The Filtrate Drips Again
By Alan Dove
During Plague Year 1 (2020), I started a more or less weekly column on my blog summarizing science news I’d found interesting in the previous week. After awhile I let it lapse, but now I’m bringing The Filtrate back. Here’s what trickled through my news feeds this time.
Mammoths won’t be afraid of regular mice
The big viral science hit of last week was, of course, the woolly mouse. A company called Colossal Biosciences created the new strain of mice, using a multiplexed version of conventional mouse genetic engineering techniques. The genes they added are similar to ones they think drove the growth of the thick fur coats on woolly mammoths. Colossal’s ultimate goal is to “de-extinct” the mammoth and other long-gone species. While much of the news coverage has been about how darn cute the woolly mice are, it’s also worth reading some of the more critical coverage of Colossal’s overall goals.
Behold the woolly mouse: cute, but what is it fur? Image by Colossal Biosciences.
Idiots in power doing idiotic things
As the dotard-in-chief and his many enablers continue their deliberate campaign to wreck the world’s most powerful democracy, the damage spreads everywhere. For scientists, the news is mixed but trending bad. The District Court for Massachusetts blocked the plan to slash NIH payment of indirect costs on Federal grants, so the nation’s top research universities won’t be bankrupted just yet. However, the idiotic trade war we’ve now initiated for no reason at all will likely cause the cost of lab equipment and supplies to skyrocket soon.
Money isn’t the only thing getting jerked around. After firing hundreds of staff at the US Centers for Disease Control, the administration did an abrupt reversal last week and told many of them to go back to work. Guess what, though? When you tell people they’re fired, they tend to go find new jobs as fast as possible, so a lot of those folks won’t be coming back.
Even those who weren’t subjected to employment whiplash themselves have seen where things are headed. Remember, these are smart people. One high profile example is Francis Collins, famous cancer researcher and former head of the NIH, who just decided this is a good time to punch out.
The answer is 42
Not all of the science is stopping. NASA expects to send another big telescope into orbit, this time to answer the big questions: how did the universe begin, and how did it get the way it is? In other words, they’re looking for the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Don’t tell them, let them work it out on their own.
Jerks have worse citation indices than frauds
Do you cite papers by a researcher who might have faked their results? How about work from someone accused of sexual misconduct? It seems a lot of scientists have made the odd choice to answer “yes” to the first question but “no” to the second. That conclusion comes from an enlightening analysis just published in the journal PLOS, which found that sexual misconduct reduces researchers’ citation rates more than scientific misconduct. While it makes some sense to punish jerks when deciding who to cite in your paper, I don’t understand why anyone would cite work that might be outright wrong. People are weird.
The ones that mother gives you
In the search for better psychiatric drugs, researchers are rediscovering hallucinogens, which have shown some promising results in treating various mental illnesses. However, they’re tough to test. There are the legal hurdles, as most existing hallucinogens are banned or restricted, but there’s also a thorny scientific problem: how do you keep patients in a randomized trial from knowing whether they got the treatment or the placebo control? Most people can tell whether they’ve eaten a plain sugar cube or one dosed with, say, LSD. I mean, unless your morning latte normally makes the White Knight start talking backwards. And if it does, please tell me what coffee shop you go to.