Doing science outside of science these days is far from easy or simple. Just consider the fact that if you're not part of a university, it is very hard to get your hands on the research papers that are the lifeblood of knowledge exchange. "I'm part of the paywalled 99 percent, the masses who don't actually get access to all these great journals," says Perlstein."
Scenes from the Postdocalypse
Ethan Perlstein was a young, bright Ph.D. from Harvard. Then he hit the academic job market.
By Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney
Mother Jones
Mar. 28, 2014
How do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you'll probably hear some version of the following: get a bachelor's of science degree, work in a lab, get into a Ph.D. program, publish some papers, get a good postdoctoral position, publish some more papers, and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It's a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start families, and contribute to their 401(k) plans.
And then comes the academic job market. According to Brandeis University biochemist Gregory Petsko, who recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on the postdoctoral experience in the United States, less than 20 percent of aspiring postdocs today get highly coveted jobs in academia. That's less than 1 in 5. Naturally, many more end up in industry, in government, and in many other sectors—but not the one they were trained for or probably hoping for. "We're fond of saying that we should prepare people for alternative careers," explains Pesko, "without realizing that we're the alternative career."
Ethan Perlstein was one of these postdocs—before he decided he'd had enough. He had gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard under Stuart Schreiber, the legendary chemist, and then gone on to a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Princeton. He'd published in top journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Genetics. He'd put in 13 years. But that "came to a close at the end of 2012," says Perlstein on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, "when I encountered what I have been calling the postdocalypse, which is this pretty bad job market for professionally trained Ph.Ds—life scientists, in particular." After two years of searching for an assistant professorship, going up against an army of highly qualified, job-hungry scientists, he gave up.
But it wasn't just the competition for jobs that deterred Perlstein. Once you land a tenure-track job, you often have to get a big government grant in order to actually get tenure. And those grants are becoming ever more competitive, meaning that young faculty members usually need to apply multiple times before securing one. That is, if they actually do get one before the university that employs them loses patience.
"I guess I just thought, 'Well, I don't want to keep waiting any more,'" recalls Perlstein. "At the time I was 33, and thought, 'Well, I'm also seeing the statistic that says that the average age at which an independent biomedical research gets their first big grant from the NIH is 43 or 42.' And I just thought, 'Another 10 years of just waiting around for my turn in line?'"
You've probably heard the claim that the United States needs to produce more scientists, like Perlstein, to remain competitive with up-and-coming science powerhouses like India and China. It is a familiar litany whenever we hear laments about American science and its disturbing habit of resting on its laurels. But what you rarely hear in this argument is the fact that we don't have nearly enough jobs to put to work the scientists we currently have. "U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings," writes Harvard researcher Michael Teitelbaum, "the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more."
This situation is not new. Eight years ago, in 2006, George W. Bush's National Institutes of Health director, Elias Zerhouni, lamented that by denying young scientists the opportunity to try out their ideas, we're in effect "eat[ing] our seed corn," likening the situation to farmers who fail to prepare for the future. And that was before budget fights and sequestration dealt a further blow to the science funding stream that heavily influences whether our country can provide opportunities for its talented young researchers.
The life sciences, the field in which Perlstein works, are a case in point—and arguably the most challenging arena of all. According to the National Science Foundation's Survey of Doctorate Recipients, between the years 1993 and 2010, the number of US biomedical scientists with Ph.Ds rose from 105,000 to 180,000, even as the percentage employed in academia decreased from 58 percent to 51 percent, and the number holding tenured or tenure-track academic jobs decreased from 35 percent to 26 percent. That, in a nutshell, is the postdocalpyse. (Note that the vast majority of these Ph.Ds do find jobs somewhere, but fewer and fewer find the sort of academic jobs for which the postdoctoral experience is designed to train them.)
The ultimate cause? Funding. "Obama put out the latest 2015 budget for NIH—flat again. It's been $30 billion ever since I basically entered grad school," says Perlstein. "I was in college in the late '90s, when the NIH budget was doubling. So I remember someone telling me for the first time, 'They pay you to go to graduate school.'" The NIH itself recognizes that its own budget largely determines how many Ph.D. students in life sciences there are, because these students are supported by grants: training grants, fellowships, and research grants.
A doubling of the NIH budget from 1998 to 2003 created dramatic growth in the biomedical science field—positions, infrastructure, postdocs, and everything else. But that set many people up for a fall. As Science magazine reported in 2007, the doubling "provoked a massive expansion in biomedical research, and expectations of federal support surged to a level that could not be sustained when the budget stopped growing. The crash is hitting labs, careers, and the psyches of scientists with a vengeance." How did that affect postdocs? You can see as much in this NIH figure, showing that as the agency's budget doubled, the length of time spent as a postdoc decreased, but once the doubling ended, it shot up:
National Institutes of Health
That's right: The postdocalypse is partly the result of science funding policies put in place by our legislators, who love science until they don't any more, who double budgets and then slow or freeze them.
So what do the more than 80 percent of postdocs who leave academia do? Some get jobs in industry, with large pharmaceutical companies or engineering firms. Some get MBAs or law degrees and use their scientific training to carve out a niche in a different industry. Some teach. Some write. Some few remain unemployed.
Perlstein did something radically different—something gutsy and surprising that has garnered him recent profiles in the Wall Street Journal and Science Careers. He decided to break from tradition and forge a new path: build, fund, and run his own independent science lab. To become an "indie scientist." To in effect hack the scientific system, work within it yet outside of it, and support himself through crowdfunding, a compelling social-media presence, and, of course, good ideas.
He's not just building a biotech startup or monetizing some scientific finding. He is using alternative revenue sources to fund basic research, hearkening back to the 19th century, when citizen-scientists usually had family money, a rich patron or a day job.
Doing science outside of science these days is far from easy or simple. Just consider the fact that if you're not part of a university, it is very hard to get your hands on the research papers that are the lifeblood of knowledge exchange. "I'm part of the paywalled 99 percent, the masses who don't actually get access to all these great journals," says Perlstein.
Then there's the growing costs of technology, with most scientific endeavors relying on very expensive equipment. A university department might be able to purchase a multimillion-dollar MRI machine, for example. But it's a lot harder for an independent scientist to make that investment.
But Perstein has figured out a way to make it work. His independent research focuses on so-called "orphan diseases," which the FDA defines as conditions that afflict fewer than 200,000 people in the United States. The NIH estimates that there are more than 6,800 rare diseases, which in aggregate affect more than 25 million Americans. Perlstein's focus on orphan diseases satisfies his passion for basic science—giving him the opportunity to make long-lasting contributions to our understanding of our bodies—while also having a clear application that makes the work fundable. You might think that biotech and pharmaceutical companies would have little incentive to develop drugs for these diseases because the market is small compared to ailments than affect millions of people, like diabetes or Alzheimer's. But orphan diseases have other incentives for investors: premium drug pricing, protection from competition, and expedited development timelines.
And then, there are the rich patrons who want to see them cured. Perlstein now has to actively court them. Foundations or wealthy families with a stake in finding a rare-disease treatment are increasingly becoming important funders of research. Perhaps the best example is the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, which committed $75 million dollars to the development of an innovative new CF treatment approved in 2012.
"I want to take the best elements of academia, the best elements of industry, try to make a business model that is sustainable, and then push forwards toward a real scientific objective," says Perlsten. "I call it a rare disease moon shot."
To do his work, Perlstein raises money through crowdfunding sites like Experiment.com, and rents his own lab space in a San Francisco incubator called QB3, which offers the "biotech equivalent of garages: small spaces for entrepreneurs to lay the foundations for companies that may spearhead new industries." Organizations like QB3 are now partnering with major research universities to create innovation hubs. In these hubs, you can rent bench space or share costs of expensive equipment with other independent scientists or academics, without having to make multimillion-dollar investments yourself. This strategy reduces waste—not every lab needs an expensive MRI machine. If you can simply rent some time on a machine to meet your needs, science becomes much cheaper.
So is Perlstein an anomaly, or is he the new face of science? Maybe he'll succeed as an indie scientist, and maybe he won't. It's hard not to cheer for him. But at the same time, perhaps the most resounding lesson is to lament a system that is forcing some of today's best scientific minds out into the cold.
To listen to the full Inquiring Minds interview with Ethan Perlstein, you can stream below:
This episode of Inquiring Minds, a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and best-selling author Chris Mooney, also features a story about the upcoming release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report on global warming impacts, and a discussion about the difficult question of when screening for disease conditions is (and isn't) a good idea.
To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher and on Swell. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also recently singled out as one of the "Best of 2013" on iTunes—you can learn more here.
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Lowering urates reduces kidney disease
Urate-Lowering Cuts Complications From Gout
Alice Goodman
Medscape
November 08, 2013
SAN DIEGO — Patients with gout who remain on urate-lowering therapy are less likely to develop kidney damage leading to chronic kidney disease than untreated patients, according to results from a large study.
There was an economic incentive to conduct this study, said lead investigator Gerald Levy, MD, a rheumatologist from Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in Downey, California. "Gout has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. With it, associated costs — including office visits, urgent care, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations — have gone up to about $1 billion per year."
Kaiser Permanente of Southern California covers 3.6 million people. "This is a big pile of patients," Dr. Levy told reporters attending a news conference here at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 2013 Annual Meeting.
"A number of studies show that people with renal disease can develop hyperuricemia, and some will also develop gout. We wanted to see if reversing uricemia would have an impact on renal disease," he explained.
Investigators identified 111,992 patients with serum uric acid levels above 7 mg/dL in the Kaiser Permanente database.
Of these, 16,186 had been tested for serum uric acid levels and glomerular filtration rates at least once in the 6 months prior to study entry and at least once during the follow-up period.
All of these patients were followed for 36 months from the first documented high serum uric acid level. Patients were grouped into categories: never treated with urate-lowering therapy (n = 11,192), on urate-lowering therapy less than 80% of the time (n = 3902), and on urate-lowering therapy more than 80% of the time (n = 1092).
Almost all of the patients receiving treatment were also on allopurinol (98.3%).
"Achieving serum uric acid below 6 mg/dL — as per ACR guidelines — was protective and associated with a 37% improvement in renal outcomes," Dr. Levy said. "These patients represent the real world."
Table. Effect of Urate-Lowering Therapy on Serum Uric Acid
Treatment Hazard Ratio 95% Confidence Interval P Value
Less than 80% of the time 1.27 1.05–1.55 .01
More than 80% of the time 1.08 0.76–1.52 .68
Serum uric acid at goal 0.63 0.50–0.78 <.0001
Patients taking urate-lowering therapy more than 80% of the time were older, sicker, and more likely to have a diagnosis of gout. They also initiated therapy earlier than patients in the other 2 groups.
Worse outcome was associated with age, being female, hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, previous hospitalizations, higher serum uric acid level at entry, and rheumatoid arthritis. There was no difference in the number of deaths in the 3 groups.
A limitation of this study is that it was observational and retrospective, and some data points were missing, noted Dr. Levy.
"The next group of studies will assess whether we can actually improve renal function by lowering serum urate levels. We need to demonstrate this and see how long it takes to show improvement," he said. "We found changes in 36 months, and we believe these changes take place early. If we can prevent progression to chronic kidney disease and dialysis, this would have tremendous cost savings."
News conference moderator, Christie Bartels, MD, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, noted that "the data for urate-lowering therapy in hyperuricemia are compelling, but we still need a prospective randomized controlled trial. The study findings are a plug for ACR guidelines for gout therapy, because many patients do not get to goal," she said.
Rheumatologists need to give patients a reason to stay on medications, Dr. Bartels added, and the fact that urate-lowering therapy might prevent a gout attack and preserve the kidneys could be that reason. " This is especially important in gout patients who present with kidney problems initially," she noted.
Dr. Levy and Dr. Bartels have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
ACR 2013 Annual Meeting: Abstract 857. Presented October 27, 2013.
Alice Goodman
Medscape
November 08, 2013
SAN DIEGO — Patients with gout who remain on urate-lowering therapy are less likely to develop kidney damage leading to chronic kidney disease than untreated patients, according to results from a large study.
There was an economic incentive to conduct this study, said lead investigator Gerald Levy, MD, a rheumatologist from Kaiser Permanente Medical Group in Downey, California. "Gout has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. With it, associated costs — including office visits, urgent care, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations — have gone up to about $1 billion per year."
Kaiser Permanente of Southern California covers 3.6 million people. "This is a big pile of patients," Dr. Levy told reporters attending a news conference here at the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) 2013 Annual Meeting.
"A number of studies show that people with renal disease can develop hyperuricemia, and some will also develop gout. We wanted to see if reversing uricemia would have an impact on renal disease," he explained.
Investigators identified 111,992 patients with serum uric acid levels above 7 mg/dL in the Kaiser Permanente database.
Of these, 16,186 had been tested for serum uric acid levels and glomerular filtration rates at least once in the 6 months prior to study entry and at least once during the follow-up period.
All of these patients were followed for 36 months from the first documented high serum uric acid level. Patients were grouped into categories: never treated with urate-lowering therapy (n = 11,192), on urate-lowering therapy less than 80% of the time (n = 3902), and on urate-lowering therapy more than 80% of the time (n = 1092).
Almost all of the patients receiving treatment were also on allopurinol (98.3%).
"Achieving serum uric acid below 6 mg/dL — as per ACR guidelines — was protective and associated with a 37% improvement in renal outcomes," Dr. Levy said. "These patients represent the real world."
Table. Effect of Urate-Lowering Therapy on Serum Uric Acid
Treatment Hazard Ratio 95% Confidence Interval P Value
Less than 80% of the time 1.27 1.05–1.55 .01
More than 80% of the time 1.08 0.76–1.52 .68
Serum uric acid at goal 0.63 0.50–0.78 <.0001
Patients taking urate-lowering therapy more than 80% of the time were older, sicker, and more likely to have a diagnosis of gout. They also initiated therapy earlier than patients in the other 2 groups.
Worse outcome was associated with age, being female, hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, previous hospitalizations, higher serum uric acid level at entry, and rheumatoid arthritis. There was no difference in the number of deaths in the 3 groups.
A limitation of this study is that it was observational and retrospective, and some data points were missing, noted Dr. Levy.
"The next group of studies will assess whether we can actually improve renal function by lowering serum urate levels. We need to demonstrate this and see how long it takes to show improvement," he said. "We found changes in 36 months, and we believe these changes take place early. If we can prevent progression to chronic kidney disease and dialysis, this would have tremendous cost savings."
News conference moderator, Christie Bartels, MD, from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, noted that "the data for urate-lowering therapy in hyperuricemia are compelling, but we still need a prospective randomized controlled trial. The study findings are a plug for ACR guidelines for gout therapy, because many patients do not get to goal," she said.
Rheumatologists need to give patients a reason to stay on medications, Dr. Bartels added, and the fact that urate-lowering therapy might prevent a gout attack and preserve the kidneys could be that reason. " This is especially important in gout patients who present with kidney problems initially," she noted.
Dr. Levy and Dr. Bartels have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
ACR 2013 Annual Meeting: Abstract 857. Presented October 27, 2013.
Sunday, December 2, 2012
An American James Bond and a killer bag lady--and doctors from Stanford and U W
I recommend clicking on the title of the article below to read the entire story. It's too amazing to describe in a nutshell, and it is much longer than the clips I've provided. Along with evil doctors, it involves Ronald Reagan's CIA director William Casey, a young Chuck Schumer as investigator, and the remarkable career of a suave banker from Transylvania. It even involves the company that bankrolls Glenn Beck.
James Bond and the killer bag lady
New clues and a powerful Wall St. skeptic challenge the official story of CIA financier Nick Deak's brutal murder
BY MARK AMES AND ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
Salon.com
DEC 2, 2012
On the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera. Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with the firm’s 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak.
The 44-year-old drifter’s name was Lois Lang...
New revelations about Lois Lang’s transformation from homecoming queen to homeless killer provide excellent grist for substantive speculation, if not the basis for officially reopening the Deak case.
A standout college athlete with an M.A. from the University of Illinois, Lang married in the mid-’60s and took a job coaching the University of California-Santa Barbara women’s tennis and fencing teams. An old U.C.-Santa Barbara yearbook shows coach Lang standing tall in a team photo. It was around this time that she began losing her mind, seeing “fakes” all around her, strangers whom she accused of pretending to be family members, her husband and, at an open-casket funeral, her mother’s corpse.
In 1970, the university declined to renew her coaching contract. Lang and her husband soon divorced. Her life quickly became a blur. Lang complained of “amnesia” and said that her ex-husband’s business partner moved her into an apartment in Mountain View, Calif., where she lived on “grants” and “took flying lessons.” (Moffett Field Naval Base and NASA’s Ames Research Center are located there). She told psychiatrists in 1985 that this business partner, or his “fakes,” took her to Deak’s offices at 29 Broadway in 1971. She said that “friends” taught her marksmanship at firing ranges. In August 1975, records show that Lang was discovered naked and catatonic in a Santa Clara motel room. (Neither Lang’s ex-husband nor his “business partner” could be located. Lang, who is imprisoned at a federal facility two hours north of New York City, did not respond to interview requests.)
Police responding to the motel room took Lang to nearby Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. For the next month, she was put under the care of Dr. Frederick Melges, a psychiatrist associated with the Stanford Research Institute. One of Dr. Melges’ main areas of research: drug-aided hypnosis. A few years after Lang was put in Melges’ care, the New York Times exposed the Stanford Research Institute as a center for CIA research into “brain-washing” and “mind-control” experiments in which unwitting subjects were dosed with hallucinogenic drugs and subjected to hypnosis. Melges, who died in 1988, is today remembered in the field for his research on the relationship between perceptions of time and mental illness.
Congressional hearings subsequently uncovered a large network of top-secret CIA-funded psychological warfare programs grouped loosely under the project name MK-ULTRA. These programs today sound like absurd cloak-and-dagger relics of “Twilight Zone”-inflected Cold War hysteria. But the people running these programs, which continued until at least 1979, were often leading researchers backed by the U.S. government. Enormous resources were committed to the study of how human behavior might be controlled for the purpose of interrogation and the creation of “programmed” assassins and couriers. In a detailed roundup of MK-ULRA-related operations, Psychology Today explained that the CIA “conducted or sponsored at least 419 secret drug-testing projects” at “86 United States and Canadian hospitals, prisons, universities, and military installations,” and that “by the agency’s own admission, many [experimental subjects] were ‘unwitting’.”
The Stanford Research Institute received CIA funding, and Dr. Melges published work about using drugs and hypnosis to create “disassociative states,” i.e., induced schizophrenia. One of Melges’ partners on these experiments was a doctor named Leo E. Hollister, who first dosed Ken Kesey with LSD as part of an Army experiment in 1960. He later admitted to author John Marks that he conducted drug research for the CIA. Marks’ 1979 book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” contains numerous such revelations about other government researchers.
In other words, the doctor who cared for Lang in Santa Clara was a senior figure at one of the CIA’s top institutional grantees. He worked side-by-side with a self-identified CIA collaborator, and conducted research into the kind of drug-induced behavior modification that the agency is known to have funded.
Following her release from Melges’ care, Lang began a long period as a drifter, leaving behind a record typical of such a life: petty crimes, arrests, stints in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Her only known job was at the once famously mobbed-up Harrah’s casino on the Nevada-California border (where Frank Sinatra’s son was kidnapped in 1963). By the early 1980s, Lang drifted north to her birthplace and spent her last free years lurking around the University of Washington campus wearing a feathered Robin Hood cap. Occasionally she was arrested and sent to one of the nearby mental hospitals before making her way back again. A local police officer told the New York Times after her arrest in 1985 that Lang “usually had money,” despite roaming “the [university] campus in unkempt clothes, usually wearing a green felt Tyrolean-style hat.” Once the police found more than $800 in her possession.
As with Stanford, the university employed a military-linked behavioral psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Dudley, who later became infamous for carrying out experiments in behavior modification. Dudley taught there from the 1960s through the early 1990s, and also worked at nearby mental institutions where Lang was periodically committed. The landmark lawsuit that ended Dudley’s career revealed that Dudley’s hobby was taking patients brought to him for lesser mental illnesses, pumping them full of drugs, hypnotizing them, and trying to turn them into killers.
We know this thanks to a suit brought by the family of Stephen Drummond, who entered Dudley’s care in 1989 for autism treatment. He was returned to his family in 1992 suffering from severe catatonia. According to lawsuit testimony, Dudley shot Drummond up with sodium amytal and hypnotized him with the intention of “erasing” a portion of his brain and turning him into an assassin. When Drummond’s mother confronted Dudley, the mad scientist threatened to have her killed, claiming he worked for the CIA. Dudley was arrested soon after the confrontation in a local hotel where he had shacked up to “treat” a suicidal 15-year-old drifter. Dudley had given the boy sodium amytal and several other drugs, hypnotized him, and convinced him that he was part of a secret army of assassins. Police were called in when the boy threatened hotel staff with a .44 caliber handgun. Not long after, Dudley died in state custody and his estate was forced to pay the largest psychotherapy negligence lawsuit in history. During the trial, it emerged that Dudley had possibly subjected hundreds of victims to similar experiments. Lang was not mentioned...
James Bond and the killer bag lady
New clues and a powerful Wall St. skeptic challenge the official story of CIA financier Nick Deak's brutal murder
BY MARK AMES AND ALEXANDER ZAITCHIK
Salon.com
DEC 2, 2012
On the morning of Nov. 19, 1985, a wild-eyed and disheveled homeless woman entered the reception room at the legendary Wall Street firm of Deak-Perera. Carrying a backpack with an aluminum baseball bat sticking out of the top, her face partially hidden by shocks of greasy, gray-streaked hair falling out from under a wool cap, she demanded to speak with the firm’s 80-year-old founder and president, Nicholas Deak.
The 44-year-old drifter’s name was Lois Lang...
New revelations about Lois Lang’s transformation from homecoming queen to homeless killer provide excellent grist for substantive speculation, if not the basis for officially reopening the Deak case.
A standout college athlete with an M.A. from the University of Illinois, Lang married in the mid-’60s and took a job coaching the University of California-Santa Barbara women’s tennis and fencing teams. An old U.C.-Santa Barbara yearbook shows coach Lang standing tall in a team photo. It was around this time that she began losing her mind, seeing “fakes” all around her, strangers whom she accused of pretending to be family members, her husband and, at an open-casket funeral, her mother’s corpse.
In 1970, the university declined to renew her coaching contract. Lang and her husband soon divorced. Her life quickly became a blur. Lang complained of “amnesia” and said that her ex-husband’s business partner moved her into an apartment in Mountain View, Calif., where she lived on “grants” and “took flying lessons.” (Moffett Field Naval Base and NASA’s Ames Research Center are located there). She told psychiatrists in 1985 that this business partner, or his “fakes,” took her to Deak’s offices at 29 Broadway in 1971. She said that “friends” taught her marksmanship at firing ranges. In August 1975, records show that Lang was discovered naked and catatonic in a Santa Clara motel room. (Neither Lang’s ex-husband nor his “business partner” could be located. Lang, who is imprisoned at a federal facility two hours north of New York City, did not respond to interview requests.)
Police responding to the motel room took Lang to nearby Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. For the next month, she was put under the care of Dr. Frederick Melges, a psychiatrist associated with the Stanford Research Institute. One of Dr. Melges’ main areas of research: drug-aided hypnosis. A few years after Lang was put in Melges’ care, the New York Times exposed the Stanford Research Institute as a center for CIA research into “brain-washing” and “mind-control” experiments in which unwitting subjects were dosed with hallucinogenic drugs and subjected to hypnosis. Melges, who died in 1988, is today remembered in the field for his research on the relationship between perceptions of time and mental illness.
Congressional hearings subsequently uncovered a large network of top-secret CIA-funded psychological warfare programs grouped loosely under the project name MK-ULTRA. These programs today sound like absurd cloak-and-dagger relics of “Twilight Zone”-inflected Cold War hysteria. But the people running these programs, which continued until at least 1979, were often leading researchers backed by the U.S. government. Enormous resources were committed to the study of how human behavior might be controlled for the purpose of interrogation and the creation of “programmed” assassins and couriers. In a detailed roundup of MK-ULRA-related operations, Psychology Today explained that the CIA “conducted or sponsored at least 419 secret drug-testing projects” at “86 United States and Canadian hospitals, prisons, universities, and military installations,” and that “by the agency’s own admission, many [experimental subjects] were ‘unwitting’.”
The Stanford Research Institute received CIA funding, and Dr. Melges published work about using drugs and hypnosis to create “disassociative states,” i.e., induced schizophrenia. One of Melges’ partners on these experiments was a doctor named Leo E. Hollister, who first dosed Ken Kesey with LSD as part of an Army experiment in 1960. He later admitted to author John Marks that he conducted drug research for the CIA. Marks’ 1979 book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” contains numerous such revelations about other government researchers.
In other words, the doctor who cared for Lang in Santa Clara was a senior figure at one of the CIA’s top institutional grantees. He worked side-by-side with a self-identified CIA collaborator, and conducted research into the kind of drug-induced behavior modification that the agency is known to have funded.
Following her release from Melges’ care, Lang began a long period as a drifter, leaving behind a record typical of such a life: petty crimes, arrests, stints in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Her only known job was at the once famously mobbed-up Harrah’s casino on the Nevada-California border (where Frank Sinatra’s son was kidnapped in 1963). By the early 1980s, Lang drifted north to her birthplace and spent her last free years lurking around the University of Washington campus wearing a feathered Robin Hood cap. Occasionally she was arrested and sent to one of the nearby mental hospitals before making her way back again. A local police officer told the New York Times after her arrest in 1985 that Lang “usually had money,” despite roaming “the [university] campus in unkempt clothes, usually wearing a green felt Tyrolean-style hat.” Once the police found more than $800 in her possession.
As with Stanford, the university employed a military-linked behavioral psychiatrist, Dr. Donald Dudley, who later became infamous for carrying out experiments in behavior modification. Dudley taught there from the 1960s through the early 1990s, and also worked at nearby mental institutions where Lang was periodically committed. The landmark lawsuit that ended Dudley’s career revealed that Dudley’s hobby was taking patients brought to him for lesser mental illnesses, pumping them full of drugs, hypnotizing them, and trying to turn them into killers.
We know this thanks to a suit brought by the family of Stephen Drummond, who entered Dudley’s care in 1989 for autism treatment. He was returned to his family in 1992 suffering from severe catatonia. According to lawsuit testimony, Dudley shot Drummond up with sodium amytal and hypnotized him with the intention of “erasing” a portion of his brain and turning him into an assassin. When Drummond’s mother confronted Dudley, the mad scientist threatened to have her killed, claiming he worked for the CIA. Dudley was arrested soon after the confrontation in a local hotel where he had shacked up to “treat” a suicidal 15-year-old drifter. Dudley had given the boy sodium amytal and several other drugs, hypnotized him, and convinced him that he was part of a secret army of assassins. Police were called in when the boy threatened hotel staff with a .44 caliber handgun. Not long after, Dudley died in state custody and his estate was forced to pay the largest psychotherapy negligence lawsuit in history. During the trial, it emerged that Dudley had possibly subjected hundreds of victims to similar experiments. Lang was not mentioned...
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Surgeons conducting clinical trials to test Medtronic Inc bone-growth failed to report serious complications
Surgeons in Medtronic trials omitted results: report
Jun 28, 2011
(Reuters) - Surgeons conducting clinical trials to test a Medtronic Inc bone-growth protein used in spine surgery, some of whom got at least $62 million from the company, failed to report serious complications in their research papers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Fifteen of the surgeons got at least $62 million from the company over the past decade, the paper said, citing an analysis of Medtronic documents and disclosures on the company's website.
A new study in the Spine Journal said serious complications including cancer, sterility, infections, bone dissolution and worsened back and leg pain, occurred in 10 to 50 percent of patients who were administered Infuse or a sister product in 13 clinical trials funded by Medtronic and conducted by the surgeons between 2000 and 2010, the Wall Street Journal said.
These complications weren't reported in research papers the surgeons wrote on those trials, even though the papers were peer-reviewed, the study said.
A U.S. Senate committee is investigating whether surgeons who were paid consulting and other fees by Medtronic failed to note the complications of Infuse.
The company last week said the three main side effect concerns raised by the committee are listed as warnings on the product labels, as approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In a statement, Omar Ishrak, Medtronic's chief executive, on Tuesday said the Spine Journal study does not raise questions about the data Medtronic submitted to the FDA in the approval process.
"Based on that data, we strongly believe that the safety profile reported to the FDA and summarized in the product label support the safe use of rhBMP-2 for the identified indications," he said. The company will continue to investigate questions surrounding researchers' potential conflicts of interest and refine policies as needed, he said.
A company spokesman declined additional comment.
Jun 28, 2011
(Reuters) - Surgeons conducting clinical trials to test a Medtronic Inc bone-growth protein used in spine surgery, some of whom got at least $62 million from the company, failed to report serious complications in their research papers, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Fifteen of the surgeons got at least $62 million from the company over the past decade, the paper said, citing an analysis of Medtronic documents and disclosures on the company's website.
A new study in the Spine Journal said serious complications including cancer, sterility, infections, bone dissolution and worsened back and leg pain, occurred in 10 to 50 percent of patients who were administered Infuse or a sister product in 13 clinical trials funded by Medtronic and conducted by the surgeons between 2000 and 2010, the Wall Street Journal said.
These complications weren't reported in research papers the surgeons wrote on those trials, even though the papers were peer-reviewed, the study said.
A U.S. Senate committee is investigating whether surgeons who were paid consulting and other fees by Medtronic failed to note the complications of Infuse.
The company last week said the three main side effect concerns raised by the committee are listed as warnings on the product labels, as approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
In a statement, Omar Ishrak, Medtronic's chief executive, on Tuesday said the Spine Journal study does not raise questions about the data Medtronic submitted to the FDA in the approval process.
"Based on that data, we strongly believe that the safety profile reported to the FDA and summarized in the product label support the safe use of rhBMP-2 for the identified indications," he said. The company will continue to investigate questions surrounding researchers' potential conflicts of interest and refine policies as needed, he said.
A company spokesman declined additional comment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)