For those of you interested in reseaarch, here's a lengthy article in today's NY Times about the new ways that foundations (such as the Michael j. Fox foundation for Parkinson's research) are pursuing goals. Not particularly about AZ research, in fact not at all, but the model is applicable to all kinds of med. research. Worth reading (but long).
Sunshyne, bluedaze, Starling, marsh in particular - I know you all are interested in at least some of these things:
Today's NY Times (11-11-08) has several articles worth reading in the science section. There is a long and complicated thing about genes which I did not try to read (right up your alley, I suspect, Sunshyne) but there is also an article on caregiving, one on the theory that autism and schizophrenia are at opposite ends of the same spectrum and influenced by genes.. one about assisted suicide, one about elderly driving.. If you can't get to them either by buying a copy of today's paper or going to their website (from the link I gave in the previous post) let me know and I'll locate them for you.
The one on caregiving points to a NYTimes blog (nytimes.com/newoldage) which looks interesting. I'll pursue and report back.
Briegull, actually, I make it a point never to read the science section of any newspaper. They "research" too fast, they write in too much of a hurry, they typically aren't qualified to understand the topic, they write for effect rather than fact, and they usually get things all screwed up. IMHO <grin>
I did read the Fox foundation article. Interesting, yes. But there are some problems with the model ... like thinking you can drive toward a goal without having the slightest idea what actually might be important for achieving it. Basic science is essential, so that applied science has the right underlying foundation.
I think that the best thing the foundation is doing to try to move forward is to emphasize accountability. In academia, once the researcher has the money, s/he believes s/he can do anything at all with it, whether or not that "anything" bears the slightest resemblance to what was in the grant application. NIH has always held industry accountable, with goals and schedules, but they sure don't treat their academic grants the same way. And when industry has an academic partner, that can lead to a lot of problems! NIH always wants industry to team with academia, so one must team to win grants. I quickly learned to carve out a "workscope" for my academic partners that would not have the slightest impact on my grant's success.
Good point, Sunshyne. I'm interested to hear your take on the research model. As the wife of someone who was a "pure" mathematician, I'm familiar with the research-for-research paradigm and always found it infuriating, to be honest.
Then there's the whole question of transparency and sharing. Do you know the work of the physicist Paul Ginsparg, who came up with the idea of scientists pre-publishing their work online so others could read about it - and critique it - without waiting sometimes years for peer-review of their work? To quote Wikipedia, -------- The arXiv (pronounced "archive", as if the "X" were the Greek letter Chi, χ) is an archive for electronic preprints of scientific papers in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics which can be accessed via the Internet. --------- My impression that medical science doesn't participate in this much but the article I referred to seemed to imply that such transparency is part of this new model. Here on this board we see the way we all unscientifically go haring off after any possible route to improvement - but we've also seen how frustrating the waits can be for the results of traditional clinical studies.
I don't draw any conclusions from all this, just think it's interesting to consider the different aspects of research.
Well, you know the old saw "publish or perish". I don't think any scientist hides what he's doing -- sometimes they rush too fast to be the first to report something, and have to retract it later on, as they get more data.
The problem now is that we all want to get access to all publications easily, off our computers, but the companies that have traditionally published scientific papers haven't quite figured out how to make a profit this way. Some of them even go way out of their way to find scientists who have links to .pdf files of their own papers on their own web sites, and break the links. Some of them protect access for a given period of time (six months, a year) and then offer full and free access (which makes the most sense to me). Some of them continue to charge an arm and a leg even if the paper is thirty years old. Anyone in academia probably has free access, via subscriptions bought by their universities. Ditto major companies. But those subscriptions are horribly expensive for small companies.
So we slog to the university library and pay 5¢ per page to get something xeroxed ... or email the corresponding author to see if they'll send a .pdf file electronically. Many will (that's how one gets cited, which is also important for survival in academia), some can't be bothered.
Anywho, NIH decided that the publishing companies were profiting from research funded by the Government, which made no sense to them. So they are now demanding preprints or drafts to be published electronically, free access to anyone who wants to read the papers. I'm not sure everyone is cooperating yet, the publishing companies still feeling they have rights (which they should -- they have built up reputations, they do the peer reviews, they bear the burdens of publishing the hard copy journals). Interesting quandry.
...oh, with regard to doing research just to be doing research ... that wasn't anything I could ever really get "into." My work needed to actually GO somewhere for me to be happy. And there sure are times when I see grants getting funded and wonder who was smoking what when they made the decision to award.
But research that is designed to shed light on complex phenomena -- trying to tease apart what's going on in a disease such as Parkinson's or AD, for example -- that can be very rewarding, and very necessary. Yet it doesn't drive toward a cure per se, nor should it be expected to. And some of the studies that will end up being the most useful might have seemed like the least likely to produce useful info, in the beginning.