Tag Archives: Research

What Happened To Ethics In Science?

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Yesterday CNS News posted an article about research going on at the University of California at San Francisco. This research is so horrific I can’t even believe it is being done in America, much less being partially financed by the government.

The article reports:

The Department of Health and Human Services says it has granted a second 90-day extension to a contract it has with the University of California at San Francisco that requires UCSF to make “humanized mice.”

These creatures are made by implanting mice with human tissues taken from late-term aborted babies.

The HHS’s multi-million-dollar contract with UCSF that requires the construction of these “humanized mice” creates a demand–driven by federal tax dollars–for tissue taken from late-term aborted babies. According to an estimate it has published on its website, the National Institutes of Health (which is a division of HHS) will spend $95 million this fiscal year alone on research that–like UCSF’s “humanized mouse” contract–uses human fetal tissue.

Under the new 90-day extension, the contract—which the government calls “Humanized Mouse Models for HIV Therapeutics Development”–will run through June 5.

HHS also is still in the process of conducting the “comprehensive review” it announced last September “of all research involving fetal tissue.”

It’s bad enough that we are killing the unborn. Now we are using them for scientific experiments. That is beyond repulsive.

Oops!

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The National Review is reporting today that some climate scientists have discovered a significant error in their recent calculations of rising ocean temperatures.

The article reports:

Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPCC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors.

The scientists who did the original research quickly realized their mistake:

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out.

“When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

After correcting their mistake, Keeling said their research indicates oceans are warming only slightly faster than previously thought, not dramatically faster as they initially reported. Keeling said the miscalculation was made when they were calculating their margin of error, which had a larger range (10 to 70 percent) than they initially believed.

When the initial report came out, the alarmists were quick to alarm:

The IPCC released a report last month calling on governments to take drastic action to combat climate change. According to the report, global carbon emissions must be cut by 20 percent by 2030 and completely eliminated by 2075 in order to prevent temperatures from rising two degrees above pre-industrial levels, at which point coastal areas would be completely flooded and hundreds of millions of people would be in danger of starvation.

I am not yet convinced that man is responsible for any global warming that may be occurring–cyclical climate change has been a part of the earth’s existence since the earth existed. I do believe that we have a responsibility to limit pollution as much as possible, but I don’t believe we are significant enough to interfere with the earth’s cyclical climate changes.

An Article From September That I Missed

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Reason posted an article in September with the following title, “New Research Confirms We Got Cholesterol All Wrong.”

The article reports:

A comprehensive new study on cholesterol, based on results from more than a million patients, could help upend decades of government advice about diet, nutrition, health, prevention, and medication. Just don’t hold your breath.

The study, published in the Expert Review of Clinical Pharmacology, centers on statins, a class of drugs used to lower levels of LDL-C, the so-called “bad” cholesterol, in the human body. According to the study, statins are pointless for most people.

“No evidence exists to prove that having high levels of bad cholesterol causes heart disease, leading physicians have claimed” in the study, reports the Daily Mail. The Express likewise says the new study finds “no evidence that high levels of ‘bad’ cholesterol cause heart disease.”

The study also reports that “heart attack patients were shown to have lower than normal cholesterol levels of LDL-C” and that older people with higher levels of bad cholesterol tend to live longer than those with lower levels.

It is estimated that 11 million Americans take statins to lower their cholesterol. A Forbes article from 2008 states that ” 25 million more should be on them (statins).”

The article at Reason concludes:

What’s more, if bad cholesterol isn’t so bad, then the benefits of so-called good cholesterol are also under assault. Recently, *HDL, the so-called “good” cholesterol, was itself deemed suspect in some cases.

Dietary fat also appears not to be the danger the government says it is. Another new study, reported on by Ron Bailey this week, suggests, as he writes, that the federal government’s warnings to avoid dairy products that are high in fat “is bunk.”

I’m not a nutritionist. I don’t know if the science on cholesterol is settled. But the federal government has warned us for decades about cholesterol in our bodies and in our food. The fact those warnings are now changing means the government has, despite what I’m sure are the good intentions of everyone involved, been handing out poor dietary advice and developing regulations that reflect that poor advice.

I’m one of many who has called out the DGAC and the federal government for foisting “decades of confusing and often-contradictory dietary advice” upon the American public. I also suggested, in a column last year, that one way the government might back up its claims to possess invaluable and unparalleled expertise in the areas of food policy and nutrition would be stop regularly reversing or altering its recommendations.

“The reason that we don’t know about these huge reversals in dietary advice is that the nutrition establishment is apparently loathe to make public their major reversals in policy,” Teicholz says. “The low-fat diet is another example: neither the AHA or the dietary guidelines recommend a low-fat diet anymore. But they have yet to announce this to the American public. And some in the establishment are still fighting to retain the low-fat status quo.”

I am not your doctor, nor your nutritionist. I have no idea what you should eat. Maybe the government should adopt that mantra, too.

We really don’t know as much about our bodies as we think we do.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

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WJLA posted an article on Monday about a recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The article reports:

You can learn a lot from studying birds and every year government funded research does just that.

But it’s one study in particular Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has been railing against for years.

“$356,000 was spent of your money studying whether or not Japanese quail are more sexually promiscuous on cocaine,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in a speech on the Senate Floor.

According to scientists, the effects of drugs like cocaine have similar brain effects in quails as in humans. The study looked at behavior patterns while on the drug and found “repeated exposure to cocaine during sexual activity may increase sexual motivation which may, in turn, may lead to high risk sexual activities.”

It cost us $356,000 to find out that cocaine use during sex might be a problem. Most of our mothers could have told us that cocaine use at any time is a problem. Rather than look at the impact of cocaine on sexual activity, why not divert that money to helping combat the opioid crisis in America? The quail on cocaine study is truly a waste of taxpayer money.

More Research Needed

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On Thursday the U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about some recent studies involving treating pain with marijuana.

The article reports:

A small study found people who use cannabis require higher doses of painkillers than non users after major traumatic event like a car crash.    

The drug, which is legal for medical use in the majority of US states, is mainly prescribed to ease pain. 

But this new research conducted in Colorado – which was the first state to legalize – suggests that short-term pain relief could weaken the body’s resilience to pain over time. 

The researchers, from the Swedish Medical Center, Colorado, analyzed around 260 people who were involved in minor vehicle accidents and admitted to trauma centers. 

Of these, 54 tested positive for recent marijuana use while 16 claimed they used the drug more or less every day.

Around nine percent of the participants tested positive for other prescription or illegal drugs, such as cocaine and opiates.

On average, the marijuana users required 7.6mg of opioid painkillers a day in hospital, compared to 5.6mg for non-drug users.

This is probably not a surprise to people in the medical profession. I have been told by nurses who work in the operating room that people who are heavy users of alcohol require larger doses of anesthesia to put them to sleep. The body builds up a tolerance for drugs, whether the drug is alcohol, opioids, or marijuana. Those who blame big pharma for the fact that marijuana has not been legalized need to remember that just as big pharma has a huge lobby with lots of money, big marijuana also has a big lobby with lots of money. Legalizing marijuana in Colorado has brought the drug cartels into the state to mass produce their product for the local market. I don’t think that is what we want.

The medical values of marijuana are not proven and the unintended consequences of legalization are still unfolding. I think we need more research.

Preventing Truth

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One of the major ideas the political left is currently supporting is transgenderism. The traditional idea of two genders–male and female–is regarded (by the left) as old fashioned and (in some cases) bigoted. Never mind what your DNA says–it’s how you feel that matters. There have been a number of people who have gone through the process of a sex change and regretted it, but somehow they have not received the positive coverage of those who parade their change around. Well, even science has gone political on the matter.

Breitbart is reporting the following today:

Bath Spa University stopped Psychotherapist James Caspian from examining cases of people who had surgery to reverse a “gender reassignment” after finding they regretted the decision.

…He pointed out that studies of the percentage of people regretting “transitioning” their gender ranged from a couple of per cent to 20 per cent, and said new research was needed as attitudes changed and practitioners observed a rise in those reversing surgery.

The university initially approved his research, but after he proposed finding more participants online and sent his ideas to the ethics sub-committee for clearance, he was told: “engaging in a potentially politically incorrect piece of research carries a risk to the University”.

“Attacks on social media may not be confined to the researcher but may involve the university,” university authorities added, The Times reports. “The posting of unpleasant material on blogs or social media may be detrimental to the reputation of the university.”

So if the truth may be unpopular or cause anything negative to be said about the University, the University does not want to know what the truth is. Wow. So much for the scientific method!