(UPDATED: See below.)
Revisiting a few life-science stories you might have missed over the weekend:
“Baby Einstein” creator’s defense: We were just kidding! — You have to feel at least a little sorry for Julie Aigner-Clark, the entrepreneur who created the best-selling line of “Baby Einstein” videos for infants and toddlers and then sold her company to Walt Disney five years ago. After University of Washington researchers suggested that the videos may retard language development in babies aged eight months to 16 months, Aigner-Clark basically had two choices: Challenge the study on its merits, or acknowledge that her entire enterprise was essentially a sham.
Surprisingly, Aigner-Clark chose the second route, and now says the videos were never intended to make children smarter. (So much for the company’s one-time slogan, “Great minds start little.”) In this AP story, courtesy of Forbes, Aigner-Clark insists that the videos, which predominantly pair toy images with cheesily simplified classical-music arrangements, were simply intended to expose babies to “beautiful things” such as art, music and poetry. “I believe we’ve done what we’ve always set out to do — expose kids to great things,” Aigner-Clark told the AP. “And when used the right way, by interacting with a parent or a guardian, they’re positive ways to engage your child.”
In other words, parents, you’ve been duped, and Aigner-Clark is more than happy to rub your face in it. Aigner-Clark’s chutzpah, however, doesn’t justify the abusive behavior some people have apparently leveled in her direction; the AP story notes that someone vandalized her mailbox with the spray-painted words “Baby Dumb.”
Why the elderly can face “death by medication” — This Sydney Morning Herald story argues that the side effects of many prescription drugs are effectively poisoning many elderly people, in part because no one really keeps track of how the many drugs older people are often taking at once interact with one another. The article tells the story of Don Ireland, a spry 91-year-old who nevertheless almost lost his will to live until a doctor weaned him from 14 drugs, leaving him on three.
From the story:
At the heart of the problem is a collision of two forces, says David Le Couteur, professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Sydney, and the director of the Centre for Education and Research on Ageing at Concord Hospital. “We have pharmaceutical companies, and doctors with conflicts of interest, who make a huge amount of money from drugs; and people who expect to live for ever and be well for ever - and they feed off each other.”
Because of their medication, many elderly patients suffer unnecessarily. They feel sick, nauseous, confused; their memory deteriorates; they suffer incontinence; they may suffer hemorrhages in the stomach or brain; they fall; they are referred to nursing homes.
(Hat tip: Pharmalot.)
Artificial life may be closer than you think — Scientists interviewed by the AP believe that someone will create a living single-celled organism from scratch for the first time within the next three to ten years. Doing so essentially means clearing three hurdles: Building an artificial cell membrane, synthesizing a working genome from basic building blocks, and hooking everything up to metabolic processes that can extract energy from the environment and deploy it to perform useful tasks. And scientists are already close to overcoming one or more of those challenges.
Of course, if you believe J. Craig Venter, he and his research team are almost there already. For a useful corrective to Venter’s often wildly overblown and always self-interested hype, see this July Forbes story by Matthew Herper. (Tellingly, Venter doesn’t appear in the AP piece.) UPDATE: He does appear in a companion piece, though. See below.
Biogen Idec’s CEO Jim Mullen on the future of biotech — In a lengthy interview with Robert Buderi of Xconomy.com (part one is here, part two is here), Biogen Idec CEO Jim Mullen waxes philosophical on what he sees as a coming era of rapid biotech-led advances in medicine, energy, agriculture and other areas. The executive also shares his thoughts on big issues such as patent reform and biogenerics — he doesn’t say a lot that’s terribly new, but it’s a useful primer if you’re interested in those issues. Pharmalot has a more detailed summary.
UPDATE: Craig Venter’s PR representative points out to us that he was interviewed by AP reporter Seth Borenstein for the piece linked above, and that he appears in the full version of the story. (You can see that full version here, I believe, although it’s always hard to tell with the AP, which frequently moves multiple versions of its own stories that are then often edited by daily newspapers and other outlets for their own purposes.) In any event, it now looks like it was the editors of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and not AP editors or reporters, who chose to cut Venter from that piece in the course of shortening it — not to mention changing the focus considerably. Apologies for any confusion.
UPDATE REDUX: As if this wasn’t confusing enough already, it looks like the AP’s Seth Borenstein did two separate articles related to artificial life on the same day. The one I originally linked to ran with the headline “Artificial Life Likely in 3 to 10 Years” and ran in a variety of papers, including the San Jose Mercury News and the Boston Globe. (Check Google News for more examples.) Venter doesn’t appear in this piece.
A longer Borenstein article addressing the philosophical issues raised by artificial-life research also ran in a number of places, including USA Today and the Houston Chronicle. This is the story I linked to in the first update, and it does mention Venter.
Bottom line: Venter’s PR person jumped the gun. My original point stands, although the same AP reporter did interview Venter and quoted him in a related piece. Similarly, the Seattle P-I didn’t cut Venter out of the story it chose to run. And now that this update is far longer than the original item, I’ll draw this to a close.
FINAL UPDATE: It’s now clear that “tellingly” was a poor choice of words. I’ve spoken to the AP’s Borenstein, who graciously pointed out that the piece I linked was specifically focused on artificial-life “purists” who are trying to build microbes from scratch. Venter, who is more interested in manipulating existing life forms — such as by swapping one microbe’s genome for another — didn’t qualify. Borenstein also confirmed that this research piece was originally a sidebar to the longer article on the philosophical implications of artificial life, and not a shortened version of the longer piece.
And now I hope I’m done.
The just-concluded Health 2.0 Conference in San Diego showcased some 30-odd startups and Web sites — with dozens more in the audience — all intent on using the Internet to improve patient care, streamline healthcare practices and bolster the ability of individuals to take charge of their own medical treatment. There’s lots more to say, and I hope to do so over the next few days.
In their current form, even electronic medical records have a significant drawback: Most amount to little more than a digital representation of the paper forms that preceded them and consist largely of dense lines of biographical, family and medical information. (This is, of course, a fine place to start given that only 14 percent of all U.S. physicians use such systems in the first place, but it’s not exactly the end of the story.)
