The great white silence has driven many a man crazy, so perhaps we shouldn’t be entirely surprised that science nerds stuck on Antarctica like to Jell-O-wrestle to let off steam. But as The Daily’s Joshua Hersh discovered last week, neither Jell-O wrestling nor a host of other scientific experiments indicted in a recent report by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., were as scandalous as they seemed.
The National Science Foundation had, in fact, fired the employee behind the Jell-O incident, which happened off the clock and without federal funding; and the experiments – which included putting shrimp on a treadmill and getting robots to fold laundry – were neither as wacky nor as wasteful of taxpayer money as they sounded. Getting a robot to fold laundry, we now know, is a precursor to getting a robot to fold skin on grievously wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions too dangerous for human medics.
But the real travesty behind Coburn’s investigation is that he — or rather, his staffers — missed an opportunity to highlight some scientific scandals that are really wasting taxpayer money, and notably, the decision to pay Italian scientists to do studies for the Environmental Protection Agency, and then burying the fact that American investigators found the results were spectacularly wrong. Worse, we only know they were so spectacularly wrong because an industry trade group demanded the details through a freedom of information request.
Unfortunately, the saga of the Ramazzini Institute — let’s call it the Ramazzini Code, because it’s the scientific equivalent of a Dan Brown novel — would require congressional staffers to do a lot more digging than reading through some documents and going “oooh, robots!”
The Institute, housed in a palazzo in Italy, was glowingly profiled by the New York Times in 2006, just after the Food and Drug Administration warned that its methods were unreliable and just before the European Union’s Food Safety Authority dismissed its study on the artificial sweetener aspartame as deeply flawed.
The simplest way of explaining the scandal is that Ramazzini always seems to find the same kind of cancer no matter what it tests, while other laboratories don’t. With aspartame, it spent seven years feeding aspartame to 1,900 rats, and found that the rats got cancer.
But as scientists who work for the EU pointed out to me, the institute let the rats die of old age. What do rats (and humans) get in old age? Cancer.
So, to figure out whether the cancer was caused by aspartame or was simply the result of old age, you need to do some fiercely difficult statistical analysis using the raw data.
But Ramazzini wouldn’t give the EU its raw data. It wouldn’t even give the EU a formal report and, according to the Italian government, it doesn’t appear to do the kind of detailed record keeping you need to do in these kinds of experiments. Meanwhile, other major regulatory studies of aspartame couldn’t find any risk.
When it appeared that the same kind of cancer kept occurring, irrespective of what the Institute was testing, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic began to wonder whether the palazzo’s animal house was also infected with a pathogen.
Despite these alarm bells, the EPA paid the Ramazzini Institute to do key carcinogenicity tests on several chemicals. But as the results started to trickle in on methanol, a key chemical in many industrial processes, they turned out to be completely out-of-whack with the results from other studies. Concerned, the U.S. National Toxicology Program sent a team of scientists to Italy and demanded that the Ramazzini Institute release its data so they could do a spot check.
This involved looking at 23 slides which the institute said showed evidence of cancer. To eliminate bias, these were mixed in with other similar slides, and the researchers doing the analysis were not told where each slide originated. When the results were unblinded, just one of the 23 Ramazzini slides showed evidence of cancer, prompting the EPA to shut down the risk assessment and a demand the full release of all data.
But while the EPA was demanding transparency from Ramazzini, it was rather reluctant to divulge the details of its investigation to the people who were paying for this fiasco – U.S. taxpayers. And while we are routinely bombarded with stories of industry covering up its dirty secrets, it took an industry group – the Methanol Institute – to uncover the precise details to this regulatory scandal.
So, here are the questions that Coburn – and others on Capitol Hill – ought to consider asking: Why was the EPA paying a foreign institute to do research, when the FDA and the EU had warned that research from the Institute couldn’t be trusted? And how much money has this all wasted? The Ramazzini Code is by no means the only scientific controversy Congress needs to unravel; regulatory science is replete with expensive mysteries; but to do that, staffers need to get serious about science and statistics, and that means looking past the shrimp.
The National Science Foundation had, in fact, fired the employee behind the Jell-O incident, which happened off the clock and without federal funding; and the experiments – which included putting shrimp on a treadmill and getting robots to fold laundry – were neither as wacky nor as wasteful of taxpayer money as they sounded. Getting a robot to fold laundry, we now know, is a precursor to getting a robot to fold skin on grievously wounded soldiers in battlefield conditions too dangerous for human medics.
But the real travesty behind Coburn’s investigation is that he — or rather, his staffers — missed an opportunity to highlight some scientific scandals that are really wasting taxpayer money, and notably, the decision to pay Italian scientists to do studies for the Environmental Protection Agency, and then burying the fact that American investigators found the results were spectacularly wrong. Worse, we only know they were so spectacularly wrong because an industry trade group demanded the details through a freedom of information request.
Unfortunately, the saga of the Ramazzini Institute — let’s call it the Ramazzini Code, because it’s the scientific equivalent of a Dan Brown novel — would require congressional staffers to do a lot more digging than reading through some documents and going “oooh, robots!”
The Institute, housed in a palazzo in Italy, was glowingly profiled by the New York Times in 2006, just after the Food and Drug Administration warned that its methods were unreliable and just before the European Union’s Food Safety Authority dismissed its study on the artificial sweetener aspartame as deeply flawed.
The simplest way of explaining the scandal is that Ramazzini always seems to find the same kind of cancer no matter what it tests, while other laboratories don’t. With aspartame, it spent seven years feeding aspartame to 1,900 rats, and found that the rats got cancer.
But as scientists who work for the EU pointed out to me, the institute let the rats die of old age. What do rats (and humans) get in old age? Cancer.
So, to figure out whether the cancer was caused by aspartame or was simply the result of old age, you need to do some fiercely difficult statistical analysis using the raw data.
But Ramazzini wouldn’t give the EU its raw data. It wouldn’t even give the EU a formal report and, according to the Italian government, it doesn’t appear to do the kind of detailed record keeping you need to do in these kinds of experiments. Meanwhile, other major regulatory studies of aspartame couldn’t find any risk.
When it appeared that the same kind of cancer kept occurring, irrespective of what the Institute was testing, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic began to wonder whether the palazzo’s animal house was also infected with a pathogen.
Despite these alarm bells, the EPA paid the Ramazzini Institute to do key carcinogenicity tests on several chemicals. But as the results started to trickle in on methanol, a key chemical in many industrial processes, they turned out to be completely out-of-whack with the results from other studies. Concerned, the U.S. National Toxicology Program sent a team of scientists to Italy and demanded that the Ramazzini Institute release its data so they could do a spot check.
This involved looking at 23 slides which the institute said showed evidence of cancer. To eliminate bias, these were mixed in with other similar slides, and the researchers doing the analysis were not told where each slide originated. When the results were unblinded, just one of the 23 Ramazzini slides showed evidence of cancer, prompting the EPA to shut down the risk assessment and a demand the full release of all data.
But while the EPA was demanding transparency from Ramazzini, it was rather reluctant to divulge the details of its investigation to the people who were paying for this fiasco – U.S. taxpayers. And while we are routinely bombarded with stories of industry covering up its dirty secrets, it took an industry group – the Methanol Institute – to uncover the precise details to this regulatory scandal.
So, here are the questions that Coburn – and others on Capitol Hill – ought to consider asking: Why was the EPA paying a foreign institute to do research, when the FDA and the EU had warned that research from the Institute couldn’t be trusted? And how much money has this all wasted? The Ramazzini Code is by no means the only scientific controversy Congress needs to unravel; regulatory science is replete with expensive mysteries; but to do that, staffers need to get serious about science and statistics, and that means looking past the shrimp.
