to do with the steering wheel and the pedal. you don't even know where the steering wheel is or that such a thing exists. i think we as a society have a lot of decisions to make and those decisions need to be informed. then happened in the past. ..'s ..

virginia, had to pause for a second. i just returned to my mama to six months ago. i want to thank the sponsors of today's program, charlottesville community, the science policy initiative at uva. women in math and science who support the festival and ask that you too support the festival, free of charge and remember to go online for information about how to support this festival and keep it going for many years to come. we ask that you go online and give your evaluation of this program and provide useful information. there will be an opportunity

for you to meet the authors we will present today and i am a book author and would love not to take any of those back with them and find them to whoever you would like them signed files to. the program title today is called digging science, brilliant, sloppy or mangled. i am a lawyer. you might wonder why a lawyer is talking about science. i use to practice law not far from here, we use scientists as expert witnesses. when they speak everyone listens. i will be listening to the panel to see if that was warranted or not. i write about public health and the reason i argue in favor of more just laws for vulnerable populations, i might learn whether my laws suggested laws

are supported or not. today we will hear from three brilliant scientists certainly. i will introduce each briefly in the order they will speak and that will allow them to speak without me interrupting them further. after their 10 or 15 minute presentation i will start the conversation from a few provocative questions that would get them speaking among each other. i will open the floor so you can get involved in the conversation as well. when you do please wait for the microphone because we are being recorded. this program is being broadcast on the city government access channel, charlottesville's tv 10 and streamed on today's facebook page at charlottesville city hall. because this is a recorded event during questions and answers please raise your hand and wait for the volunteer to hand you the microphone before

speaking. let me tell you who you are going to hear from. meredith wadman's book is at the 15, science, politics and the human cost of defeating disease. i will tell you it has been recently nominated and made the shortlist for the welcome book prize and we are excited about that. meredith has been covered by by medical research from washington for 20 years. in the new york times and wall street journal and others, she was an editorial fellow, washington dc think tank. she graduated stanford and columbia university, a native of vancouver, meredith began her medical school at the university of british columbia and finished as a rhodes scholar at the university of

oxford. if that were not enough she earned a journalism degree at columbia university in new york. you will hear from meredith first. dave levitan's book is called "not a scientist," how politicians mistakenly misrepresent and utterly mangel science. dave is a freelance journalist based in philadelphia. he write articles focusing on an array of scientific topics especially those at the intersection of policy and politics. is articles have been published in a host of other places. i list a few, reuters, psychology today, wired, the atlantic, scientific american, guardian and washington post. i had the pleasure of reading a couple that i will read to you. what is called when a president banishes science from the white house. that one will surprise you. and another called radical proposal would prop up the coal powered industry. that one will surprise you not

at all. you one next hear from richard harris to my immediate left. 's book is a content, how sloppy science creates worthless cures, precious hopes and wastes billions. this is his first book but not his first rodeo. is one of the nation's most celebrated science journalists. he has covered science, medicine and the environment for 30 years since 1986 for npr. he is 3-time the association of science, science journalism award. 's award-winning report included 2010 report that revealed us government was vastly underestimating the amount of oil spills from the blowout in the gulf of mexico. he shared a peabody prize with rebecca pearl for a report on the tobacco industry's secret documents showing they were well aware of the hazards of smoking. richard lives in washington dc and asked me not to say all those things about him but i couldn't help myself so we will

start now and hear from meredith first. >> thank you for the intro and thank you for your interest and thanks to the charlottesville organization making the book festival possible. wonderful to be with people who care about writing and reading and wonderful to find an audience which i will be as quick as i can because it is usually a longer talk. why a book called "not a scientist"? it began with another book, the immortal life of henrietta lacks which i devoured. i read and reread that book when it came out in 2010, a writer, trapped down the descendents of henrietta lacks who was an impoverished nearly illiterate african-american woman whose cells from her cervical cancer of which she was dying in 1951 were taken without her knowledge or consent and turned into an

enormously valuable research tool. if you want a page turner in this area i highly recommend this if you haven't read it already. that book was on my mind when a couple years later i was working for nature and reading the competition and science as a policy forum published a discussion between ethicists and other dignitaries, whether people should be paid when their tissues are turned into lucrative medicines and therapies. in response to this printed argument came in a letter, the case of wi 38. a man who identified himself as leonard, herself getting the attention. derived from an aborted fetus that was legally aborted in sweden and i turned those cells into miniature vaccine factories that protected hundreds of millions of people from diseases. i got into a huge fight with

the us government in the 1970s over who owned those self and that raised questions that were in answer to this day. how has this not been turned into a book? i phoned leonard and said it sounds like a story that hasn't been told. he was 84 at the time and living on a sea ranch where he retired with his wife in california. sounds like there might be a story here and he said is there ever and that that point i happened to be going to california anyway for college reunion and was able to visit with him and spent literally hours, he was a generous with his time and took me down his memory lane. here he is with his wife to this place, 1960, an independent research institute tucked away on the campus of the university of pennsylvania. it was dying a slow death because it was neglected by the board of trustees for years and years, when in 1957 the man in

the middle, larger than life polish émigre and polio vaccine, offered to take over. he took it over, rescued it, filled with world-class biologists and hired this young man, age 30 in 1958, by the bootstraps philadelphian who came from nowhere, no money and no family. immigrants from eastern europe, parents, the last generation had been raised in a horrible slum of philadelphia and he was brilliant and ambitious and he was darned if he was going to be hired as hillary kotowski hired him to be essentially a servant to the brilliant biologist recruited to make cultures for them to use in their brilliant experiments. he said i'm not going to just

do this but i will make some discoveries myself and his biggest discovery was normal cells which were thought to be immortal when they were grown in a lab actually aged and died in lab dishes just like you or me unless they were cancerous. cells in the lab were mortal. this was the limited number of time cells could die in a lab dish before dying and it put him on the map if you ask any young cell biologists, i know the hazlitt limit and that was a tremendous discovery but it was met with a huge amount of pushback. he had begun life with a chip on his shoulder, rejection by and large of his discovery by biologists and nobel type figures graded on him. in any event he made this discovery using cells from abortions performed across the street at the university of pennsylvania and i will come back to that. he decided at the time he

published this, the nih paid attention, normal cells the died in a lab dish, now we can study aging, we can study how viruses infect normal cells, we can do all these things and they said we will pay you to have leonard hayes let -- heyflick, handsomely come a $120,000 a year or more which was a lot of money in 1962. heyflick began deriving these cells. the fine print in the conflict, this will become important, it looks boring but it says when this contract is up, the contractor, heyflick agrees to turn over to the government any materials developed under this contract. file that in your mind for a minute. his ambition was to turn his normal human cells into many vaccine factories that could

pump out viruses for vaccines and really quickly virus reproduction, viruses can't replicate except inside cells. if you want to make viral vaccines which consist of weakens live viruses, you got to have the reproduced in quantity, there was a problem. the rhesus monkey whose kidney cells were used to make the polio vaccines which were the great public-health victory of the day had been discovered to house silent monkey viruses and these viruses were thought to be not harmful to humans. they were multi-viruses. then on the left, polio vaccine scientist discovered a virus in these cells that actually caused laboratory hamsters to develop tumors and die in the hundreds. when she pronounced that discovery to her boss she was demoted, put in a broom closet, her staff stripped - she was up two assistance, she was

punished. eventually the truth came out, not the greatest source of information, actually correct. the national enquirer got the story in the new york times and other major media ignored it. basically they had to move on, had to get to a different species of animal to make polio vaccine because it was not known whether this particular virus would cause cancer in human beings over time. enter mrs. glottal -- mrs. x. she was married to a hard drinking ex-con who was often out of town for manual labor, had four children already, she was pregnant early in 1962 and felt she couldn't face it. it was legal but not easy to get an abortion in sweden at the time and the fourth month, she was 17 before she found a rare sympathetic gynecologist who agreed to perform the

abortion. her fetus was taken without her knowledge or consent, dissected at the home of the famous nobel prize physiology of medicine and heyflick was waiting for them in philadelphia. he arrived the summer of 1962, 800 ampoules like those pictured here, each had 4 million cells that would replicate in the lab to a certain point derived from the lungs of fetus x and he froze them and began handing them to vaccine makers, scientists, to say you can use these cells to make clean, safe antiviral vaccines because we can ascertain, testify to the cleanliness of these particular cells, tested them backwards and forward them not only that but sent a physician in sweden

back to mrs. x to say we took your fetus and we need to make sure you don't have xyz problems in your family, infectious cancer and so on so that was her rude awakening several months after the abortion and she did testify and her medical record was provided and her cells certified. and heyflick's mind was clear and safe, he controlled the vaccine licensing process, he was cautious, risk-averse, had been through several vaccine disasters where people had been harmed or killed by vaccines under his oversight or he had witnessed these up close and personal and wanted to stick with the monkey cells, he preferred the evil he knew to the one he did not. for 10 years prevented any cells mean in these clinking human fetal cells, vaccines made of them from being licensed in the us. there was a reason these fetal cells were needed and it was called rubella. it is also known as german measles. it might be so mild we don't

know we have a, two in three don't notice when they have it but if you feel ill, you stay home today from work. in 1964 there was no vaccine against rubella and of pregnant women got rubella it was devastating on the phoenix -- the fetus. effectively vital organ especially if the woman is infected in the first trimester. in 1964 there was a massive epidemic of rubella in this country. you can see the rubella virus particles moving between two cells. in 20,000 or more this was underreported, 64, 65, blinded by cataracts, heart defects, profoundly deaf, intellectually disabled because microcephaly, same thing you see in the seeker babies and they have

combinations of these conditions. it was devastating. sivan winslow was born deaf in 1964, all but blind and had heart defects. this is a picture of him at age 8. women of childbearing age wanted to vaccine and wanted it fast and the pressure came from congress on nih, get the vaccine. a young pediatrician named stanley plotkin took his cells, and virus vaccine in them and there they are, the wi 38 affects the fetus and the vaccine was first tested as a catholic orphanage with permission of the archbishop, this was common practice in the day, institutionalized population, be they prisoners or preemies in hospital charity wards or orphans under care of the catholic church, and this

was how it was done for two decades and sometimes 3 after world war ii would ultimately the vaccine did prevail, a tempestuous regulator at nih was forced out of office, the rubella vaccine became the are in the merck and mr vaccine, it was approved in 1975 resulting in rubella being a limited in this country and in 2015 in the entire western hemisphere. 72% of people vaccinated against rubella in childhood and 100,000 babies are born still every year afflicted by numerous birth defects because of rubella and the vaccine could have prevented it. heyflick felt like a second-class citizen. his contributions were never

acknowledged, not least the wi 38, and moved to a better job at stanford, went to the basement, took every vaccine ampule, and the family sedan and went to stanford via the grand canyon and petrified forest with the liquid nitrogen refrigerator strapped in the backseat. this will come back to bite him at stanford when nih's chief investigator of waste, fraud and abuse, they began a company began selling the cells, highly problematic. and getting the whole story. and the take-home message, so heyflick cells prevented thousands and thousands of lives being lost particularly to rubella. this child happens to be in south africa during the

apartheid era. this baby died of measles which invaded his lungs. 6 billion vaccine doses have been made in heyflick's cells or copycat cell line, an aborted fetus in 1966. [applause] >> i don't know if i can compete with that kind of story. thank you to everybody for coming and dan for moderating and various sponsoring and all this, we appreciate it. i told you i would tell you about the origin of my book "not a scientist" and what the point is.

basically it got started when i got a full-time job as a staff writer@factzoobacheck.org, spent like her as a freelancer, i spent about a year as the first ever full-time science writer. i assume people are familiar with fact check. they call out when politicians get things wrong so they got a grant specifically to cover science. they had done that before but not in a methodical fashion, but a section of the site was dedicated to science the they hired me to do that. i encourage you to check that out. my day job at the beginning of 2015 was to pay attention to what politicians were saying about scientific topics and when they got it wrong explain why they were wrong and i didn't lack for material. i basically started to notice

some patterns with the way they talked about science. sometimes they were repeated talking points, the same thing almost word for word said by different politicians about the same topic. it also came up a lot that they would use similar techniques lose not necessarily the same words that similar styles of speech or rhetorical devices to talk about science and they would get the science wrong in doing so. i started collecting these techniques at first out of curiosity but it quickly became clear there was an extensive list of these that i thought might be useful to gather together in one place and that is what the book is, a playbook of various techniques politicians use to get science wrong. i specifically don't try to assign intent to a lot of these errors in the book. a lot of the time they are doing this on purpose but i find it difficult to say

definitively when politician x said scientific thing why that they were 100% lying. i tried to just explain the reasons they are wrong and the reasons this rhetorical device is working against us. the first main talking point was the title of the book. i thought i would give you a little bit of the origin a story, a lot of people have heard that. i'm not a scientist but, always the but that comes after it that matters the most. i found this line infuriating. you heard it a lot in 2009, 10, 11, 12 range of years. almost universally when politicians were talking about climate change, used for other things in the same. go. climate change was the most commonly discussed topic when that came up.

the line was intended to act as a smokescreen more than anything else. science is unknowable but we can't possible know the actual answers but i will go ahead and give you a fake answer anyway on whatever the topic was. once they decided to use that as the title, i decided to figure out the origins of the line because it was so commonly used. it was like everyone got a memo that they were going to have to use this line so i started figuring out where it came from and a decent chunk farther than i thought it did. since the whole point of the book is about evidence i cannot promise this is the very first time someone used this line in this way but the first one i can find was in september 1980 during a presidential campaign, ronald reagan used the line. start to pick up my own book but i will read it to you because it is kind of fun. he was asked during a campaign

event about various environmental issues that were relevant at the time. he said i have loan twice over mount saint helens on our west coast which 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 released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere of the world than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind that people are so concerned about. i will explain just how wrong he is in a second. i find this really fascinating because it is a topic we don't hear about anymore. sulfur dioxide is a primary component of acid rain and that was a big deal in 1980 and a lot of people remember that but you don't hear anything about acid rain anymore because we kind of fixed the problem. at the time this was a big deal and a common topic of discussion among politicians because it would require government regulation to do

something. at the time mount saint helens was emitting 2000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day on average. sound like a lot. all human sources in the united states, 81,000 tons per day. globally, 300,000 tons from human sources every day. if he was talking about just the eruptions, mount saint helens -- because of the eruption in may 1980 - obviously 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 and just from the united states alone. globalism, more relevant number anyway. he was way off. it almost doesn't matter. the use of this line i'm not a

scientist, it doesn't make a ton of sense beyond that you don't hear people use the same formulation, you don't hear a politician say i'm not a lawyer or i'm not an economist or i'm not an expert at north korean diplomacy. you don't hear that. you just trust they have experts around, to legislate on, and politicians - shenanigans, i guess, to say things out of the norm, they make the excuse first. i was not the only one to find this ridiculous, one of my favorite lines, gop consultant and strategist, mike mckenna once called that line, i'm not a scientist line, the dumbest talking point in the history of

mankind. i feel pretty good about that being the title. i will stop there and say the techniques i'm talking about, most of what i wrote about, i go back in history for some of them but a lot is semi-recent examples. these techniques are very relevant. i'm not breaking any ground to say the current government is not science friendly and it is more important for all of us to hear when they are trying to get things passed. that is the point. [applause] >> i picked up your book today and it is like a field guy, let's look at cherry picking. thank you for coming. i will start my conversation

with henrietta lacks because this is a story about scientists getting things wrong they don't need to get wrong which is a recurrent theme in my book and when i was a young reporter in san francisco in the 1980s there was a scientific paper published saying there i many experiments in research laboratories involved in cell cultures in the test tube or petri dishes and it turns out in many cases scientists are mistaken what soul they are using. turns out henrietta lacks cells are the kudzu of the world of medicine because they growing credible he rapidly, the smallest bit of contamination, before you know it, your cell which you think might be a live reseller breast cancer cell actually gets overrun and what you are studying is a cervical cancer cell. early 1980s someone published a

paper saying this is a big problem in biomedicine and many experiments are wrong. i thought this is a huge thing. what are people going to do? how will they take these result in scientific literature and admit these are mistaken results and fix the problems and move forward? i sat and watched and absolutely nothing happens. really? this is a major contamination of scientific literature and the scientific response was nothing to see here, move along. this persisted for a long time. a study published last year tried to total up how many papers had been published calling a cell something when it turns out to be the henrietta lacks cell line, they found 33,000 papers in the scientific literature, mostly things us taxpayers have paid for over the years that claim to be one kind of cell but were actually hilo cells which how

many papers cited those 33,000 papers of mistaken identity? the answer was half 1 million papers in scientific literature are pointing to the 33,000 studies that are a case of mistaken identity. if it weren't bad enough is an international committee of people who got together to say this is a problem not for these cell lines that many cell lines misidentified through scientific literature and tabulating. they have a list of 400 cell lines that are said to be one kind of cell that are actually another kind of cell line. these were hard things to figure out a little bit. you have to do careful testing to figure out what it was. look at it under the microscope. it was a fuzzy business to do but for the last 10 to 20 years it was pretty easy.

quite inexpensive tests to sort out cases of misidentified cells. this is the kind of issue i was looking at in my book. $30 billion a year of nih funding, more than that thanks to what congress did the other day and why are there so many dead insects? one reason up front is science is hard. you should not expect, i do not expect science will get everything right. if they did i would be worried because they are supposed to be looking at the frontiers of science and you expect missteps and misdirection's and that is part of the normal process of science. we shouldn't be mad about that. we should say this is how exploration works, you go this way, doesn't work that welcome you go that way, doesn't turn out to work that well and eventually find a path forward. what i was focusing on are the sorts of things i can and should be preventing like looking at bad cell lines and

not taking the time to say i'm using these for a long time, find out what they really aren't scientists are reluctant to do that. why is this going on? what other problems are there? i mentioned bad ingredients, the cell lines are good example of that but there are other examples. that experiment and design turns out that people in biomedical research don't learn the best techniques for designing, one professor moved down the hall and said why did you use meissen that examined? everyone uses them. that is not a good experimental design. how many mice do unidas why do you need a certain number of mice for an experiment? scientists also are liable to use bad statistics. there are statistical tricks people use a little bit deliberately, a lot is unconscious, a lot is not fully understanding what is going on. i remember talking to another

scientist named keith yamamoto who said when i went into biology, he is older than i am, he said our philosophy was in biology we went in because we didn't want to do math. our sense was if you have to use statistics to analyze the results, think of a better experiment. that made sense in the descriptive era of biology. it has become quantitative and makes no sense now. there is a long tradition of biologists not thinking is deeply about statistics as they need to do. last but not least, bad incentives in the world of biomedical research. scientists respond to the motivations in front of them, we were in a hypercompetitive world of biomedical research. in 2003, fabulous or so they

thought, the amount of laboratory space and universities increased by 50% in the us during that time and congress said we have taken care of nih and they stopped increasing funding for nih and in real dollar terms it declined 20% so you built up a huge community of people and started cranking down the amount of money available for them to do their experiments. you can clearly understand this became a big issue of survival but scientists say i would love to keep my lab alive. whatever it takes i'm responsible for my graduate students and the rest of this. what do i need to do to do that? it is to do flashy experiments to get attention for themselves to get grants going and coming along and often means publishing in high-profile

scientific journals and so on which expect perfect results. one funny thing that is not quite perfect, i won't mentioned that in my paper whereas if it was in another journal this is an exploration. i don't understand everything and this doesn't quite fit in but they are afraid if they put that in, you don't have a long story here. incentives are myth. what are the consequences of this? we taxpayers fund this research, we hope they are moving in the right direction, treatments for diseases and - following news coverage, news getting more expensive, it is getting harder and harder to

get new drugs out of the pipeline and this is part and parcel of this process where -- incentives for the scientists or not to do that. one of the people i talked to was tom murphy, and put in a clinical trial, part of the experiment to see if it would work, there is no drug for that and a dozen drugs tried and failed and looks at those drugs. and it has initially been done, the initial experiment, the proper mice - none of the drugs

were successful. let's take time up front, figure that out more carefully, to design experiments correctly for the right results. my book despite the horrible title or frightening title is not really all that news. my preferred title was science friction because this is a story of slowing down science, it is struggling but not dead and science is still moving forward but it could be moving forward faster. we could reduce the science friction. actually a couple years ago the nih said to scientists, and to get them tested. and study lung cancer, maybe you have to start your

experiment over again. the nih has woken to this and to their credit they are aware of these problems, the director, francis collins, stepped up and said we have problems to address and we have been thinking about how to do that, dealing with the low hanging fruit which is easier to get to. there is now a movement to improve education in this area. i talked to a professor at johns hopkins who is saying we need to get phd scientists thinking about philosophy of science, how to design experiment, think more deeply about what to do. if a scientist gets a result they don't understand, do another experiment to get more data and figure it out. i would like people to stop and think more and be more philosophical about how they approach their science. my feeling is if we did less science and more carefully, we

would benefit. it is just off and 1 million papers published in scientific literature, most are never cited again by anybody else. let's publish fewer papers but make sure each one has greater clout. another thing is to increase standards for how science is done. i talked to a pathologist at arizona state university who says it is hard to get money to work on standards, she is concerned about tissue gathered on autopsies or during surgeries and so on. someone had colon cancer removed. when it is removed from the patient, until the time it gets put in the biological repository, handling it in crazy ways. that will affect the way the

tissue and up -- if we don't understand that we can't make good use of that. it is hard to get money to do something that seems boring as well. let's follow tissue through this process, i have a new idea for something that might work for cancer and we need to do both and figure out how to do both. last but not least thinking about changing the system. i'm delighted to see brian, the center for open science in virginia, he is thinking a lot about these issues. there are people around the country thinking how do we change this? one of the favorite stories brian told me was when he was up for promotion, his professor or his chairman said bring your scientific papers, i have

written 100 papers, we publish a lot of papers, you don't want to read hundred papers, all of your papers, as brian tells us, he thought about it and the department when he started his career, talking about the 3 most interesting and exciting paper that evaluate you from that, think how different it would have been to construct his research, and in the literature, that was one small example of incentives but there are lots of other ideas, that you can tweak, make little changes but to change the

incentives that are badly aligned, to talk about doing the best science, not just the science that keeps labs going. [applause] >> all three of our authors, and ask you to talk about a surprising announcement we had last week from the white house. science is going to be well-funded in 2018-19. we were shocked, i was shocked to learn $37 billion to the nih, $7 billion to nsf, nasa gets $21 billion, a lot more money than last year. is the problem that you isolated misstatements, wrong incidents, contract disputes, going to get better or worse in light of new funding?

>> our experience from 1998-2003 as the budget was doubled is a cautionary note. science says we could use more money and we have a hypercompetitive world to put more money into it. you can alleviate that and that is good. many scientists, the printable investigator in the laboratory, you may spend 3 corners of your time writing grants to get more money, not just focusing on science but hope the lab is running along and doing that work. to the extent this money goes to alleviating that pressure is good. to expand unsustainable funding structure is treacherous. it really depends how the nh and other agencies use that

funding. >> the white house may have announced it but congress did it. the white house would never have done that. they didn't want to sign a bill into law -- in nih, in the current year, it is all great, increasing quickly at that rate. the fire hydrant was open, it is hard to spend it well when changing that quickly. they are funding alzheimer's disease, in the base of $800 million coming out is $1.2 billion. in one way that is great, whose

expanse is getting studied and a lot of crossover, it is germane to more fundamental processes or other diseases. >> i am more bullish on the new money than you guys are. rather more money than less money. just in terms of nih, the acceptance rate, 12%, and down toward the single digits, what type of grant you look at, this will allow them to raise the rates.

generally speaking, that means there are good potential experiments or studies that are out there that are unfunded. in terms of it is tough to spend glottal - to spend x amount of dollars, there's an issue there. would it help with what i wrote about? whatever day congress noted on this, friday or thursday, rand paul was doing the usual stick of taking out individual grants that are wasteful and picks up a decent chunk of my book for doing this exact thing. and you make fun of some individual bit of science as a

way to undermine all of science and he, a doctor, someone who should do better, does this all the time. and he is not going to stop. it is good but there is always going to be people who will try to undermine the message. >> thanks for being bullish. think not about the science that is done but science that is not done. you talk about the way it is talked about, negotiated, you have ideas for fewer articles, how do we get some of the science that needs to be done done that isn't being done. i want to use science on gun violence research. a lot of the countries in washington dc talking about gun violence went to the getting on stage saying cdc can't research this. they are from didn't. can you talk about the unscientific way in which we

censor science? >> i don't know if there's another example like that. that is very much an anomaly unless you can tell me i am wrong. the dickey amendment from 1996, an incredible bit of anti-scientific mindedness out of washington. there is plenty of bad science in washington but i don't know of another example like that. get rid of that amendment. it feels pretty straightforward to me. >> a couple states are stepping into the breach. california funded $5 million which is a drop in the bucket which is needed, new jersey is thinking about imitating california. there is some movement. i do think this is an outlier. i can't speak to specifics.

i'm not an expert. it is hard to say what should be funded, $400 million for alzheimer's. you can't predict, it is the nature of the scientific process you can't predict when a breakthrough will come but if you dictate top-down too much it doesn't work well. >> one thing in this new bill is some language to ease the restriction on funding gun research. it is unclear how far that will go but they did take some rhetorical effort to ease that so basically saying you can fund some research on gun violence but it was pretty clear according to my colleague who reported about this earlier this week, you still can't suggest solutions that would include restricting access to guns. that is the genesis of the amendment, to make sure the gun industry is not impeded and it

is not clear how much the cdc can do. there is an active debate what this new language means, significant opening for gun research or just more rhetoric the cdc will be afraid to step into. >> i think there is a book there. let me go to some individual questions which i cannot help but ask you to talk about how women fare in your story. i don't remember the last name of the scientist whose first name is bernice, got demoted. the swedish woman whose fetus is the genesis of this all carries away the wheelbarrow of money in your slide. can you talk about the gender nature of your story? >> that is broad, in a different era. i don't -- one of the things that leapt out at me in looking at philadelphia circa 1960 when these abortions were going on

at the hospital university of pennsylvania and the fetuses were being carted across the street to hayflick's lab without the mothers being any the wiser, that whole issue let me to wonder what was the law? turned out abortion was a criminal offense in all 50 states. in philadelphia, in pennsylvania there wasn't even an exception for saving the life of the mother. it was still illegal. these two parallel universes in terms of the sort of authorities chasing the back alley butchers and self-inflicted abortions and so on and the hospital, the university of pennsylvania, and other major hospitals around the country where therapeutic abortions were allowed, the authorities tolerated them, small committees, whether a certain woman would get an abortion but by and large these were wider, wealthier, better

connected women, women of color, for women, very very tough to get an abortion and what comes to me is the 15 week loss being challenged in the courts. mississippi has a larger proportion of african-americans stayed in the country so the one clinic that will not provide abortions for women after 15 weeks and you know who that affects. not the doctor's wife in scarsdale. i don't know if that answers your question. >> it does. i will push just one step further to play devils advocate a little bit. you talk about vulnerable populations in your answer. would you talk a little bit for the critic in the audience thinks a vulnerable population

is defeatist? the wonderful cures, we always talk about the end justifying the means, how many billions of people were cured but does the end justify the means? is there no other way? should we be thinking about the other way? >> i should add, totally, obviously legitimate, well-intentioned people on both sides of the abortion question which will never go away. it needs to be said the abortions in the book would have happened anyway. my interest was more - the one in sweden that led to the effect of abortion, my question went to the disposal of the fetal tissue without the woman's consent, not like having your appendix taken without your consent. there is something different

there. and how to respect that. these days in this country fetal tissue is still important in certain areas of research particularly hiv and hepatitis c. but the rules, the laws are such that consent is required of the woman and it has to be a consent that is obtained separately from her decision to abort, i will have the abortion because maybe it will do some good for someone. those decisions have to be separated and there can't be money beyond the cost of storage and preparation for fetal tissue. we are getting to an era where new techniques are moving us away from that but there are areas of science where that is required, where fetal tissue is important to advancing the

science. those are two separate issues. what happens to fetal tissue after an abortion is whether there should be abortion allowed at all and as long as the law of the land is abortion is legal, those questions need fixes, to address that should address that, incentives for journals, funding agencies, universities, are those areas we might be looking at for a more just distribution of scientific endeavor? >> i think there are many promising young scientists training to be scientists right

now is a more diverse pool. it is not representative of the population at all but it is more diverse pool than senior members of the scientific community. the real problem is the funding squeeze. most of those young scientists end up not being able to get careers in science. this is a structural problem with biomedical research. how can you say to somebody in their 70s and still pulling down nih grants, congratulations, you have done a wonderful job in your career, why don't you step aside and let some young scientist with new ideas and new perspectives come in and have a chance to test their ideas? that is another dimension of this and it is all about the incentives, the way the entire biomedical enterprise is structured, not so much about whether things are sloppy or not but the kooky way it is funded and a broken system that

needs to be fixed. >> let me push you a little bit. one of the favorite things about your book for me is understanding more about the scientific process itself, how the inquiry proceeds and how one discovery builds slowly and intimately upon another. there is something counterintuitive about your suggestion that we slow down, we publish fewer papers, that we privilege fewer people to create these designs and we have these large unanswered questions about alzheimer's, don't we need more of the slow prodding process to happen, not less of it? don't we need to get people going gravidarum slow them down? >> it is paradoxical but just asking people to publish less doesn't mean due to less research in their labs. many scientists the one reason these are problems, many

scientists don't use enough animals to get a strong result in their experiments. it may be for funding reasons, they will only say - i only have money for 6 experiments, 6 mice appeasing you end up with experiments that are not robust enough to give you meaningful results. .. if you get an answer you can believe it more. where the situation they looked at 53 experiments and they thought from academia these would all be great leads for new cancer drugs. he could only get six of them to work. that's even when he went back to the original science and

said i'm having trouble reproducing your experiments. i think they are actually starting to look like this. there setting up labs. bring those ideas to us. so we can do some of that spot checking. i think those are the sorts of things that bring us more robust results. it can actually move science forward. thank you so much. let's talk about your recommendations.

how we get less cherry picking and beat and switching. if i have a good answer it would've been a good thing. i don't have a really solid list of ways to fix it. as long as their politicians are to get things wrong. they are not experts. we can expect it to go away. i've have a very long-term solution which is improved scientific literacy. if we could improve all of our appreciation for method and some of the very gritty under the radar stuff. it be harder for politicians to do those sort of things.

that's one thing. the other thing is just money. i'd really useful ideas. and people have a lot less incentive to get science run. is not like an actionable thing. part of the reason i wanted to write something like this was because there are really a ton of actionable things to do about politicians. other than us calling them out for it. if you can see it. if education and money. and if you've got ideas for that. i'm all ears. one of my favorite things about the book is your humor in it. oversimplification. but i want to ask you.

what takes a little bit of a push back in a challenge. and whether it's just as much of a jedi mind trick to make a more complicated. the simple statement and i think it's made so that they can understand that. the response certainly maybe looking like it is experiencing pain. as a non- cortical spinal reflex. by individuals in a persistent vegetative state. is that not catch enough for you.

we do not expect those elected officials and to to talk about science in the same way. i don't expect them to do that at all. it's a skill to be able to do that. in ways that people can understand. and grab a hold of. if you are using that technique to poll the world pull the whirl of dust rock wool over someone's eyes. that's a little bit different than trying to explain the things in simple terms. i try to explain why there is a better way to say the think that these politicians are 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.

you could just as easily say something very simply science is unsure exactly when a fetus feels pain because it cannot tell us when the fetus feels pain. that's pretty simple. there are ways to use it that are quite the same level of deception. i would like to hear from some of you in the audience. i want to know where the mic is. can we start in the front.

what is unique about the two cell lines. and the lung cells that were imported from europe. that makes him so valuable them so valuable for these decades. is it understand what makes them immortal. are there people pretending or claiming to be researching and mortality. how credible is that in terms of getting better experiment design. in doing less nasty things perhaps to analysts. i do not perhaps make it clear

they are not immortal cells. that was part of their tremendous value. the huge number of little vials. a minute for practical purposes. and partly this is because 50 divisions. it is so powerful he already throws 800 values -- files but if you thought those cells. a year later. today. those cells remember how many divisions they've gone through and they are dividing again. they are not unique in the sense that one could in

principle divide another cell line very similar. what is valuable now about them is that the backseat makes us have decades of experience with them. why would you want to make that with a new cell line when we already understand these so well. and have decades along record of safety and effectiveness. that flight of valuables is knowledge-based but the fact that they are still vials in vials of them sitting in the that will last until our great grandchildren are there and beyond. i will say the cells. that is a problem with

cancer. without uncontrollably. some people actually consider it to be part of the original cells. it was adapted to grow in traffic. you asked me about the prospect of getting away from animal research. it's a perfect stand-in for us. there is a great deal of hope that there are other ways of doing this. and they are percolating along. they're not quite ready for prime time. you can actually take human cells. they will form little balls

that are like mini brains that will think. studying something like a brain tumor. it's a close enough model. does this really work. how good is it. it's still often the best thing that we have. and then say in the section and then move across the room. feel free to chime in from anyone.

it would be on improving science literacy for everyone in the public. do you think the burden is mostly on politicians. that's a different question. a lot of the scientists were great communicators. with all of their work. does that mean politicians suddenly stop getting it wrong. to be better at telling it

all. a lot of universities now had workshops for scientists to improve their communication and everything like that. to be andrew to understand what is better. if part of the weight way that we all get better at understanding the scientists that they are trying to legislate on. if part of that is that scientists get better at telling us about it than sure. absolutely. just one more in the section. and that then we will go to the middle section. my question is primarily for mister harris i guess. i enjoyed your book.

with that biomedical research. are you a little bit more sanguine about the physical sciences and if so why. the national academy of scientist. what is happening they deal with different kinds of issues. for one thing one of the real struggles in biomedical sciences. they are highly variable to begin with. if you're in the small sample size or whatever. you're likely to be fighting really hard to see what kind of signal is happening. they have a huge problem.

of course that he brill scientists do also. if you're studying adams for example when they have a huge experiment involving at least a thousand scientists when they set up experiment. we absolutely had to see if you get the same answer from each of those. it was built in that verification right. pretty confident with those results.

i think there are issues sometimes. i think of the cold fusion story. people are fooled for a long time about whether it was happening and test tube. my expectation is physical science. climate change falls under that umbrella. it has been repeated in like 25 different ways at this point. showing in the record basically. there are some fields that had demanded of themselves there is one question appear in the front. and one there. from an and in a ministry to standpoint it sounds like a potential hurdle. with the volatility.

to increase that. and from economic standpoint. and from the funding standpoint. as you're not worried about without saddam. one thing were seen a used to be when i want to the university of california. back in the 1970s it was actually the university of california. more than half of the money came from the state of california today i was talking about research and i said how

much of your funding and now comes from california. i think it's only about 5%. i went to fact checked that. it's actually 3%. a small proportion of the money here. comes from the state of virginia. we can fob off that financing. on the states had found a cheaper way to keep their universities going. it's a political question. that we value this work.

and then people that had that framework. it seems like a great idea to give grant money for the winners. the most conventional science possible. that we can take a third of our budget and say it doesn't go to a specific grant process. but two institutions to hire young people instead of having up philanthropy that sets them and have a blue ribbon panel.

some of that goes on there also institutions the best of the best in bargaining give them a huge pile of money so we don't have to spend so much time. the reality is they still do. there should be more focus on diversity and science and more money focused on getting diverse people with diverse points of view.

and there is a little money for that. and certainly could be a lot more. this is from mister harris. you had mentioned the switch from public funding a lot of this is coming from corporations and associations of that sugar industry and how much of an influence is that on the overall quality of research. with the biomedical research. a lot of it starts in the university but then gets picked up for drug companies.

the next biggest pool of money is the and age funding. there are lots of association. still a fairly minor share of the funding. the question you are raising is how much can we trust with the research done at universities. to make sure that these are really grants and not trying necessarily to promote a particular product or whatever. we do think about those questions and where is the money coming from. was it funded by a drug company. those are important things to bear in mind. it's also true as dave alludes to in some of the stuff he does. there is also philosophical biases that come into that as

well. in the pit politicians are rebelling about that. if climate change means that the government has to have it. when people people don't like the government's heavy hand. i don't believe in climate change. also be aware we need to be aware of what those are. why do we react to the way we do to things. before i do let me make sure that i did not miss a question over on the side of the room. let's head that be the last formal question on that we will let the authors speak with you individually.

thank you very much to all of the participants. i think these were all great and really interesting. i'm following up a little bit on the last question. there seems to be more and more of a trend of the super wealthy in this country. mother as cancer or sean parker. and plunging hundred million or something with a big amount of money. they favor this trend actually and get into the politics of it. all of you can maybe speak to. if more and more of our science is in a greater percentage. i think it is certainly making more of an effort.

to address some of these issues like reproducibility rigor. with these issues are being addressed. all bets are off once you are at some of the privately funded science. as this can be a big step back. is having to pay attention to this issues. the political level and they are going to be agendas that some of the super wealthy

head. when it is super wealthy. with a personal agenda who has. sorry for the complicated answer. it is a nice one to end on. we will just well just ask each of those to speak to it and then we will think it. i welcome philanthropy. they want the best asides of looking at one. i don't think by a large they are hugely financially incentive.

i may be naïve. i think i'm kind of with you. there are we should not just give a blanket approval kind of thing. if someone with billions of dollars that the parent has als. that doesn't seem like a bad thing to me. obviously they're going to be weird exceptions to that. there are some very odd billionaires who want the blood of teenagers kind of thing. we can of think it's an okay one. they might own the things that they discover. and then turn to the agenda that is put forth here. i don't see as that different from drug companies.

one company owned the test for the breast cancer risk gene. there is can be more of those. and it's gonna be some rich person who funded this. i'm not sure there is a huge difference there. if we didn't have suddenly billionaires able to lobby congress maybe i will disagree a little bit. the gates foundation. it is a huge supporter of global health research. they are just looking at what is best for me and kind.

there will be a lot of money and malaria. the other one that i paid close attention to. is the initiative. it's one of the billionaire who is pouring money into research and it's not will appreciated. they are supporting the universe -- university scientist. it's not a nonprofit. i was going to own of the intellectual property. from the university scientist if that comes along. i don't have a full story there.

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