So you've just completed your last assays on physioprofitin signaling in the Namnezian complex. Lo and behold it is qaz-mediated, just like you suspected and the beccans are off the freaking chart. woot! PiT/PlS ratios are within relevant physiological ranges and still this work of art, your labor of love, came through with the experimental goods.
With a hope and a prayer you run your stats....and YES! p < 0.01!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What is the correct way to report your big Result?
[ Please welcome our guest blogger, who identifies as robin, just your average everyday neuropharmacologist. -DM ]
One of the most important yet overlooked tasks of the average pharmacologist is dissolving drugs into solution. Those of you who work with things that don't have to cross the blood-brain barrier probably have a generally easier time dissolving shit than those of us who prefer to study CNS-active compounds. For those of us who play with compounds that are hydrophobic enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, I can testify that those range from fairly easy to major suck to put into an aqueous solution.
sourceI recently introduced a paper on the discriminative stimulus properties of cathinone analog drugs with reference to the recent emergence in the popular media of an analog called 4-methylmethcathinone (4-MMC), mephedrone (2-methylamino-1-p-tolylpropan-1-one), Meow-Meow, MMCAT. The name "plant food" is what 4-MMC is apparently being marketed under in the UK, given that the compound itself is not controlled but it is illegal (I surmise) to sell things as "legal ecstasy" or "legal methamphetamine" or similar. There has been one fatality attributed* to 4-MMC that I can find and a few bits of seized-drug analysis confirming that the stuff is indeed being used.
An early report of a fatality associated with consumption of the drug in Sweden resulted in placement of mephedrone on the controlled list. The followup in the Swedish press shows that the woman was reported to have consumed mephedrone (confirmed post-mortem) and smoked cannabis (no apparent confirmation; alcohol and other narcotics excluded postmortem) and then collapsed. Emergency services were unable to revive her and she died a day and a half later; symptoms of brain swelling, stroke, hyponatremia and hypokalemia were mentioned, as well as a low body temperature of 33 degrees C.
The story has heated up recently in the UK press after the death of two individuals who are, at present, suspected of taking 4-MMC/mephedrone, reportedly in combination with methadone (an opiate) and alcohol. As I mentioned before, a quick scan of PubMed finds little reported on the effects of this compound in animal models or in humans.
Research (source)via Female Science Professor. A recent news bit in the Chronicle of Higher Education details another case in which the alleged three legged stool of Professorial careerdom (teaching, research, service) is revealed to stand only on the one leg- research.
his department's tenure-and-promotion guidelines.. were revised in 2000, shortly after he had received the university's Distinguished Teaching Award and a similar prize from a statewide association of governing boards.
Under the revised criteria, faculty members are given many more points for supervising graduate students than for teaching undergraduate courses. "I can teach an undergraduate course with 44 students and get only three points," Mr. Vable says. "But a faculty member who supervises a graduate student gets 19 points and can be released from course duty. So that totally skewed the algorithm."
After I read the now-infamous paper by I. Kouper, entitled "Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities", I was left in some confusion as to how the author selected 11 blogs to study. I was also curious about what my readers thought of when asked to generate a list of "science blogs" so I asked them. I left the request as general as possible because I was interested in what "science blog" meant as much as in specific examples.
For your entertainment and edification, I tabulated* the results from the 31 answers supplied as of this writing.
sourceMy Google news alert for MDMA, Ecstasy and the like has been turning up references to a cathinone analog called variously 4-methylmethcathinone (4-MMC), mephedrone (2-methylamino-1-p-tolylpropan-1-one), Meow-Meow, MMCAT and a few other things. There has been one fatality attributed* to 4-MMC that I can find and a few bits of seized-drug analysis confirming that the stuff is indeed being used. A quick scan over at PubMed finds little reported on the effects of this compound in animal models or in humans. I did, however, run across an article on other cathinone analog drugs that caught my attention.
The newpaper reports on 4-MMC coming out of the UK, for the most part, are experiencing the usual difficulty in characterizing the subjective properties of an analog of a stimulant class of drugs. This not dissimilar to the case of MDMA and relatives such as MDA, MDEA/MDE which are structurally similar to amphetamine and methamphetamine but convey subtly different subjective properties. This also gives me an opportunity to talk about an animal model used quite a bit in drug abuse studies: The drug-discrimination assay. The paper of interest is the following one.
Cathinone: an investigation of several N-alkyl and methylenedioxy-substituted analogs. Dal Cason TA, Young R, Glennon RA. Pharmacol Biochem Behav. 1997 Dec;58(4):1109-16. (DOI)
We've been talking about grants getting spiked by one outlying, jerk of a Reviewer #3 lately. Here and elsewhere. I have one guiding philosophy when it comes to disappointing grant reviews.
Many of my readers will have already faced the joys of the shorter NIH Grant application. Briefly, the meat of the R01 proposal has now been reduced from 25 to 12 pages and the meat of the R21 from 15 pages to 6. As I observed when the Notice appeared, this is a challenge.
Since I am finally getting serious about trying to write one of these new format grants, I am thinking about how to maximize the information content. One thought that immediately strikes me is....cheat!
I've been meaning to pick up on a comment made by a reader over at writedit's epic thread on NIH paylines, scores and whatall. (If you want to swap war stories and score/IC payline grumbling, that is the hot place in town.) The guy was ticked off about a recent review he received and had a question:
I am an establishe investigator. I subnitted a competing renewal ... I got a score of 40 (37 percentile). I was very shocked and dissapointed to find out that my application had a preliminary score of 2.7 (which would have been fundable) but it seems one negative reviewer carried the day, and convinced others to pull down the score. I have not yet seen the comments, but if the comments have factual errors, especially from the negative errors, can I appeal the review and request a re-review?
Recently, as luck would have it, a loyal reader of the blog submitted the following scores, received on the review of her R01 grant proposal. Under the new scoring procedures in place since last June, these are scores which each reviewer suggests for criteria of Significance, Investigator, Innovation, Approach and Environment. I may have slightly re-ordered specific scores for concealment purposes but this is essentially the flavor.
A recent paper from I. Kouper entitled "Science blogs and public engagement with science: practices, challenges, and opportunities" has been receiving a fair bit of bloggy attention. Of the negative sort. Mostly because the paper purports to report on the state of all science blogging but then cherry picks a few blogs to generate data- which is not actually presented for the most part. Furthermore the paper ends up with a subjective review of blog tone, level and commentary that makes one wonder if the author actually reads blogs at all. It is just that detached from the experience of many of us.
Since this blog was included in the alleged dataset, narcissistically, I felt I had better point out some more flaws in this paper. Let's get the hilarious one out of the way first.
NIGMS has a long-standing commitment to research training and biomedical workforce development. As science, the conduct of research, and workforce needs evolve, we want to be sure that our training and career development activities most effectively meet current needs and anticipate emerging opportunities, and that they contribute to building a highly capable, diverse biomedical research workforce. To this end, we are engaged in a strategic planning process to examine our existing activities and articulate strategies to help us build and sustain the workforce that the nation needs for improving health and global competitiveness.
We are seeking broad input for this planning effort from university and college faculty members and administrators, current and former predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees, industry representatives, representatives of professional and scientific organizations, and other interested parties.
From March 2 to April 21, 2010, you may give us your input on our Web site in response to the series of questions below. These submissions will be completely anonymous.
1. What constitutes "success" in biomedical research training from the perspectives of an individual trainee, an institution, and society?
2. What can NIGMS do to encourage an optimal balance of breadth and depth in research training?
3. What can NIGMS do to encourage an appropriate balance between research productivity and successful outcomes for the mentor's trainees?
4. What can NIGMS do through its training programs to promote and encourage greater diversity in the biomedical research workforce?
5. Recognizing that students have different career goals and interests, should NIGMS encourage greater flexibility in training, and if so, how?
6. What should NIGMS do to ensure that institutions monitor, measure, and continuously improve the quality of their training efforts?
7. Do you have other comments or recommendations regarding NIGMS-sponsored training?
I just received my summary statement for an R15 I submitted in October and found out that I had four reviewers score my proposal. I thought that three reviewers was routine. Would anyone know why a fourth was included?
Thanks for your help.
I had the following response, slightly expanded for this context.
Every now and again I get a request to provide information to an individual who writes for a mainstream media print outlet. Sometimes ones that are focused on the scientific enterprise, sometimes ones that have a regional focus and sometimes the larger, more general national news organizations. The latest one was from Sharon Begley of Newsweek .
The typical request includes some stroking "I'm a big fan of your blog" (yeah, you and the spam commenters, bucko) and a request for a voice interview on some topic of interest that is obviously related to my blogging.
So far, so good.
Even if I do not really understand the fetish with the voice interview over the email exchange. (Oh, ok, yes I do*.)
Then, with various degrees of clumsiness, they work around to the question of my real identity and how they would like to cite that real identity in their article.
No, I don't mean the self-imagined political wag, nor those of a similarly fantastical oppressed ethnic subculture of the US. I mean the kind of (over)educated middle to upper-middle class, progressive liberal occasionally self-avowed skeptic, contrarian and/or scientific white folk.
I've seen the odd social justice action now and again in the US over the past decades. Whether at the local municipal level, the University level or on national TV. African-Americans are typically very well represented even when the issue at hand is not a "black issue" per se. When it comes to the incredible underrepresentative University campus population, it is particularly striking because you will find the black faces that you'd never known were on campus appearing in support of social justice causes.
There is one notable exception and that is the animal-rights campaign. The practitioners of animal rights theology would have you believe they are engaged in a social justice battle akin to many familiar ones. They never seem to look around and ask why their tiny band of followers are so unusually devoid of the black folks.
Perhaps it is because one of their favorite memes is viscerally offensive to African-Americans?
We've been talking about the use of animals in research lately. One thing that always comes up is how animals share some critical capacity with humans. I try to point out in all of this that some of these questions are amenable to investigation. Some of the claims can be supported, nullified or qualified on the basis of existing data. The process of describing or interpreting the data is never simple. And it seems that many people who parrot what seem to be simple claims actually have very little understanding of the evidence on which they rest. I have at least one observation in the archive that points out where not thinking hard about the strength of the evidence can lead to unsupported conclusions being widely disseminated. This post was originally published Feb 25, 2008.
In the midst of World War I, Wolfgang Köhler conducted a famous series of experiments to investigate problem solving ability in chimpanzees. The lasting impression of these experiments, reinforced by just about every introductory Psychology text, was Köhler's assertion that the chimps demonstrated "insightful" learning.
In response to the blog posts of PZ, orac, MarkCC and many others, you did what you do best. You commented. At the home blogs and at the sites of the violent Animal Rights extremists who feel it is acceptable to threaten the children of a man who no longer does the work to which they object.
Some of you were in support of animal research and some were not. But even many of the latter stood up for the civil society of discourse, unfettered by the intimidation of personal threats.
You know this, of course, because you are already engaged in the blogosphere. What you may not see is the gratitude of scientists who work with animals. In the past day I have seen several expressions of gratitude from my scientific friends, peers and colleagues in other venues. They are happy, and in cases overjoyed, to see such public support. Even if many of you are pseudonymous or anonymous. Their joy is a surprised one because it is so rare in their careers to see much in the way of individual support for their research and, more importantly, personal antagonism directed toward the extremist violent fringe of the AR movement. Even as you delight in acting the skeptic, calling out asshats, FWDAOTI and other assorted blogospheric games, know that you have real beneficial impact on the scientists who are just trying to do their jobs, create knowledge and, in many cases, improve human health in ways both small and large. It helps for these individuals to see the personal and individual expressions of outrage and support that you have posted around in various places. It makes them see in a very tangible way that they are not facing the onslaught alone.
You may have noticed a rash of posts around the ScienceBlogs decrying the ARA terrorist extremists who have vowed, again, to target the children of a UCLA neuroscientist. Dario Ringach famously gave up his nonhuman primate research in 2006 because of threats against his family. His participation in last week's dialog held at the UCLA campus apparently induced the extremist attention seekers, angry at having the momentum and PR shift to their slightly more rationalco-travelers, to renew their threats. This is utterly despicable. Utterly.
This would be a great time for people who purport to be non-extremist animal rights advocates or sympathizers to do some deep soul searching. Soul searching that does not just easily write off the terrorists as a crazy fringe but asks penetrating questions about the nature of their own beliefs.
I cannot help you with this difficult work but I noticed something a little odd and new to me popping up in comment threads following the posts linked above. It has to do with the concept of sentience.
