Linda and the Prince of Darkness, 1978
I returned to Bellingham late yesterday to discover that I
had forgotten to stop delivery of the Wall Street Journal. Sarah, who minds the cats and sees that the
house remains standing while I am gone, had placed them in a neat pile – all 39
of them, each with its own red plastic wrapper.
Bellingham is about to begin enforcement of a ban on plastic grocery
bags, but the newspapers will still come enclosed in their own wasteful
wrappings. If I were a good
environmental citizen I would cancel my newspapers, buy an iPad, and get my news
through the ether. Maybe I will.
Anyway, I happened on an interesting and somewhat
discouraging article on the front page of the April 21st issue. It deals with the problem of “contamination”
in the cell lines that some cancer scientists use in their work. In the Henrietta Lacks book I read that her
cells are a well-known contaminate, world-wide.
I somehow visualized her cells surreptitiously escaping from their
container, wafting through the air to another cell line, diving in and taking
over. This article makes it less
colorful: sloppy lab work, plus mislabeling.
An authority (several authorities, in fact) estimates that between 18
and 36% of all cell lines in use today are not what they are supposed to
be. The results are horrendous for
individual cancer researchers and a set-back for cancer research in general
As an example, one poor duck has worked on breast cancer for 25 years – using cells that probably are melanoma instead. Apparently many others have discovered that the cells they were probing, rather than representing the cancer in question, were from Henrietta Lacks. Another mix-up involves a cell line labeled MDA-MB-435, supposedly a breast cancer, being M14, a skin cancer, instead.
You can imagine the consequences of this sort of mix-up. Not surprisingly, lots of these scientists are reluctant to admit that THEIR cells are contaminated, and moreover refuse to test them – even though, the Journal says that the test costs only about $200. Short-sighted, for sure, but completely understandable.
As an example, one poor duck has worked on breast cancer for 25 years – using cells that probably are melanoma instead. Apparently many others have discovered that the cells they were probing, rather than representing the cancer in question, were from Henrietta Lacks. Another mix-up involves a cell line labeled MDA-MB-435, supposedly a breast cancer, being M14, a skin cancer, instead.
You can imagine the consequences of this sort of mix-up. Not surprisingly, lots of these scientists are reluctant to admit that THEIR cells are contaminated, and moreover refuse to test them – even though, the Journal says that the test costs only about $200. Short-sighted, for sure, but completely understandable.
So what do we do?
Well, WE can’t do much of anything about cleaning up the mess. What we should NOT do is cease advocating for
funding of cancer research. Fortunately,
my group at the Hutch uses questionnaires and statistics more than cells, so we
will continue to hold up our heads.
Now to the back yard to plant some onions and garlic. The sun is out, the wind is calm, and there
are no rain clouds in sight. When these
conditions describe Bellingham, better get outside and get with it.
Yikes about the cell contamination. Sometimes it is hard to maintain trust in this world. Sad.
ReplyDeleteYour data is only as good as your technique - too many 'cooks in the kitchen' (lab)? Makes you wonder what other similar problems there are in medical research. PhD's don't like to have their 'errors' exposed.
ReplyDeleteIn the geological research community there are well-known practitioners who specialize in proving other people wrong. Most do little or no original research themselves; rather, they wait for someone to propose something new, and then set out to refute it. I guess such people are useful, but they certainly are not popular.
ReplyDeleteWell, apparently such folks exist in the medical research field, too. If you get something wrong in geology, nobody cares but other geologists, and perhaps your mother. But if medical treatment (I have learned to call this an “intervention”) is based on invalid science, or no science at all, people suffer and scarce resources (like: money) are wasted. So I guess we need these guys - but I’d bet that they don’t get invited to many parties.
A case in point is the subject of the cover article in the latest Stanford magazine. His name is John Ioannidis, and he is the head of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. He seems to be an expert in biostatistics, as well as – I presume – medicine. He does things called “meta-analyses”, which is the art of mathematically blending diverse smaller studies of the same thing into one big, and more rigorous, study. If in so doing he finds things that are wrong, he says so in print. For instance, he is the author of a paper a journal called PLoS Medicine entitled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”. I’m going to try to run this paper down and see if I can understand it.
My take on this article is that we need a lot more rigor in medicine – although things are improving, they say. Part of the problem is that some “interventions” are based on no science at all. For instance, the time-honored practice of prescribing hormones during menopause has been shown to be downright dangerous by a systematic study in 2002. Probably outright fraud is rarely involved (in erroneous studies), but an unconscious bias in favor of your benefactor may be present. (Large sums sometimes are involved, and it is hard to bite the hand that so lavishly feeds you.) Thus, funding should come from a neutral source – but neutral sources, as, for instance, the government, rarely have much money to spare. Finally, it appears that many studies have been conducted properly and fairly, but their results are invalid because of invalid design – according to Ioannidis. To leave you with another quote: “For most designs and settings (of research projects) it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true.”
But don’t despair. Things are looking up. Keep on advocating. Just don’t invite Ioannidis to my next birthday party.