses that ferment in their rumen (i.e. stomach). On a corn-based diet, they gain weight more quickly, but they are also more susceptible to disease—and so, like crops, must be treated (with antibiotics, not fertilizers).

Never mind corn’s role in high fructose corn syrup, which has ignited controversy over increasing diabetes and obesity rates in America. (See articles from American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, Nutrition Today, and BioEd Online for positions on the debate.) Or its controversial role as a federally endorsed biofuel (see our May blog post and articles in NewScientist and WiredScience).

For now corn may be king. However, with scientists, environmentalists, health advocates, and farmers building their cases, a threat to the monarchy is on the horizon.

Happy Labor Day!

Caster Semenya is an 18-year-old South African who won the women’s 800m at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin in 1:55:45. She entered the competition as female competitor; her coach attests to her gender; and her family swears to it. Yet, the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) has arranged for a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, a psychologist, an internal medicine expert, and a “gender-transgender issues” expert to investigate allegations that Semenya is a man. News reporters attribute the suspicion to her “muscular stature” or her “deep voice,” but ultimately, the controversy boils down to one thing: testosterone.

Testosterone is a steroid hormone that imparts athletic advantage. Males produce 40-60 times more testosterone than females, which is why they can develop considerably more strength, speed, and power. According to BBC News, a urine test showed Semenya’s testosterone levels to be 3 times higher than those of a “normal woman.” If the raised levels don’t mean she’s doping, critics speculate, perhaps they indicate that she’s a man?

In the late 1960s, gender was determined by performing buccal smears: analyzing cells from athletes’ mouths to determine the presence of two X chromosomes. Any individual possessing only one X was assumed to be male. However, the IAAF abandoned this test in the early 1990s because of its unreliable results. For example, the test could not accurately identify individuals with Klinefelter syndrome (XXY genotype), since it would recognize these individuals as female in spite of their male genotype. The test also failed to identify individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome—women who have the XY genotype but outwardly develop into females because they lack the protein receptor that recognizes testosterone.

If individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome (the male genotype) and gonadal dysgenesis (surgically removed sexual organs) are permitted to compete as women, according to IAAF policy, the question is: who deserves to be disqualified? Semenya will undergo tests for

• the XX (female) chromosome pattern,

• the SRY gene (the sex-determining gene on the male chromosome that differentiates males from females during embryo development),

• and ordinary female testosterone levels,

• as well as psychological tests to determine her gender.

Ultimately, the concern is whether she is competing among equals. Yet, is a 6’4” runner equal to a 5’8” runner? As elusive as the question of gender may be, the question of equality may remain even more unanswerable.