The Slow, Slow Road to De-Discovery

Posted on September 18, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

The virus known as XMRV does not cause chronic fatigue syndrome.

Achieving this particular bit of knowledge has taken a pretty spectacular couple of years.

In October 2009, Judy Mikovits, a scientist then at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, and her colleagues published a startling paper. They found that 68 out of 101 people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis) carried a virus called XMRV. Only 8 out of 218 healthy people had it. That’s 67% versus 3.7%. Mikovits and her colleagues raised the possibility that the virus played a part in the disorder, which affects an estimated 60 million people. If that were true, then there might be a straightforward way to treat people: wipe out the offending virus.

Continue reading “The Slow, Slow Road to De-Discovery” →

Flu Fighters

Posted on September 11, 2012September 30, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Another Science Hurricane: A Massive Survey of the Genome

Posted on September 5, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Every now and then we science writers come face to face with how much science there is to write about–and how limited our powers to write about it are. This week, I’m on the road to report a magazine feature–a week that just so happens to be the one that a team of scientists chose to publish dozens of papers at once on the nature of the human genome. The purpose of the project, called ENCODE, is to systematically measure the function of every bit of the human genome. ENCODE has been going on for quite some time. In 2008, I wrote about the first chunk of results from ENCODE in the New York Times, and I followed up in 2010 here with a report on the work of some skeptics who challenged some of ENCODE’s results. If I wasn’t already insanely busy with another story, I’d be all over this one.

If you’re interested in the debate over how our DNA works, let me direct you to some coverage:

Brendon Maher at Nature News

Ed Yong blogs the story, then updates with responses from skeptics

University of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran explains why he doesn’t buy the results.

Why Debunking ESP Can Be Interesting

Posted on August 29, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Last year, a Cornell University psychologist named Daryl Bem published a study which he claimed showed that events in the future can influence our minds at the present. I wrote about the study in an essay for the New York Times on the workings of science–how science relies on replication to move forward, and how scientists often struggle to make this happen. When other scientists replicated Bem’s experiments, they failed to get his results. But they found it difficult to get their results published in prominent journals, which frown on replication studies.

Over at Science-Based Medicine, Steve Novella writes about a newly published replication study appearing in the same journal where Bem’s original research was published. Once again, the scientists failed to get Bem’s results. That the future does not affect the present is not exactly news, but Novella’s post is still very much worth reading, because he takes this moment as an opportunity to talk about the reason that studies like Bem’s turn out the way they do in the first place, and how scientists can design experiments better in the future. Check it out.

[Image: Photo by meeni2010 via Creative Commons]

Hello, Norway! Two talks in Oslo next week

Posted on August 23, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Next Friday (August 31) I have the honor of taking part in the Kristine Bonnevie Lecture, an annual lecture held at the University of Oslo to honor the first female professor in Norway. I’ll be speaking along with Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, who has done hugely important research on the links between the anatomy of the brain and how animals behave. Details are here.

On Saturday (September 1) I’ll be giving a public lecture about A Planet of Virusesat Oslo’s House of Literature (Litteraturhuset). Details are here.

If there are any Loom-readers in Norway (perhaps a few?), I hope to see you in Oslo.

[Image: Wikipedia]