>> thank you all for joining us today. please join me in a plotting our authors today. [applause] and thank you again for june a humanities and please join us up front to a book and have it signed by one of our authors. [inaudible] >> booktv's "after words" of the virginia festival of the book continues now with an author discussion on science literacy, policy and ethics.

>> so good afternoon, everyone. it's a pleasure to have you here. we welcome you on behalf of the virginia humanities which is the producer of virginia festival of the books. my name is dana and i'm a professor at the university of virginia law school. i had to pause for a second because i have just returned back to my alma mater. six months ago. i want to thank today's sponsors, charlottesville community youth net key, the science policy initiative at uva, women in math and science at uva. they support the festival and would ask that you would support the festival. it's free of charge, there's the cost to the please remember to go online for information about how you might also support this festival and keep it going for

many years to come. we also ask that you would go online and get your evaluation of this program and provide useful information that will help us in the future. at the end of this program will be an opportunity for you to meet the authors that were present today and to purchase their books. i'm a book author and they would love not to take any of those back with them. it will be happy to sign them to whomever you would like the inside too. so please support them that way. the program title today is called digging science, brilliant, sloppy or mangled. i am a lawyer and you might wonder why is a lawyer talking about science. well, i'm not going to tell you how many years, i used to practice law not too far from here and we used scientists often as expert witnesses. i will take whatever they spoken

of you listen. so today i will be listening to this the fantasy if that was warranted or not. i also write quite a lot about public health and one of the reasons i argue in favor of more just laws for full of a population is i might learn whether my laws suggested laws are supported or not. today we're going to hear from three brilliant scientists, certainly. i introduce each briefly in the order that they will speak. and that will allow them to go ahead and speak without interrupting them further. after their tent a 15 minute presentation on going to start the conversation with a few provocative questions i hope that will give them speaking among each other and then at the end end of the hour i will open the floor so that you get involved in the conversation as well. when you do please wait for the microphone because we are being recorded and that's something i was told to say in addition to all of that. this program is being broadcast

on the government access channel and streamed live on the cities facebook page at charlottesville city hall. because this is this is a recot during question and answers, please raise your hand and wait for a volunteer to head to the microphone before speaking. deep breath. now we will get started. let me tell you who you're going to hear from. first meredith wadman, her book is the vaccine grace, science, politics and the human cost of defeating disease. i will type it it's been recently nominated and made the shortlist for the welcome book prize so we're excited about that. meredith has covered by medical research politics from washington for 20 years. she was a reporter at "science" magazine. she's written for nature, fortune and the new times as well as the "wall street journal" and others. before joining site she was an editorial fellow at new america,

washington, d.c. think tank. she graduated from stanford and from columbia university and she is a physician among us, a native of vancouver comes to begin a medical school at the university of british columbia and finished as a rhodes scholar at the university of oxford. she's also if that were not enough, earned a journalism degree at columbia university in new york. you have meredith first. dave levitan our second speaker, his book is called "not a scientist: how politicians mistake, misrepresent, and utterly mangle science." dave is a freelance journalist based in philadelphia to get write articles focusing on an array of scientific topics especially those that are at the intersection of policy and politics. his articles have been published in a host the places, i'll list a few, reuters, psychology today, wired, the atlantic "scientific american," regarding and the "washington post."

i had the pleasure of reading a couple that i will recommend to do what is called when the president banishes science and the white house. that when will surprise you. [laughing] and another called radical proposal would prop of the cold -- coal power industry. that one will surprise you not at all. you and extra from richard harris boost to my email of book is called rigor mortis. this is his first book but not his first rodeo. he's one of the nation's most celebrated scientists, science journalists. he's covered science, medicine and their private for 30 years since 1986 for npr. he is a a three-time winner ofe american association for advancement of science, science journalism. his reports include a 2010 report revealed the u.s. government was vastly underestimating the amount of oil spills from the blowup in

the gulf of mexico. he shared a peabody prize with rebecca perl for the 1994 report about the tobacco industries secret documents showing that they were well aware of the hazards of smoking. richard lives in washington, d.c. and asked not to say all those things about him but i couldn't help myself. so we will start now and hear from meredith first. >> such a pleasure to be here, thank you for the intro. thank all of you for your interest thanks to the charlottesville organizations that make the book festival possible. it's wonderful to be with people who care about writing and reading and it's always wonderful to find an audience that i'm going to be as quick as i can because it's usually a longer talk. cut me off at the pass ethical too fast, or too long. my both begin with a notebook with which are probably throw, the immortal life of henrietta lacks which i just devoured. i read and reread the book after came out in 2010. the writer trap and on track

down the family, , the distancef henrietta lacks who was an impoverished nearly illiterate african-american woman whose cells from her cervical cancer of which she was dying at age 31 in 1951 were taken without her knowledge or consent and turned into an enormously valuable research tool. if you want to page turn in this area i would highly recommend this if you haven't read it already. that book was on my mind when a couple years later is working for nature and of reading the competition as one always does and science policy form had published a discussion between ethicist and other dignitaries on whether people should be paid with their tissues are turned into lucrative medicines and therapies. in response to this printed argument came in a letter paying for tissue the case of wi 38, meant i didn't of his later take the katy said henrietta lacks

celtic and all the attention but in 1962 i derive some cells from an aborted fetus was legally aborted in sweden, and i turned those cells into miniature faxing factories that produce vaccines that are protected hundreds of native people from diseases. not only that i got a huge with the u.s. government and then in the $.19 over who owned the cells. that raise questions that are unanswered to the state. and i thought oh my god, how has this not been turned into a book? i found leonard and said sounds like there's a story that hasn't been told. he was 84 at the time and living in the sea majority retired with his wife in california and i said come celtic there might be a story and he's like is there ever? at that point i happen to be going to california anyway for a college reunion and i was able to visit with them and spend literally hours, use generous with his time and is a fantastic storyteller and it took me back

down his memory lane. here he is in 2013 with his wife to this place, 1960-ish, and it didn't research institute title on the campus of university of pennsylvania. it was kind of dying a slow death because it'd been neglected by its board of trustees for years and years when in 1957 the man in the middle this larger-than-life bon vivant polish immigrant and polio vaccine pioneer was offered the start institute -- wistar institute to take it over. he rescued it from this more of its day. dignity filled it with world-class biologists and also hired this young man, age 30 and 1958, leonard wasn't up by the bootstraps philadelphia who came from nowhere and no money and no family. they were immigrants of eastern europe, his parents the last generation had been raised in the slums of south philadelphia.

but he was brilliant and he was ambitious and he was darned if he is going to be hired to be essential a servant to the biologists that was recruited to the wistar institute to make cultured for them they could use in their brilliant experiments. he set a not going to just do this. i'm going to make some discoveries myself, and his biggest discovery was that normal cells which were thought to be immortal when they were grown in the lab actually aged and died in lab dishes just like you or me. unless there they were cancerss in the labs were mortal pictures became known as the limit, it put it on the map, if you ask in the young cell today, have you heard of leonard hayflick? yes, i know the try to limit and that was a two-minute discovery that was met with a huge amount of pushback. he had begun like i would say with the chip on his shoulder and rejection by large of a

cisco rate by biologist and novellus type figures really graded on it. in any event he made his discovery using fetal cells from abortions performed across the street at hospital of university of pennsylvania and i'll come back to that. he decided at the time, so we publish of this, the nih sat up and paid attention bills like normal cells that divide in a lab dish? that we can study aging. now we consider viruses infect normal cells. now we can do all these things and nih said we will pay you wistar institute to have leonard hayflick to divide the cells for use by nih funded biologist and will pay you handsomely, $120,000 $120,000 or more a gear which in 1952 was a lot of money. so try to begin under contract. read the fine print in the contract as anyone can tell us. this will become a it looks boring but basically says when his contract is up, the

contractor, hayflick agree to turn over to the government any which is developed under this contract. so just filed it in your mind for a minute. hayflick big ambition was to turn his normal human cells into many faxing factories that could pump out viruses for vaccines. and really quickly virus reproduction, viruses get public inside cells. if you want to make viral vaccines which consist of rekindled my viruses or killed viruses you've got to them reproduce in quantity in cells. there was a problem. the rhesus monkey whose kidney so said than used to make the famous falcon vaccine which was the great pic of the day had been discovered to house silent monkey viruses. these viruses were thought to be not harmful to humans. they were monkey viruses, who cares? that a polio vaccine site is at nah discovered a virus in the

cells that actually cost hamsters to develop tumors and die in their hundreds. when she pronounced that discovery to her boss she was demoted. she was put in a broom closet. most of her staff stripped of gumshoes left with two assistant. assistant. she was basically punished but eventually the truth came out in that use as great a source of information but in this case actually correct. the national enquirer got the story while the new york times and other major media ignored it. basically they had to move on. they had to get two different species of animal to make polio vaccine because it was not known whether this particular virus would, in fact, cause canted human beings overtimes. enter mrs. x, a woman who 1962 in sweden with mary to kind of window could man, a hard drinking ex-con who is often out of town for his manual labor. they had four children already

when she discovered she was pregnant early in 1962. she felt she couldn't face it. it was illegal but that easy to get an abortion in sweden at the time and, in fact, it was the fourth month. she was 17 weeks pregnant before she found a rare sympathetic gynecologist in sweden who agree to perform the abortion. her fetus was taken without her knowledge or consent. it was a dissected at the institute, home of the famous nobel prize physiology of medicine. the lungs were shipped to hayflick waiting in philadelphia he divide that summer of 196-2800 ampoules like those pictured here. each ampoule had up to 4 million cells of gum replicated cells that would replicate in a lab dish to a certain point derived from the lungs of fetus ex. he froze them and began handing out to vaccine makers, to cite this to say here, , you can use

the cells now to make clean, safe antiviral vaccines because we can ascertain we can testify to the cleanliness of these particular cells that we have tested backwards and forwards, and not only that he had sent a position in sweden back to mrs. x to say by the way, we took your fetus and that we need to make sure because it is being used in research that you don't have ex-wife and see problems in your family, infections, catches a sword. so that was a rude awakening settlements at the abortion and she did testify at a medical record was provided the cells are certified. this guy control the u.s. vaccine the licensing process, brodrick murray of nih. he was extremely cautious, very risk-averse because you've been through several vaccine disasters where people had been harmed or killed by vaccines under his oversight or he'd witnessed these events up close and personal and you want to stick with the monkey cells. he preferred the evil that he

knew to the one that he did it. so he for ten years prevented any cells made in these clean human fetal cells, any vaccines made in them from the licensed in the u.s. seeing there was a reason he's fetal cells were really needed and is called rubella. rebel if you are i get is also known as german measles is a mild disease. it might be some out were not even aware we have it. two in three people don't notice when you have. if you feel ill, abcmr, a couple lymph nodes, may stay home a day from work, that's it. in 1964 there was no vaccine against rubella and pregnant women got rubella it was devastating on the fetus. the virus infected virtually every fetal organ, particularly four and was affected the first trimester. in 1964 there's a massive historic epidemic of rubella in this country. you can see a little rubella -- the black circles moving between two cells. 20,000 or more, this is probably

underreported, 20,000 babies of these were born in 64-65, blinded by cadres, infected by rubella, they at heart defects, they profoundly deaf. they were intellectually disabled because of microcephaly, the same thing you see in the zika babies, and oftentimes they have combinations of these conditions. conditions. it was a devastating. stephen was born in 1964, all but blind and yet heart defects if this is projecting at about age eight. women were just, women of childbearing age wanted the vaccine. they wanted it fast that the political pressure came from congress on an h, get the vaccine. i'm going to recent because i talked too long. at the wistar institute this young pediatrician named stanley plotkin took hayflick's cells, develop a rubella vaccine by virus vaccine in them. that they are, the wi 38 and the

vaccine was first tested at this catholic orphanage in southwest philadelphia with the permissif the archbishop. this was a common practice in the day. institutionalized populations, be they prisoners, preemies on hospital charity boards, orphans under the care of the catholic church would routinely tested. stanley plotkin was not an outlier and this is how was done. for approximately two decades in the sometimes three after world war ii. ultimately, the vaccine did prevail. brodrick murray, the regular at in h was forced out of office. the vaccine became the art in the market vaccine. it was approved in 1979. in 2005 resulted in rubella being a limited in this country and in 2015 in the entire western hemisphere. it is the rubella vaccine studies use virtually throughout the world. sadly only about 72% of countries vaccinate against rubella routine in childhood

and, therefore, there's about 100,000 babies born still every year affected by numerous birth defects because of rubella and the lack of use of a vaccine that could have prevented it. what happened to hayflick? he felt like a second-class citizen at the wistar. they never acknowledges many contributions, and at one point when he decided to move to a better job to the basement he took every single vaccine ampoule although he been ordered return the to the nih. he instead packed them in the backseat of his car alongside his kids can the family sedan and the went to stanford the event grand canyon and the petulant force with the cells have liquid nitrogen refrigerator staff in the backseat. this will come back to bite them at the height of his power at stanford went nih chief investigator of waste, fraud, and abuse came after hayflick had begun a company began selling the cells. that was highly problematic, but

i would encourage you to i hope you be interested in buying the book in order to get the whole story because i do want to give it all away. and with that i just want to get the take-home message, which is that hayflick's cells has prevented thousands and thousands of lives been lost to go to rubella. this child happens to be in south africa during the apartheid era. i was a medical student and it took this picture and two days later this baby died at of meas which invaded his lungs. in all more than 16, 6 billion vaccine doses have been made in either hayflick's wi-38 or a copycat post felt by the british also from an aborted fetus in 1966. that's it. [applause] >> i don't know if i can compete with that kind of story. [laughing] first of all, thank you a smith said thank you to everybody for

coming and to dana for moderating and for the various sponsoring bodies and everything. we appreciate it. i thought i would tell you about the origin of my book, "not a scientist" and so do what point is there. basically they got started when i got a full-time job as a staff writer as a staff writer@factcheck.org that i spent most of the grid as a freelancer but i spent about a year as the first ever full-time science writer. i see most people are familiar with fact check but if they basically all one politician tt things wrong, so the got a grant specifically to cover songs. they done some come to sites before but not in that sort of methodical fashion but the got a grant to start a section of the site specifically dedicated to sign so they hired me to do that. the little corner is called cite check, it is still running without another very good writer so i encourage you to check that

out. basically my day job, this is at the beginning of 2015. my day job was to pay attention to what politicians were saying about scientific topics. and when they got it wrong, explain why they were wrong. i didn't like for material. [laughing] i started to notice some patterns with the way that the talked about scientific sometimes you just repeated talking points, the same thing almost word for word set by deborah politicians about the same topic. but it also came up a lot that they would you sort of similar techniques, not necessarily the exact same words but very similar styles of speech but rhetorical devices to talk about science and they would get the signs science wrong in doing so. i started collecting these techniques just at first out of curiosity but it quickly became clear that there was a fairly extensive list of these that a thought might be useful to sort of gather together in one place.

and that's really what the book is. it's sort of a playbook of the various techniques that politicians use to get science wrong. i specifically don't try and assign intent to a lot of these errors in the book. obviously, a lot of the time they're doing this on purpose. however, i could be to say definitively when politician x said scientific why that there were 100% line. i try to just explain the reasons they're wrong and the reasons that this rhetorical device is sort of working against us. the first sort of main talking point a came across with the title of the book. i thought i would keep it lipid of the origins. i'm sure people have heard that. i'm not a scientist but pick is always the but the comes after that matters the most. i found this line infuriating. you will get a lot to like of

2009, ten, 11, 12 range of years almost universally when politician were talked about climate change, probably used for other things but climate change is the most commonly discussed topic when that came up. the line i guess was sort of intended to act as a smokescreen more than anything else science is a noble. we can't possibly know the actual answers what i'm going to quit npv of a cancer anyway. on whatever the topic was. once i i decided to use that as the title i i decided i should figure out the origin of the line because it was so commonly used. it seemed, it's like a point out a memo that they're going to have to use this line. i just started trying to feel what came from. it goes back a decent shot farther than i thought it did, and since the whole point of this book is not evidence, i cannot promise this is the very first time someone use this line

in exactly this way but the very first one that i could find was actually september 1980 during a presidential campaign, ronald reagan used the line here i'm sorry to pick up my own book but i'm just going to read it to you because it's kind of fun. it will sound a little moat even though the topic is different. he was asked during a campaign event about some very standby mental issues that were relevant at the time. he said, i have flown twice over mount saint helen's out on the west coast. i'm not a scientist and i don't know the figures but i just have a suspicion that one little mountain out there has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world and has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about. so i'll explain just how wrong he is in the second. [laughing] i find visually faceting because it's about a topic that we don't hear about anymore, that's over docs it is a primary component

of acid rain and that was a very big deal in 1980 and that your a lot of people remember that but you don't hear anything about acid rain anymore because we kind of fixed that problem. but at the time this was a big deal and it was a common topic of discussion among politicians because it would require government regulation to actually do something about. .. if he was talking about just the eruption, in may of 1980,

that was a catastrophic event, that eruption released 1.5 million tons but he also said ten years of automobile driving and things of that sort so that would have been closer to 200 million tons just from the united states alone and of course globalism is a more relevant number anyway. the point was, he was way way off. it almost doesn't matter. the use of this, i'm not a scientist but basically it's to give them an excuse to get things wrong "after words". it really doesn't make a ton of sense beyond that. you don't hear people use the same formulation for other topics. you don't hear a politician say i'm not a lawyer or i'm not an economist or i'm not an expert o at north korean diplomacy. you just don't hear that. you kind of just trust that they have experts around who might know the things that they are trying to legislate on or regulate or whatever it is they are doing. science, for some reason gives politicians permission for shenanigans, to say things that are so far out of the

normal but they make an excuse first and it's a bizarre talking point. i found it ridiculous but i just want to point out i was not the only one to find it ridiculous but this is one of my favorite lines. there is a gop consultant and strategist named mike mckenna. he once called that line, the i'm not a scientist line the dumbest talking point in the history of mankind. i feel pretty good about that being the title. anyway, i will stop there and say obviously these techniques that i'm talking about most of what i wrote about, i go back into history for some of them but a lot of it is semi- recent examples. honestly these types of techniques are very relevant today. i'm not breaking any new ground to say the current government is not exactly science friendly and i think it has become ever more important for all of us to be

able to hear when they are trying to get things passed us. that's kind of the point i guess. [applause] >> i just picked up your book today and it's like a field guide to political rhetoric. it's very handy. it's a good read. thank you all for coming. i will actually start my conversation as well with henrietta lacks because this is a story about scientist getting things wrong they don't need to get wrong which is a recurrent theme in my book. i remember as a young reporter in san francisco, in the mid- 1980s, there is a paper published saying there were many experiments in research laboratories with cells in petri dishes and it turns out in many cases, scientists are mistaken about what cells they are using. it turns out henrietta lacks cells are like the kudzu of

the world of medicine because they grow incredibly rapidly and if you make even a smile smallest contamination, before you know it your cell which might be a liver cell or breast cancer cell actually gets overrun and which are actually studying is a cervical cancer cell. in the early 1980s someone published a paper saying this is a really big problem in biomedicine in many experiments are wrong and i thought this is a huge thing. what are people point to do. how are they going to take all of these results that are already in the scientific literature and admit these are mistaken results and fix the problem and move forward and i watched an absolutely nothing happened. this is like a major contamination of scientific literature and the response was nothing to see here, move along. this persisted for a long time. in fact, is th study published last year tried to

total up, deep papers had been published calling a cell something when it actually turns out to be what's called a healer cell line, the henrietta lacks cell line and they found 33000 papers in scientific literature, mostly things of u.s. taxpayers have paid for over the years that claim to be one kind of cell but were actually another. they said how many papers cited those 33000 papers of mistaken identity and the answer was half a million papers in the scientific literature are pointing to these 33000 studies that are basically a case of mistaken identity. if it wasn't bad enough, there are actually an international committee of people who got together to say this is a problem not just for the cell lines but there are many cell lines misidentified through the literature and they been tabulating them. they now have a list of 400 cell lines that are said to be one kind of cell that are actually another cell line. in the early days they were

hard to figure out. you had to do careful testing to figure out what it was and look at it under the microscope. it was a fussy business to do, but for the past ten or 20 years it has actually been pretty easy, a simple test. it's now inexpensive to sort out these cases of misidentified cells. this is the kind of issue i was looking at in my book, to say we as taxpayers put $30 billion. year, more than that now thanks to what congress just did the other day, why are there so many dead ends. one reason i should say upfront is science is hard. i do not expect science will get everything) if they did i would be worried because they're supposed to be looking at the frontiers of science

and you expect miss steps and misdirection and so on. that's part of the normal process of science. we should be mad about that, we should say this is how exploration works. what i was focusing on are the kind of things that you can and should be preventing, like looking at bad cell lines and not taking the time to say i've been using this for a long time, why don't i find out what they are. scientist have been very reluctant to do that. i started to peel back the layers and say why is this going on in what problems are there. that experiment will design, it turns out that people in biomedical research don't actually learn the best in experimenting.

i said why did you use six mice. he said everyone uses six mice. i said you should think about the number of mice you need for the experiment. they also are liable to use bad statistics. there are some tricks they use deliberately but a lot of it is not fully understanding what's going on. i remember talking to another scientist who said when i went into biology he said our philosophy was, in biology we went in because we didn't really want to do math and our sons was if you have to use statistics to analyze the results, think of a better experiment. that actually made sense in the descriptive era of biology , but it's become a very quantitative field now and it makes no sense now. there's sort of a long traditio tradition.

finally and last but not least is bad incentives in the world of biomedical research. scientists respond to the motivations that are put in front of them and unfortunately we are now in a hypercompetitive world of biomedical research, funding doubled between 1998 in 2003 which was fabulous, or so they thought for the field. the laboratory space increased by 50% during that time in congress that in 2003, we've taken care of nih and they basically stopped increasing the funding and in real dollar terms, it actually declined 20% over the following decade. so all the sun you've built up this huge community of people and then you started slowly but surely cranking down the money that was available for them to do there's experiments. you can clearly understand this became a really big issue of survival but scientists would say we need to keep my lab alive. whatever it takes.

they're saying what do i need to do to do that. is not necessarily to do the best and most careful science but to do flashy experiments and get attention for themselves and to get the grants going and keep their labs humming along and unfortunately it means publishing in high profile scientific journals which expect perfect results and if you have one funny thing that's not quite perfect you'll say i just will mention that my paper because i might not get published whereas if it was in another journal they'd say this is an expiration. i don't understand everything and here's something that doesn't quite fit in but they're afraid if they put that in their paper, all the sudden nature will say obviously don't have a clean story so take it to another journal. the incentives are amiss. what are the consequences of this?

as i mentioned, we fund this research and we would like a returning return on investment and we hope people are moving to improve treatment for diseases and diagnosis and cures and as you undoubtedly noticed by following the news coverage, drugs are getting more and more expensive and it's getting harder and harder to get meaningful new drugs and this is all part and parcel of this process where we want to get the most bang for our buck as taxpayers but the incentives are to not do that. one of the people i talked to was a man named tom murphy who had developed als and he was put into a clinical trial, he got in the trial and it turns out the drug that was part of the experiment didn't work and there's no drug for als that has worked. it turned out there are more than a dozen drugs that have

been tried and failed in summary went back and looked at those drugs to try to understand what was going on and they looked at the mouth six ferment that had initially been done and then notice that the initial experiment was very small and although is promising, when they redid the experiment was the proper number of mice, none of the drugs were really successful. it's like let's take a little more time upfront and figure things out and think about fundamental things like how to design an extreme man correctly to get the right result. so despite the horrible title or frightening title, it's not really all bad news. my preferred title was science fiction because this is a story of slowing down. science is struggling but it's not dead. i think it could be moving forward faster.

what can and should we do. there's a couple of things i talk about my book. one of them is actually, couple years ago the nih said are you using cell lines in your. we expect you to validate them. get them tested. find out if they are what you think they are. if you thought you were studying hilo cells in lung cancer, maybe it got to start over so the nih has woken up to this end to their credit, they are aware of these problems and the director has stepped up and said yes we have some problems we need to address them and they have been thinking about how too do that or at least dealing with the low hanging fruit which is easier to get to. the second thing, there's now movement to improve is education in this area. i talked to a wonderful professor who is saying we need to get phd scientists thinking about the philosophy of science and how to design

experience and think more deeply about what to do. so often if the scientist gets a result they don't understand they say will do another experiment to get more data. i'd like people to stop and think more and to be more philosophical about how they approach their science. my feeling is if we did less science and more carefully, we would benefit as a public because so much of what's published is off and there are a million papers a year published in biomedical research and most of them are never cited again by anybody else so let's publish fewer papers but let's make sure that each one has greater clout. another thing that can and should be done is to increase the standards for how science is done. i talked to a pathologist named carolyn his now at arizona state university who said it's really hard to get money to develop the work on standards, she's really concerned about tissue that is

gathered during autopsies or during surgeries and so on and how that tissue gets handled from the time it's removed to the patient and the time he gets put into the repository. people don't pay a lot of attention to it. she said that could really be affecting the way that tissue and up. if we don't really understand that we can make good use of that. but she's also frustrated because it's really hard to get money to do something that's considered boring. obviously we need to do both and we need to figure out how too do both. last but not least, thinking about how to change the incentives in the system. i'm delighted to see brian in the audience because he's been thinking a lot about these

issues and i think there are other people around the country thinking how do we change the incentives. one of my favorite stories brian told me when i interviewed him for my book was when he was up for promotion, his professor or his chairman said bring me all of your scientific papers and brian set i've written like a hundred papers and we publish a lot of papers. you don't want to read a hundred papers. he said what are you going to do, weigh it? but as brian tells the story, he said he thought about it and realized when he got to the department where he started his career, they said when you're up for promotion we want you to bring your three most exciting and interesting papers and we will evaluate you from that. think how different it would've been and how we

would've thought to construct his research and how valuable the research would be. he's gonna think carefully about really exciting ideas and press on those ideas as opposed to try to get a hundred papers in literature to get my promotion and so on. that's one small example of incentives but there's lots of other ideas we could talk about more and you can do to tweak and make little changes to make some changes to the incentives that are so badly aligned right now to think about scientists doing the best science, not just that which keeps the labs going. thank you for your attention. [applause] >> owner start with a question to all three of our authors and ask you to talk about a surprising announcement that we had last week from the white house, science is going to be well-funded in 2019. we were shocked, i was shocked to learn $37 billion to the nih. nasa gets 20.1 billion, that's

a lot more money than last year. the question first to each of you is, is the problem that you've isolated, the statements wrong incentives, contract disputes going to get better or worse or is it going to change in light of this new funding? >> i think our experience from 1998 to 2003 with a budget was doubled is a little cautionary note. if you put more money into it, you can help alleviate that and i think that's good. many scientists i've talked to are the principal investigator in a laboratory, you might spend three quarters of your time writing grants and you're not even focused on your science, you're hoping your lab is running along and doing that work. i think to the extent that this money actually goes to alleviating that pressure is good, to the extent that it

becomes another excuse to expand unsustainable funding structure, i think it's treacherous. i think it really depends upon how the nih and other agencies and up using that funding. >> i would just like to fly that the white house may have announced it but congress didn't. the white house would never have done that, there were some who didn't want to sign the bill. i would add, just something to what richard said in terms of new dollars for nh which is about 9% on the current year, it's all great, but it's hard to spend money well when it's increasing quickly at that rate. thinking back to the stimulus in 2010 and 2011 when it was like the fire hydrant was open with data spend less by such

and such time. it's hard to spend it well when it's changing that quickly. another example, the cares act, their funding alzheimer's disease, 400 million new dollars every year, growing on the face of 1.8. in one way that's great because it draws new scientist into a field that's crying out for it but at whose expense or other diseases not getting studied to a degree even though there's a lot of crossover and you might make a discovery when you think you're studying alzheimer's which is applicable to many other diseases, but i think it's hard to spend that much new money well, fast. >> i think i'm more bullish on the new money than you are. rather more money than less money. just in terms of nih in particular, what's the rate in

the hospital, like 14% or 12% so this is the exception rate for grant application which has been down toward the single digits, depending on what type of grant you look at. this will allow them to raise the rate and generally speaking that low rate means there are good potential experiments are studies that are out there that are unfunded and can now be funded. so yes, the details are important in terms of it's very tough to spend x amount of dollars on this disease or whatever the details are. i'm sure there are issues there but raising that rate as a general principle is a good thing. just quickly, you asked will help with what i write about, no. on whatever day congress was voting on this, if it was friday or thursday or whatever

it is, rand paul was always ready doing his usual stick of picking out individual nsf for other grants that he thanks are wasteful. it's an error i call the riddic ridiculed and dismissed we make fun of some science and it undermines all science. he's a doctor and he should know better and he does this all the time and he's not in a stop because they give them more money. i think it's good, but there's always going to be people who try to undermine the message. >> thanks for being bullish. i'm curious now, what you think about the science that is done but about the science that's not done. you talk about the weights talked about and negotiated, richard you have ideas for fewer articles and better incentives, but how do we get some of the science that needs to be done done that isn't

being done. example i want to use is science on gun violence. if you turn on booktv, a lot of the country is in washington d.c. right now. they're talking about gun violence and kids are getting up on stage and sing the cdc can't research this. they are fo for bidding. you talk about the unscientific way in which we censor science and what your thoughts are. >> also say, i don't know there's another example like this. i think it's very much an anomaly that unless you can tell me i'm wrong, the moment from 1996 is an incredible bit of anti- scientific out of washington. there's plenty of bad science in washington, but i don't know of another example like that. get rid of that amendment and it feels to me pretty straightforward. >> a couple of states are stepping into the breach,

california funded 5 million new dollars which is a drop in the bucket compared to what's needed. there is some movement. i do think this is an outlier so at least in biomedicine, i can't really speak specific other things to things of which i'm not an expert, but it's really hard to say what science should be funded, 400 million for alzheimer's, you can't predict, it's the nature of the scientific process that you can't predict were breakthrough will come. if you try to dictate a top down too much, it doesn't work well. >> and actually, one thing in this new bill is some language to ease that restriction on funding gun research. it's unclear how far that will go, but they did take some rhetorical effort to ease that basically saying yes, you can fund some research on gun

violence but it was also pretty clear, according to my colleague who reported about this earlier this week but it seems as well you still can't suggest solutions that would include restricting access to guns. that's obviously the genesis of the amendment to make sure that the gun industry is not impeded, and it's not clear how much they can do so there's active debate about what this new language means, if it's really a significant opening for gun research or if it's just more rhetoric that the cdc will be free to step into. >> i think there's a book there. [laughter] let me go to some individual questions. meredith, i cannot help but ask you to talk a little bit about how women fair in your story. i don't remember the last name of scientists whose first name is bernice but for bernice got demoted. the swedish woman who is the

genesis of the fall, i doubt she carries a way that wheelbarrow of money that was in the slide. can you talk about the nature of your story? >> wow. that's broad, but one of the things that really leapt out at me and looking at philadelphia before 1960 when these abortions were going on in the hospital and the fetuses were being brought across the street without the mothers being any other wiser, that whole issue led me too look at like what was the law, and it turned out that as we know know, abortion was a criminal offense in all 50 states but in pennsylvania there wasn't even an exception for th saving the life of the mother, it was still illegal but there were two parallel universes in terms of what really happened. the resort of authorities chasing the back alley butchers and the

self-inflicted abortions and so on and then there was the hospital at the university of pennsylvania, and other major hospitals around the country where therapeutic abortions were allowed, the authorities tolerated them, allowing others to decide in small committees whether a woman would get an abortion or not, but by and large these were wider, wealthier, better connected women and so women of color, poor women, it was very tough to get an abortion. what comes to me as this new mississippi 15 week law which is being challenged in the court, but mississippi has a larger proportion of african-americans than any other state in the country so now the one clinic there will not be able to provide abortions for women after 15 weeks and you know who that affects. it's not the doctor's wife.

i don't know if that answers your question. >> it does. i'll push one step further, just to play the devil's advocate. you talk about vulnerable populations, even in your answer. would you talk a little bit about the critic in the audience who thanks the vulnerable population is the fetus that is now the loser, if you will on the wonderful tears. we always talk about the and justifying the mean but in the last slide they talked about how many people were cured. is there no other way or should we be thinking about the other way. >> i should add that i think they're totally legitimate and well-intentioned people on both sides of the abortion question which i don't think will ever go away, but it needs to be said that the abortions in the book would have happened anyway. my interests was more, as were

legal like the one in the book, my question went to the disposal of the fetal tissue without the women's consent. it's not like having your appendix taken out. it's different and how to respect that and these days in this country, fetal tissue is still important in certain areas of research, particularly for hiv, but the laws are such that consent is required of the woman and it has to be a consent that's obtained separately of of her decision to abort. those two decisions have to be separated. there cannot be money beyond the cost of storage in

preparation for fetal tissue. i think we are getting to an era and new lab techniques are moving us away from our but there's still certain areas of science were that is required were where fetal tissue really is important to advancing science. so i think those are two separate issues. what happens to the fetal tissue after an abortion and whether there should be abortion allowed at all. as long as the law of the land is that abortion is legal, those two questions need to be separated. >> thank you. let's continue talking about vulnerable populations. science and biomedical research, we see a really serious underrepresentation of minorities in clinical trials and i'm wondering if any of the fixes that you have for the biomedical process will address that or should address

that. the intentions for journals and funding agencies and universities, are those areas that we might be looking at for more just distribution of scientific endeavor? >> i would look at it this way and that there are many promising young scientists out there who are training to be scientists right now and i think there's a more diverse pool. it's still not representative of our population at all, but it's more diverse than the senior members of the scientific community. the real problem is with this funding squeeze, most of the young scientists and up not being able to get careers in finance but i think this is another structural problem, how can you say to someone who's in their 70s and still pulling down the big grants, congratulations are doing a wonderful job in your career, when they step aside and let some young scientist with new ideas and new perspective as

you point out, come in and have a chance to test their ideas. i think that's another dimension of this and it's all about the incentives in the way that the enterprise is structured, not so much about whether things are sloppy but basically the cookie way that it's funded and the broken system that needs to be fixed. >> one of my favorite things about your book is understanding more about the scientific process itself. how the inquiry precedes and how one discovery builds slowly and incrementally upon another, there's something counterintuitive about your suggestion that we slow down, that we publish fewer papers, that we privilege fewer people to create these designs and at

the same times we've got these large unanswered questions about lou gehrig's disease and alzheimer's. don't we need more of that slow prodding process to happen, not less of it, do we need to get people going rather than slow them down? >> it is a paradoxical but just asking people to publish less doesn't mean to do less research were no webs. for example, many scientists us use, one reason is that they don't use enough animals to get a really strong result in their experiment. for funding reasons they might say i only have money to do six experienc experiments about six mice in all send you end up with experiences that are not robust enough to give you meaningful results. if the scientists is limited to fewer experiment but do it with meaningful sample you're more likely to believe those results. you may test fewer ideas but if you get an answer you can believe it more.

i think we are in a situation, one of the stories i tell about cancer researcher at a drug company looked at 53 experiments and he said if these were results that would pay off these would all be great leads for new cancer drugs. he went and retested them and they could only get six of them to work. was only when he went back to the original science and set i'm having trouble reproducing your experiment. can you do this for me and the original science would often say i can get its work this time but it worked last time or whatever and were moving on. i think universities are starting to think about this and when exciting results come out of their lab there setting up subsidiary labs to say let us tested so we can spotcheck and see if that's a real result that's leading somewhere or if it's just a dead-end.

i think those are the sorts of things that bring us more robust results that mean something, but don't just fill the literature to give people a nice long list that can actually move science forward. >> thank you so much. can i talk to little bit about your recommendations on how to fix things. it's easy to know what richard's list is but i want to know what your list looks like and how we get less cherry picking, less bait and switch and less of those wonderful categories that you highlight in your book. >> if i had a good answer would've been a different book. i don't have a really solid list of ways to fix it. as long as there are politicians are going to get things wrong intentionally or unintentionally because they are not experts and we can't expect it to go away. have a long-term solution which is improved scientific

literacy and education. if we could sort of improve all of our appreciation for method and some of the gritty under the radar stuff that your book talks about, if the general public appreciated that a little bit more will be harder for politicians to do this sort of thing. obviously there's not really a useful thing to say, let's reform the entire education system, that's one thing. i guess the other thing is just money. you take money out of politics. i have really useful ideas, honestly, take money out of politics and the politicians have a lot less incentives. it's not like an actionable thing necessarily. part of the reason i wanted to write something like this was the art really a ton of

actionable things to do without politicians messing up science other than us calling them out for it. if you can see it you can do a little better with that. it's education and it's money. if you have ideas for that, i'm all ears. >> one of my favorite things about your book is the humor in it and you talk about oversimplification as a jedi mind trick. i want to take a little bit of a push back and challenge you and ask you whether it's just as much of a jedi mind trick to make things more complicated than they need to be. the example i want to give, i just had to play with you a little bit. the simple statement which is made to explain that babies feel pain at 20 weeks. you know, that's not right, here's what's right. the response may look like the fetus is experiencing pain but let's go back to the 2005

revie review. the answer is withdrawal from stimuli is a noncritical spinal reflex exhibited by influence within a separately and those in a vegetative state who lack function. i'm thinking that's just not a sound bite. >> does not catch enough for you. >> obviously, politician, we do not expect our elected officials to talk about science in the same way that a paper will talk about it. i don't expect them to do that at all and it's a skill to not, to simplify complex science in ways that people can understand and grab a hold of, however if you're using that technique to pull the wool over someone's eyes, that's a little different than trying to explain things in simple terms. in that example, the book isn't just quotes, i tried to

explain why there is a better way to say this thing that these politicians were saying. in this case, they are taking advantage of some very sketchy research that tries to claim that a fetus feels pain at 20 weeks when in fact the vast amount of research and experts think that is not true. you could just as easily say something very simply by saying science is unsure exactly when is fetus deals pain because the fetus cannot tell us when it feels pain. in terms of neuroanatomy, it's probably closer to 27 weeks or after. there are ways to use it that aren't quite the same level of deception, i guess. >> i've taken up much of the conversation now and like to hear from some of you in the

audience. i want to know where the microphone is before i start calling on people. can we start the front? think you. >> the gentleman in the gray sweater. >> actually, two questions. one for meredith and now i've lost that question, oh, i remember, what is unique about the two cell lines, henrietta lacks and the cells that were imported from europe that makes them so valuable for these decades of research? is understood what makes him immortal? there people in silicon valley pretending or claiming to be researching immortality. it would seem that those cell lines might have some relevance to that. the question regarding the design of experiments, the committee for responsible medicine advocates doing more with technology and less with

animals. a question for you is how credible is that in terms of getting better experiment design, faster results and doing less nasty things to animals. >> because i have to go so fast, i didn't perhaps make it clear that the, those are not immortal cells. those are normal. that was part of their tremendous value in vaccine making so they go through about 50 divisions before they die. the power of exponential growth in the huge numbers of files developed mean that for practical purposes it created an infinite supply. part of this is because he froze the cells after they divided about nine times. it was so powerful that he already froze 80 800 files of 400 million cells in each.

if you saw those cells a year later, ten years later, 50 years later, today, they remember how many divisions it gone to and they start dividing again. >> what was so unique about cells from europe. >> they're not unique in the sense that one could derive another cell line very similar from a pair of fetal lungs of abortion that happens tomorrow. what is valuable now that vaccine makers have decades of experience, they have their own little personalities and they get to be known in the lab by those working with them. basically, if it's not broke, don't fix it. why would you want to make a vaccine with a new cell line from another normal fetus we already understand the cells of well and they have this decades long record of safety and effectiveness in producing this vaccine. that's why there valuable.

the knowledge base that's been built up around them and the fact that there's still vials and vials of them deeply frozen that will last entire great-grandchildren are in the grave and beyond. >> the cancer cells, that's the problem with cancer is cells proliferate uncontrollably. some people consider it to be so different that they think of it as a new species. it was adapted to grow in plastic at high action concentrations so even though we still think of it as a human cell line, it's really different from what human self look like. you asked me about the prospect of getting away from animal research and i think animals are models and there often quite imperfect the

indians for us and there's a great deal of hope that there are other ways of doing this in their ideas percolating around that are quite ready for prime time but they're moving in that direction. one that really interest me is something where you can actually take human cells that will reproduce and form little balls that can take your neurological tissue that are many trains. they can't think that they have electrical signals like brain stupid the question is is that a good model for studying something like a brain to her tumor. is it a close enough model. that's a very active area of research. there's a lot of excitement going on but it takes a while to validate that and say does this really work, how good is it, how do we compare to animal research and so on. there been summoning missteps from animal research and have just not translated into human research but it still often the best thing we have so

until we have something better were stuck with it. i agree, ideally we will find something that's a more powerful stand-in as opposed to these animals. >> my question is mostly for dave, but feel free to chime in. you mentioned a long-term solution to this connection of scientific communication on improving science literacy for everyone. you think the burden is mostly on politicians, journalists, the public to up their scientific literacy or should scientists and academics be able to communicate their work that's more understandable to everyone else and not just academics. >> that's a good question. i guess my first answer is a question. of scientists, i think they're great indicators but yes, if tomorrow they were all

incredible communicators about all their work, does that mean politicians suddenly stop getting it wrong just because the scientists are better at telling us about it? my guess is probably no. yes, definitely it would be great for people doing the research to be better at telling us what they're doing and i think there's a lot of movement in that direction, a lot of universities have workshops for scientists to improve their communication, i think it's kind of in all of the above thing. again, unless you have a way to solve the money and politics thing, they're going to keep doing it so it's up to people listening and voting for them to understand better what they're saying. if part of the way we all get better at understanding the science that they're trying to legislate on, if part of that

is that scientist get better at telling us about that than absolutely. i'm not sure it's a matter of dividing up the blame necessarily. does that answer your question. >> one more in this section. >> my question is primarily for mr. harris. i enjoyed your book, although i'm not sure enjoy is the right word. your book is about biomedical research in social science research, are you a little more sanguine about the physical sciences, and if so, why. >> i'm, although it's not been examined as closely as biological science has. i shouldn't say actually the national academy of science, i'm doing a study to ask that question, what's happening in other areas of science in terms of reproducibility but i think they deal with different kinds of issues. for one thing, one of the real

struggles in biomedical sciences is for dealing with living systems that are highly variable to begin with. particularly if you are using a small sample size, you're likely just be fighting really hard to see some sort of signal of what's really happening above cost any of what's happening anyway so biomedical sciences have that problem and behavioral sciences due to because human beings are so variable. if you are studying adams, there's less variability from one calcium adam to the next and also as a physical sciences they think about these problems more deeply. for example the hunt in switzerland, it was a huge experiment involving thousands of scientists what they did was set it up when they said this is so hard, were actually going to build two separate

detectors with different principles and see if we get the same answer from each of those. that verification was built in right the beginning. that's why they were pretty confident with those results. but it cost $4 billion, one experiment so we can't afford to do that for every single medical experiment. i think there are issues, i think of the fusion story where people were full for a long time whether it was happening in a test tube. my expectation is that we'll see less reproduce issues that we have another science. >> climate change falls under that umbrella and that has required a ton of studies because of the scrutiny that the field gets so hockey stick graph has been repeated in like 25 different ways at this point showing the paleo

climate so there are some fields that have demanded of themselves for weird reasons. >> this one question appeared on the front and one there. thank you. >> thank you for sharing. i really appreciate it. from the ministry of them.it sounds like a pretty potential hurdle to doing good science is the volatility in terms of funding, you mentioned decline in real dollars or decreasing dollars in funding and also in $400 million. can you speak to some type of vision or principles of what would be helpful for scientists in terms of creating a sustainable future to increase both the quality and quantity of research from the economic standpoint so you're not wearing about will my lab shutdown tomorrow or i'm going to get

$400 million. >> one thing we are seeing, one problem is sort of this cost shifting. when i went to the university of california back in the 1970s, it was actually the university of california and more than half the money came from the state of california. today i was talking to researcher and i said how much of your funding comes in california. he said i think it's only about 5%. i went to fact check that in his public affairs office and they said no it's actually 3%. the same is true at the university of virginia. a small percentage of the money comes from the university of virginia and that creates huge volatility. they realize they can make scientists raise their own money and get these federal grants and the husband very damaging. they found a cheaper way to keep their universities going. i think it's a political

question of how can voters in the states say we value this work, we wish that the state taxpayers would fund the university so scientists are less dependent upon grants. i'm not too optimistic that could happen, but pie-in-the-sk pie-in-the-sky, that's one thing that could help a lot. >> there are these inconvenient things called elections and change of congress, you wish you could say nih you're going to have 2.5% increase in your budget each year for the next 25 years and then people could have a framework in which to work but i don't know how we get away from the funding and politics. i wish i had an answer. >> the woman in the white sweater, i'll ask you after this gentleman. >> my question was very

similar to has more to do with the grant process. it seems like a great idea to give grant monies to the winner, but that actually does is makes the science go to the most conventional science possible. as an alternative is that we could take a third of our budget and say it doesn't go to specific grant processes but institutions to hire young people. instead of having a philanthropy that says i'm going to have a blue ribbon panel pick up the next 20 great-grandson alzheimer's disease i will instead from the first three years of junior faculty at a great institution. maybe we could have comments related to that. >> some of that goes on but not very much. there are grants that come out of the nih and also institutions like the howard hughes medical institute that says we won't fund specific projects but we will pick the best of the best and give them a huge pile of money so they don't have to spend so much time scrambling for grants but the reality is they still do

go out and they're still spending time trying to get even more money from the nih. it is, again, because we have the shortage of funding but i do think particularly there should be more focused on diversity in science a more money focused on getting diverse people, diverse points of view and letting young scientists have a chance to get their feet on the ground and see what's going on. there's a little money for that but there certainly could be a lot more. >> this is for mr. powers. you had mentioned that it switched from public funding to scientists finding their own funding. an awful lot of funding is coming from corporations and associations of the sugar industry or the meatpacking industry or whatever it is. have you any figures for how much of that funding is

commercially funded as opposed to nsf funding and how much of an influence is that on the overall quality of research? >> if you look globally at funding for biomedical research, a lot of the research starts in the university but then gets picked up for drug companies but if you look at the drug companies are doing to spend their own money to develop drugs that then they are going to sell, that's probably the biggest single pool of money. the next biggest pool of money is the nih funding. it's up to $37 billion. year now. there's lots of associations and things like that, but there's still a fairly minor share of the total funding. the question you are raising is how much can we trust research done at universities if it is funded by drunk drug companies. in think we need to be mindful of where it comes from to make sure they are grants and research that's trying to expand knowledge and not

trying to promote a particular product. we do think about those questions, where's the money coming from, there's a study published in the new england journal. was it funded by drug company and things like that. it's important to bear that in mind but it's also important as dave alludes to others also just philosophical biases that come into science as well and these politicians are choosing not to believe. think of science not just for economic reasons but it may be philosophical reasons. if climate change means that the government has have a heavier hand in the way we regulate things and people don't like the governments heavy handbell say i don't believe in climate change. it's important not to get completely sidetracked or think only about the financial conflict but also be aware of other kinds of conflicts. everyone comes with bias and

we need to be aware of what those are and why we react the way we do. >> and like to leave time for the authors to speak individually. before i do, let me make sure i didn't miss a question on the side of the room. let's let this be the last formal question. then we will let the authors speak with you individually. >> i should have given you a warning. >> first, thank you very much to all the participants. i think these are all great and really interesting. following up a little bit on the last question, there seems to be more and more of a trend of the super wealthy and billionaires actually finding a priority, whether it's cancer or immunotherapy and plunging 100 million are some big amount of money and i think there's some who favor

this trend. i think there are potential implications that all of you could speak to and is this problematic if more of our science is being corporate-funded or funded by super wealthy individuals. i think the nih is certainly making more of an effort as mr. harris was saying to address summaries issues like reproducibility, rigor, there's new criteria with grant review where these issues are being addressed and i think it's within the past year with grant review that these are new criteria. all bets are off when you're at this privately funded science, is this going to be a big step back if this represents a bigger proportion of the science that's happening now. are you seeing any signs that privately funded science is

paying attention to these issues, i think there's medical and legal implications. i don't know if meredith wants to address those that they could and up being privately owned, some of the advances that happen with the super wealthy funding science and also dave could maybe address the political level, i think there's going to be agendas that some of the super wealthy have with things that their funding in science could be pushed in certain directions. and sorry for the complicated nature of that. >> in law, we call that a compound question. >> in my experience i welcome philanthropy. : :

maybe i will disagree a little bit if you look for example at. there is a huge supporter of global health. they are looking at what is best for mankind in a way that they get to choose what's important and what's not s said they think malaria is a big deal and if they change the mind of malaria money if it goes away. the other one paying close attention to is the initiative where they had one of these billionaires reporting money into research and it does not well appreciated that they are funding research at the universities anuniversity's ande university scientists. but that initiative is not a nonprofit. it is an llc liability corporation, and i think there's

serious questions of who will own the property generated from those universities that we are also supporting if that comes along. so i don't have a full story but i think it's something that we need to be aware of that those relationships are changing in the way that we do science and you are right to say we need to keep an eye on this. this. >> let that be the last word from the podium. [applause] and the final panel from the book tv coverage of the virginia festival