Science of overconfidence

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Meet Science: How clinical trials work

By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:45 am Thursday, Oct 6

Did you know that, with a properly conducted series of clinical trials, it can take upwards of 20 years before a medical discovery makes it from the lab to the hospital?

Judy Stone, an infectious disease specialist who does clinical research, has a guest post on the Scientific American blog network today, explaining the basics of clinical trials—where they came from, and how they can go wrong.

She's going to be publishing a series of posts on this topic, and is looking for input on what you want to know about clinical trials. Disclaimer: As a clinical researcher, Stone has a goal here. She'd like to see more people volunteering for clinical research, and part of what she's interested in is the gaps in knowledge that make people wary of participating, or leave them unaware that they can participate. Your input would be helpful.

Image: Pills Phial, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from luca_volpi's photostream

Clinical trials seek to learn whether a drug (or device) works as expected—it’s unknown, until tested in people. That’s why early phase trials use only a few people, and more are added as experience is gained. Sometimes unexpected discoveries are made along the way. For example, Rogaine was discovered by an astute clinician researcher during a clinical trial studying high blood pressure. The drug, minoxidil, originally under study as an anti-hypertensive medication, was serendipitously found to have the unexpected side effect of stimulating hair growth, prompting a whole new line of products for baldness.

Similarly, Viagra was discovered by accident. Sildenafil, the generic form, was being studied as a treatment for angina, as it dilates blood vessels by blocking an enzyme, phosphodiesterase (PDE). While not very effective for angina, it was found to prolong erections, stimulating the whole “life-style drug” industry. Fortunately, PDE inhibitors are now being found useful for a host of important medical conditions, ranging from pulmonary hypertension to asthma and muscular dystrophy.

Of course, not all inadvertent discoveries have such rosy outcomes.

For example, Diethylstilbesterol (DES), a synthetic estrogen, was commonly prescribed in the US 1938-1971, to help prevent miscarriages. It was only after many years that DES was found to cause a rare type of vaginal cancer in daughters of exposed women. Later, other types of cancers showed up as well, in small numbers.

Via Aaron Rowe

Tags: clinical trials, faq, medicine, meet science, Science

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Feynman explains beauty and science

Here's Richard Feynman monologing about the way that science creates new ways to appreciate the beauty of the world around us. Inspiring stuff, and the accompanying video is nicely apt.

(via Kottke) This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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Science shot of the day

"Boom! Blood stem cells generated from skin cells." — From the Google+ feed of Erik Westin, post-doctoral fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

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Habibi: graphic novel is blends Islamic legend, science fiction dystopia, love and loss

Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi is an enormous and genre-busting graphic novel that blends Islamic mysticism, slave/liberation narratives and post-apocalyptic science fiction, creating a story that is erotic, grotesque, and profoundly moving.

Habibi is set in an atemporal Middle Eastern country that seems at times to be caught in classical times, but whose landscape is dotted with derelict jeeps, poisoned water awash in rotting consumer goods and other elements from out of time. Dodola, a child bride, is captured by slavers who murder her older husband, a scribe who had reared her on the stories, sutras and legends he was paid to calligraph. On the run, she rescues a younger slave boy, Zam, and the two become refugees together. They find a new home in the desert, a strangely out of place wrecked ship amid the sands, which they make into a snug home. Dodola raises Zam as her son, and to feed them both, she must prostitute herself to the caravans that pass by their hiding place.

When violence comes again -- when Dodala is enslaved to a capricious sultan's harem -- Zam is on his own, and is also soon in trouble. The story veers into Scheherazade territory as Dodola tries to charm the sultan into releasing her, but with the dark threat that usually lurks in the background in Scheherazade brought to the foreground. Zam is battered by life and circumstance, mutilated and enslaved, and still the two pine for each other.

Habibi is told in a dreamlike, non-linear, dense style, with asides for swirling Islamic legends, the theory and practice of magic squares, the hidden meanings in Arabic calligraphy, jumping from time to time and place to place, giving the book a deep, mythic resonance. The tale is epic and often horrific, but so well told that it grips you right through it's 670-odd pages.

I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.

Habibi

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Freedom, Science Fiction and the Singularity: A conversation with author Vernor Vinge

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Moore Foundation seeks data-intensive science ideas

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