Kirsten was a little late getting the show up on the site, but here it is, better late than never for all you TWIS fans. There will be another one real soon, so hold tight.
Those of you following the manufactured controversy over Ben Stein’s movie Expelled will be happy to know that the National Center for Science Education has put together a fantastic website called Expelled Exposed. The site has a thorough critique of the movie showing how intellectually dishonest Stein is in the movie.
Personally, I think this is a sad end to a rather interesting career for Stein. His manufactroversy is little more than a veiled attempt to push creationism by misrepresenting the scientific method. That or he is displaying a gross inability to understand what most high school science classes teach, the scientific method.
The Federation of American Scientists just launched a Chemical Weapons Convention Archive featuring a document of the day section. They started off with a 1997 letter from then former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney urging the Senate to “reject the Chemical Weapons Convention.”
The Chemical Weapons Convention outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. It was signed in 1993 and went into force in 1997. To date, it has been signed by 183 of the 195 nations recognized by the UN and is widely considered an essential international treaty for the prevention of the unspeakable horrors associated with the use of chemical weapons.
Besides launching the archive, FAS will be blogging live from the second review conference of the CWC in the Hague from April 7-18. Every 5 years parties to the treaty get together to review the treaty and try to improve it. Enforceability is really the key issue for the CWC and with both Russia and the United States unlikely to meet their deadlines for destruction of their chemical weapon stockpiles, the subject of noncompliance is likely to take up much of the meeting. Scientific and technological advances including the convergence of chemistry and biology will also be hot topics.
SEA is holding a workshop to train scientists to run for office on May 10th at Georgetown University. If you are a scientist or engineer and have been considering running for office or working on an election campaign, then join us for a crash course on how it’s done. Below is a video for the workshop featuring Congressman and former physicist Vern Ehlers.
We will be holding more campaign workshops in the future, but the lineup for this one is spectacular. So, if you share our belief that we need more people in congress who understand how important science is to the country, then join SEA and come to the workshop. Space is limited, so register today.
Dr. Bill Foster, a former Fermi lab physicist, has won the special election in the Illinois 14th district. The district was formerly held by retired House Speaker, Dennis Hastert. The initial results show Foster defeating Republican, Jim Oberweis 52 -48%. Foster’s win adds another scientist to the House, for now…
When Speaker Hastert resigned in November, he forced this special election. However, the special election does not preclude the November general election. So, we are going to see these two squaring off again in the fall. Nonetheless, having another scientist in the House is good news.
Originally posted at Science Progress
What are they Smoking
We Need the FDA to Regulate the Tobacco Industry
by Michael Stebbins, Ph.D.
I recently learned that that a friend of mine has been driving his father several times a week to treatment for his smoking-related cancer, and yet there is a Marlboro Light balanced in my left hand as I type this. I hate cigarettes, and after 16 years of addiction to nicotine and countless attempts at quitting, I believe it is time for me to take drastic measures (more on that at the end of this piece).
I didn’t start writing this column about my friend’s father’s cancer or my addiction. I set out to write about legislation that could finally bring parasitic tobacco companies under the control of the Food and Drug Administration and the astonishingly shortsighted opposition to placing basic health and safety regulations on products that have been proven dangerous.
Currently the FDA can regulate my mouthwash, but not the cigarettes that made my breath stink.
In 1996, the FDA actually tried to assert regulatory power over tobacco products, but the tobacco companies fought back and ultimately the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 2001 that Congress had not granted the FDA the power to do so. Enter the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, introduced last year by Senators Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and John Cornyn (R-TX) in the Senate, and Congressmen Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Thomas Davis (R-VA) in the House. The bill would reinstate the 1996 rule and expand the FDA’s power to restrict the marketing of cigarettes, to children in particular.
A superficial glance at the bill reveals that it fails the logic test by requiring an agency charged with protecting the health of Americans with regulating a deadly product without the authority to ban it outright. But the alternative, of leaving Big Tobacco to freely manipulate their product to keep me and the rest of my stinky-fingered brethren addicted, is unacceptable.
Indeed, a 2007 study by the Harvard School of Public Health1 confirmed a previous study by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health showing cigarette companies deliberately increased the amount of nicotine in the average cigarette by 11.6 percent between 1997 and 2005. So during the time period that I and many other Americans were trying to quit smoking, Big Tobacco was bumping up nicotine levels to make it even more challenging.
Since cigarette ingredients are unregulated, they were neither required to seek approval before increasing the amount of an addictive chemical nor to inform their customers. That’s the kind of regulatory oversight the FDA could bring to this drug-peddling industry.
Cigarettes are unregulated drug delivery systems.
It’s common knowledge that cigarettes are far more than dried tobacco leaves, and that the companies that produce them have misled the public for years. But somehow we don’t think of cigarettes as highly engineered nicotine delivery systems. It is the nicotine-induced blast of dopamine and other neurotransmitters that keeps me coming back for more, so, naturally, improving the drug delivery mechanism will increase addiction. And that is the key. Cigarettes are unregulated drug delivery systems.
A recent report by several respected health organizations, including the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association, details many of the clever advances that make the modern cigarette an engineering marvel. Case in point: Philip Morris, which manufactures my brand of cigarettes, discovered that adding ammonia-based compounds to cigarettes increased the absorption of nicotine. That’s the same principle as crack cocaine. Genius!
The addition of ventilation holes in the filter paper is another brilliant bit of engineering designed to dilute the smoke so the machines that test for tar levels register lower amounts, and the cigarettes can be marketed as “light.” The problem is, smokers functionally draw on cigarettes differently than the machines to maintain nicotine levels, and there is no net health benefit, just smooth smoky goodness2. The best part about these companies is that they continue to innovate. A recent Wall Street Journal article detailed the many wonderful products that Phillip Morris has developed, including a high-tar, high-nicotine cigarette and shorter cigarettes for those who just need a quick fix3.
Fear Itself
Like cigarettes marketed to minorities and children, opposition to the FDA regulating tobacco comes in a variety of flavors. Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, the Commissioner of the FDA, told the Associated Press last year that the FDA “approve(s) products that enhance health, not destroy it,” and that if regulated the FDA could unintentionally make a decision on cigarettes that could make “the public health radically worse.” In a Senate hearing last year, von Eschenbach also expressed concern that “the public will believe that products ‘approved’ by the Agency are safe and that this will actually encourage individuals to smoke more rather than less.”
Yet the bill now in Congress does not mean the FDA will be approving cigarettes. And the public, while foolish enough to start smoking, is not so foolish as to believe that smoking is okay because the FDA regulates it.
The fear that the FDA could make things worse scares the hell out of me. Are we to believe that the FDA is incapable of making rational decisions about cigarettes, but rational ones about all other consumer products they regulate? It is also irrational to think that forcing companies to lower the amount of nicotine in cigarettes or to remove the ammonia compounds that help deliver it to the brain faster could cause people to smoke more cigarettes, especially in light of a study by the National Cancer Institute that found that gradually lowering the level of nicotine in cigarettes does not cause smokers to smoke more or inhale more.
Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) is perhaps the most outspoken opponent of the bill in Congress, and along with eight Republican colleagues on the Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee, he voted against it. Enzi has referred to the bill as a “public health disaster” because it does not allow the FDA to kill the tobacco industry completely.
He also claims that the bill is a peace offering to Big Tobacco because Philip Morris has expressed support. But the support by one of the biggest offenders is not an indication that the bill is a public health disaster and does not preclude passing additional laws that aim directly at stopping people from smoking or putting Big Tobacco out of business.
To that end, Enzi introduced the Help End Addiction to Lethal Tobacco Habits Act, which he touts as an alternative to having the FDA regulate tobacco. At its heart, the bill is a kind of cap-and-trade program that allows companies to divest from the tobacco industry over a period of 20 years. Keep in mind that Enzi’s bill is not mutually exclusive from the Kennedy-Cornyn, Waxman-Davis Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which has 55 cosponsors and has passed the Senate twice before—virtually guaranteeing that it will pass when brought to a vote.
This brings up the second and perhaps more important point regarding Enzi’s alternative bill; he has failed to convince a single Senator that it is worthwhile enough to co-sponsor.
The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act will be considered by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health this week, and the full committee is likely to consider it in the next couple of weeks. But ranking subcommittee member Joe Barton (R-TX) now claims that part of the bill might be out of their jurisdiction because the user fees charged to tobacco companies are adjusted for inflation over time and thus, in his view, constitute a new tax. The House parliamentarian will surly resolve this minor jurisdictional issue before next week. Then we may hear much of the same hollow and often embarrassing opposition from many in congress, including Rep. Steve Buyer (R-IN), who invoked the slippery slope argument at a House hearing on the bill last fall, stating “What are we going to do? Outlaw Halloween, Valentines day, the Easer bunny?…That gets pretty ridiculous when you think about all that.” I have and it is.
What is clear is that this brand of specious opposition will be far less decisive than the over 600 public advocacy groups that support it. With over 430,000 Americans dying of tobacco-related deaths each year, one would suppose that in most districts, more constituents have died from cigarettes over the years than would oppose the bill today.
I hate the fact that I am at the mercy of a tobacco company that has engineered their product to keep me addicted. And I hate the fact that my friend has to bring his father to chemotherapy because of cigarettes. But the fact that cowardice has prevented our government from protecting us from such manipulation makes me physically queasy.
Sen. Enzi is correct—having the FDA regulate tobacco will not get rid of cigarettes. But it sure will make it a lot harder for more dangerous products in development and currently sold abroad to make it to the United States. And if Big Tobacco has to stop developing their products for and advertising them to children, then please explain to me again how this bill is worse for us than a pack of Luckys.
Smoke-by-numbers
An estimated 20.8 percent of all adults (45.3 million people) smoke cigarettes in the United States.In the United States, cigarette smoking is responsible for about one in five deaths annually, or about 438,000 deaths per year; on average, these people die 13 years younger than non-smokers.
For every person who dies of a smoking-related disease, 20 more people suffer with at least one serious illness from smoking.
Annually, cigarette smoking costs more than $167 billion, based on lost productivity ($92 billion) and health care expenditures ($75.5 billion).
In 2005, the latest year with available data, the cigarette industry spent almost $13.11 billion, or more than $36 million per day, on advertising and promotional expenses.
Each day in the United States, approximately 4,000 people between the ages of 12 and 17 years initiate cigarette smoking.
In the United States, 23 percent of high school students are current cigarette smokers.
Among adult smokers, 70 percent report that they want to quit completely, and more than 40 percent try to quit each year.
Michael Stebbins is the Director of Biology Policy for the Federation of American Scientists, President of the SEA Action Fund and author of Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science’s Taboos Confronted. He quit smoking as of the publication of this piece and will donate $1000 to the American Heart Association for every cigarette he smokes from now until the end of the year. You can track his progress at SexDrugsandDNA.com.
Notes
[1] Connolly, GN, et al., Trends in Smoke Nicotine Yield and Relationship to Design Characteristics Among Popular U.S. Cigarette Brands, 1997-2005, A Report of the Tobacco Research Program Division of Public Health Practice, Harvard School of Public Health, January 2007.
[2] National Institutes of Health, Risks Associated with Smoking Cigarettes with Low Machine-Yields of Tar and Nicotine; Report of the NCI Expert Committee, National Cancer Institute, Smoking and Tobacco Control Monograph 13, October 2001.
[3] “Philip Morris Readies Aggressive Global Push,” The Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2008.
In a public hearing earlier today at Harvard Law School, the FCC finally said it would punish internet service providers who violate basic net neutrality principles. At the hearing Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) laid out his view of the practice of limiting access to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like BitTorrent, “Such intercession into a user’s access to the Internet should not result in…the transformation of BitTorrent into BitTrickle.”
Last year, Comcast was busted by the Associated Press for limiting access to BitTorrents last year. But at the hearing, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen was unapologetic, “What we are doing is a limited form of network management objectively based upon an excessive bandwidth-consumptive protocol during limited periods of network congestion.” Uhhh, really? Is Comcast broadband service really slower because of peer-to-peer network use? I have seen no data to support this contention.
The question is whether this practice opens a can of worms for regulating access to websites, like those critical of the practice of limiting access to peer-to-peer networks…ah hemm. In all fairness, such networks are commonly used to trade copyrighted material. Whether you believe that extensions on copyright to digital files is being abused or not is besides the point. Peer-to-peer networks are often used for legitimate purposes and it is not up to Comcast or any service provider to police file sharing.
The FCC is considering whether new rules are necessary to define and limit what constitutes reasonable network management by Internet service providers. But does anyone really believe that they will do so? I can’t see Comcast being fined by the FCC or caring much if they were. They have a monopoly on internet service in many areas including my own, so being the only game in town, they have tended to abuse their position.
Rep. Markey has introduced a bill that would limit the practice of access management, but it doesn’t really have teeth since it doesn’t outright ban the practice. The public overwhelmingly supports full net neutrality, so anything short of that seems to be window dressing. A far stronger net neutrality bill failed in the house two years ago, and this bill “contains no requirements for regulations on the Internet whatsoever,” according to Markey. It contains no penalties for violating the practice and simply adds principles on net neutrality to current principles including calling for the establishment of “baseline protections to guard against unreasonable discriminatory favoritism for, or degradation of, content by network operators based upon its source, ownership, or destination on the Internet.”
OK, so if Comcast or AT&T break the principles (they don’t see anything wrong with their current practices) we’re back at square one. The bill is clearly intended to be better-than-nothing, but such measures only punt the issue and allow lawmakers the comfort of claiming that they support net neutrality without actually guaranteeing it.
Originally posted at SEforA.org
Barack Obama’s “plan” for science was just posted on his campaign website issues page. The statement is short and generic at best, but he has also posted a three page fact sheet that gives more detail about his overall view. They call the fact sheet a plan on the issues page, but it is really a rather odd combination of statements about his record on the issues and statements about what he supports rather than a real top down plan for science. Overall, it is a rather sloppy document and while it is very positive for science, it lacks enough detail for any kind of substantive assessment. There are some notable highlights though.
Doubling Basic Science Research Funding?: His plan plainly states that “Barack Obama supports doubling federal funding for basic research.” However, it seems that he might be talking just about the physical sciences as outlined int he American COMPETES Act. Unfortunately there is no specific mention of increasing funding for basic biomedical research anywhere in the document.
Politicalization of Science: The fact sheet states, “An Obama administration will make sure that the government does not distort the results of scientific research for ideological ends.” While far less detailed than Hillary Clinton’s refreshingly specific plans to end the politicalization of science, it is a good sign that the Obama campaign at least realizes that it has been a problem.
Scientists and Engineers for America has launched the long-awaited Science Health And Related Policies (SHARP) Network, a Wikipedia-style website designed to track the health and science stances that elected representatives in Congress and the Presidential candidates have taken. There are already over 500 web pages in the Network including one for every Senator, Congressman, and Presidential candidate. They have also launched pages with information on key science and health issues and for Senate and House committees. Not sure what your congressman has said or done on embryonic stem cell research or global warming? Look it up on their SHARP page. If it’s not there, then you can help by adding it at sharp.sefora.org
At the same time, they have launched a partner organization the SEA Action Fund, which is also a nonpartisan and nonprofit, but under a different tax code [501(c)(4)] so blog comments do not have to be stripped of passionate statements by members of the public.
If you have not yet joined SEA, then please do so. You can join and sign up as a user of the SHARP Network here.
In my previous post I talked about how the budget bill does nothing for the NIH, taking inflation into account and this is the fifth year that NIH funding has been cut. Since the previous, do-nothing, Congress failed to pass their spending bills, the government has been working off of a 2006 budget. The new budget is not much better. Digging further, you find:
Funding for the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) was zeroed out, so we won’t be making new nuclear weapons after all. Funding for abstinence only education was frozen, but not zeroed out, so programs that don’t work and result in an increase in risky sexual behavior will continue. All research papers resulting from and NIH grant will have to be deposited into the Pubmed manuscript database. In all likelihood, this will result in many rarely-read, lower-tier journals going out of business. I just hope that some of the small, but excellent journals don’t perish along with them. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) was originally in the bill, but was yanked over the weekend with the encouragement of the White House despite the fact that the President has openly supported the bill and released a Statement of Administration Policy supporting it. The Office of Technology Assessment was not funded…AGAIN. This is not such a big surprise, but is disappointing nonetheless. The Government Accountability Office got $2.5 million to do technology assessment studies. Hardly what anyone would call a strong commitment to good advice.
Now, before you get all upset at the Dems; look what they were facing. The President decided to take a stance on spending (only after his party lost control of Congress) and threatened to veto anything that came through that went beyond his budget. Congressional Republicans are in serious trouble for the next election cycle and need something to point to so they can say that the Democrats are not getting the job done. So, rather than not get a budget through at all, they caved on many fundamental issues that got them elected in the first place. OK, maybe you should be pretty pissed at the Democrats too. It really doesn’t matter for this spending bill. We all lose on this one.
