MMR & autism - hogwash

Living in the UK in the late 90s (as I did) it was hard to avoid the MMR scandal. I won't go into the details here. This link will tell you what you need to know and concentrates on the part played by the press in the whole palaver. Suffice to say, they did not cover themselves in glory and undoubtedly influenced a large number of parents not to use the triple jab thereby endangering the children of those parents who immunised their kids but for some reason the jab didn't work.

Now that the dust is settling, that the GMC verdict is in and that the Lancet paper retracted, some reflection is appropriate.

Despite the Bad Science link above suggesting that the autism / MMR link is a UK phenomenon, in my young student cohort one person put their hand up in a tutorial to remark on the link when MMR was mentioned. So, the damage has spread globally.

The other entity that comes out of this mess poorly is the magazine Private Eye. Although it is typical for the magazine to take an automatically contrarian view, their lack of understanding of the data disproving the autism link went on for far too long. Even today, there seems to be a reluctance to accept that they were duped by the lobbyists on this one. I sent them a letter post GMC to see if they'd publicise the safety of MMR as thoroughly as they did the imagined dangers, but normally when the letter is accepted you get a "I've passed this on to the editor"... nothing this time. And there's nothing on their website at the moment when you search for 'MMR'.

Oh God, and I forgot about their special report in 2002. 2002! Geez. The BMJ produced an interesting review here.

The problem comes down to the media's lack of understanding of science. Being largely art grads, this is not surprising. Other skills, such as understanding how the biases of sources can bias a piece of work, you would have thought to have been in an experienced journo's tool kit... but in this case the author of the Private Eye report, Heather Mills, even goes so far as to thank these sources on the back cover of the report..!

Following this debacle, a demonstration of little self-awareness of one's limitations amongst the fourth estate is warranted.

Multitasking

See: I'm already making no effort with my pics (the one above is the first that comes up on a Google image search for 'multitasking').

Crap, isn't it?

Anyway, this year, now that I'm a bit settled / stuck in a rut, and what with the economy improving and all, I've started to take on a bit of work based on my previous experience. A bit of cash will be nice and it makes me feel like a grown up again. I've snagged a chunk of research work as a visiting fellow in the local university and am working with a professional services firm (as it were) to help out with a few management consulting projects in the CBD. Not sure whether this work will detract from my strict flash card-based exam technique, but so far I've gone well enough and frankly I quite like having a CV without a four / five year medical school-shaped gap in it.

I've also had conversations regarding going back to the bench for some wet science. I'm in two minds about this. On the one hand, it would be nice to maintain a bit of momentum on the (hard) science side: may help my clinical career although I have published ok over the years so I'm not sure what that would prove. On the other, it was my dislike for bench science (or rather, the crap career structure surrounding bench science) that led me to leave altogether ten or more years ago.

The clincher may be how much time I can spare. There's also a financial consideration of what is the best use of time plus the fact that I would like to use this highly unusual career break to see as much of my family as possible.

We'll see... perhaps the two small roles are fine as they stand.

Science literacy in the media

The Guardian, the paper of the British undergraduate (and me when I lived there), likes consider itself somewhat a cut above other newspapers. It provides a platform to the excellent Bad Science columnist Ben Goldacre (although his recent article on drug patents left a bit to be desired) which is to be applauded.

However, despite all this it still seems to favour the art graduate stepping sideways school of training health correspondents and because of this makes regular, irritating (to me) mistakes in the most basic facts of science stories. There was an article which conflated influence vaccines with therapeutics quite recently etc etc.

Here's a classic. As I clicked on the link, I knew what I would find:

- Story about an E. coli outbreak.
- Covered by David Batty, "Health Correspondent"
- He thinks it's a virus. He's clearly not sure, so starts off with the classic "bug" gambit at the start of the article to avoid committing.
- He even quotes a bacteriologist.

How long does it take to search Wikipedia? I suppose if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know you need to search.

Maybe I could be the Guardian's Australian chess correspondent. After all, I know shag all about that.

Links to past scientists

The photograph above is of Peter Mitchell, a gentleman scientist who achieved the rare distinction of receiving an unshared Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1978. His great achievement was the discovery of how the breakdown of glucose and other nutrients in linked to the production of a high-energy intracellular molecule (ATP). It was an elegant theory, elegantly demonstrated. He was, by all accounts, a great bloke too according to my undergraduate tutor who worked with Mitchell in his labs in Cornwall for a number of years. Sitting in tutorials, I was once removed from this work.

When I moved to take a PhD, initially I was similarly once removed or directly involved with a number or biochemitry giants. These included Arthur Kornberg, Lubert Stryer, Hans Krebs and JRS Fincham. Apologies for the nerdy name-dropping

The world of biochemistry seemed to be one where large thoughts were generated and proofs pursued methodically over several years. There were close connections between the big discoveries and current opportunities.

It may be me but these connections are much diluted at the present. The process of developing a scientific lineage of PhD graduates from a supervisor's early work naturally splits a large field into smaller ones as graduates take an element of that work and run with it. After twenty or thirty PhDs have come out of a lab, the field has been split so often it's looking like a bastardised version of Zeno's paradox.

An example of this was a friend of mine who went to work with a scientist looking at a topoisomerase. By the time he'd arrived, two other PhD students had started and the protein's three domains had been allocated to one student each. Unfortunately, the bit he inherited turned out to be a spacer domain which let the other two domains do all the interesting stuff which made his viva interesting.

The sense of excitment I felt as a newbie undergrad scientist undertaking a short research project, the proximity to big leaps that had been made only ten years previously, waned quickly and for others too and by the mid-90s I was also mutating a wee bit of a protein to see what happened... just like four other groups around the world who were working on the same protein.