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Who would you choose as Britain's science envoys?

Frank Norman (@franknorman) asks an interesting question this morning on Twitter. Three senior scientists have just been appointed as US "science envoys" by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State.

They are Elias Zerhouni, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health, Bruce Alberts, the editor-in-chief of the journal Science, and Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1999.

Who, Frank asks, would you choose as Britain's three science envoys? My own picks after the jump.

Time to take gene therapy seriously

Gene therapy has become rather an unfashionable branch of medicine. Though heavily hyped in the early 1990s as the answer to many genetic diseases, it has largely failed to live up to its promises. The scientific challenges of conveying replacement genes into the body to correct deleterious mutations have prevented it from having an impact on more than a handful of conditions. And it has been beset by safety problems.

The death of Jesse Gelsinger during a clinical trial in 1999, following a massive immune response to an adenovirus vector, was a signficant setback, not least because a US Food and Drug Administration investigation found that University of Pennsylvania scientists had breached rules and should have excluded him from their study. Then, in 2003, fresh safety concerns emerged about one of the most promising applications of gene therapy to date.

An Anglo-French team had had significant success using gene therapy to treat X-linked Severe Combined Immune Deficiency (X-SCID). Several of the children who had apparently been cured, however, were then found to have developed leukaemia, almost certainly as a direct result of the way the gene vector incorporated itself into their genomes. Pharmaceutical companies have in recent years curtailed their funding of the field, and many scientists have grown sceptical that it will ever deliver much.

As a thoughtful Nature editorial argued last week, however, gene therapy deserves a second chance. New vectors and techniques have started to resolve some of the safety issues that once held it back, and enterprising scientists are now using it creatively to treat conditions that aren't obviously tractable in any other way.

Unflinching Alzheimer's account wins top medicine writing prize

 

When her mother-in-law Nancy was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Andrea Gillies and her family took the decision to move to a remote peninsula in northern Scotland to a house with space to accommodate Nancy and her elderly husband. Gillies kept an account of her experiences, not shying away from the harsh reality of the disease, nor from the moments of unexpected humour it brought.

The resulting book, The Keeper, was yesterday awarded the 2009 Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Jo Brand, the comedian and a former psychiatric nurse who chaired the judging panel described the book as “darkly comic and down to earth”. “The book is unflinching in its honesty and the account of the disease itself draws the reader in,” she said. “The judges found it compelling.”

Vintage X-ray cartoons

Following on from the X-ray machine being voted the most important invention in the history of science in a Science Museum poll, here are a few Punch cartoons from the time. X-rays had clearly captured popular imagination... although understanding of how they work may have lagged behind slightly.  

Malcolm Gladwell: why the NHS computer programme is like Paul Cezanne

 

A chat with Malcolm Gladwell the other day has thrown an interesting across-the-pond perspective on the malfunctioning relationship between the NHS and information technology. Gladwell believes that many of the problems encountered by the health services IT programme (£12.4 billion and counting, before you ask) may actually make for a better service.

Gladwell has taken an interest in the IT project — the linking up of personal care records, hospitals, GPs, pharmacists et al into and integrated, computerised whole — because of its intersection between the public and innovation.

He has two simple categories for such relationships, “special innovation” and “experimental problem”... and no prizes for guessing where the UK’s decade of computer wrestling fits. But it’s no bad thing, says Gladwell, drawing up the interesting comparison with the artistic development of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne. Picasso was the great radical, revolutionary and innovator, churning out dramatic ideas that jumped into the unknown. Cezanne may have been a radical too, but his was a slow process of refinement, a process of trial and error.

The NHS is its Cezanne stage now, he believes...

The David Nutt affair: Charles Clarke's history of the ACMD

My colleague Hattie Garlick has an illuminating post over at Comment Central, in which she's reprinted in full an email circulated by Charles Clarke, the former Home Secretary.

Mr Clarke has always struck me as one of the politicians who's most comfortable with science, and his take on the situation is extremely interesting. He shows how successive Home Secretaries have marginalised the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs. The text follows after the jump here.

David Nutt's controversial lecture conformed to government guidelines

An interesting development in the row over the sacking of Professor David Nutt as the government's chief drugs adviser has emerged this afternoon. It appears that the lecture that provoked Alan Johnson to dismiss him (and the pamphlet in which it was subsequently published) conformed to the Government's own code of practice for scientific advisers.

The Code of Practice for Scientific Advisory Committees, as revised in 2007, sets out the ground rules for members and chairs. It states that committee rules should not normally preclude advisers from speaking out about their areas of expertise, so long as they do so in their personal capacity, and do not claim to be representing their panels. The key section is paragraph 106:

“Rules of conduct need not affect a member’s freedom to represent his or her field of expertise in a personal capacity. The committee's rules however should generally oblige members to make clear when they are not speaking in their capacity as committee members."

The comments from Professor Nutt that angered Mr Johnson were made in July in the Eve Saville lecture at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College, London, which was published as a pamphlet last week. And Richard Garside, the centre's director, has today written to the Home Secretary to point out that both the lecture and the pamphlet made it perfectly clear that Professor Nutt was speaking in his capacity as Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College, London, not as chairman of the ACMD. Garside writes:

"I have to conclude that the public confusion between Professor Nutt’s academic role and his chairmanship of the ACMD has been sowed by the Home Office, not by Professor Nutt nor by the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies."

The full letter follows after the jump.

The David Nutt affair: Lord Drayson responds to my suggestions

 In my commentary for this morning's paper about the sacking of David Nutt, I made two suggestions about how the Government might go about repairing the damage it has caused to its reputation in the scientific community.

It should start, I said, by endorsing two recommendations made by the Commons Science and Technology Committee, in its July report, Putting Science and Engineering at the Heart of Government Policy:

An independent media office serving all of the Government’s advisory panels would remedy the ridiculous situation where the Home Office was tasked with communicating scientific advice it was keen to undermine.

Departmental chief scientists, too, should be required to report and explain all instances where expert advice has been sought but not followed. Both measures would make ministers think twice before commissioning opinions they have no intention of heeding and then shooting the messenger.

I tweeted the column to Lord Drayson, the Science and Innovation Minister (@lorddrayson), last night, and he's this morning come back with a response:

"They are very helpful ideas, thank you. I am v interested in positive solutions to this complex problem."

It's good to know that Lord Drayson is planning to use this affair as an opportunity to raise the much wider question of how science advice is best used by government. But it's also worrying that Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, didn't think it worth consulting the Science Minister or the Chief Scientific Adviser, John Beddington, before deciding to dismiss Professor Nutt. Either could have warned him of the furious response he could expect from scientists.

The Respiragene genetic test for smokers: the company sets out its evidence

GUEST POST BY BERWYN CLARKE

A week ago, Hannah wrote a piece (and I wrote a commentary) about Respiragene -- a new test that claims to assess smokers' genetic risk of developing lung cancer. We invited Berwyn Clarke, chief scientific officer of Lab 21 Limited, which markets the test, to address the scientific criticisms of his product that we featured.

Controversy about the merits of genetic testing to gauge risk of disease is understandable. It is a new, fast-developing area. The debate, however, can generate more heat than light, as I found this week after The Times reported on Respiragene, a new test that measures individual smokers' predisposition to lung cancer, which Lab21 now offers in Britain.

The Respiragene test is based on new technology, but it is intended to trigger an old response: the will to quit smoking. I believe genetic testing can play an important role in helping prevent smoking-related lung disease.

Battle of Ideas: a matter of choice

GUEST POST FROM ELLIE LEE

Those of us who are pro-choice know how much it matters that women can access free and easily available contraception and abortion. Over many years this has brought us into often passionate conflict with so-called 'pro-life' movements that seek to restrict the ability of women to avoid or end pregnancies.

That conflict still exists but things have got a little more complicated. For those of us who are pro-choice because we believe in 'decisional autonomy' - people's freedom to make decisions in the realm of social life that we commonly call 'intimate' or 'private' - the battle for reproductive choice has taken a new turn.

Attacks on decisional autonomy come from new quarters today. The Malthusian project that seeks to influence women to limit their fertility in the interests of a 'greater good' has a long history. It now takes the form of environmentalists who urge women to plan their families and limit family size. So those who are pro-choice now find themselves with unexpected bedfellows. Yet from a perspective that values freedom of choice in private, intimate life, there is an inescapable similarity between these environmentalist crusaders, who aim to influence women to use contraception (and abortion), and those who push women to do the opposite. Just like 'pro-lifers', campaign groups such as the Optimum Population Trust, who urge women to sign a pledge to help save the planet and 'stop at two', seek to persuade us that we should plan, found and grow our families according to a moral imperative far more pressing than what we may feel is right for us.