Author Archive
Duke’s PottiGate: Another scandal
Wednesday, July 28, 2010, 9:41 pm
Paul Goldberg
Dr. Anil Potti, the Duke University cancer researcher whose resume and research are under scrutiny, is the ideal target for Paul Goldberg, the editor of The Cancer Letter. Goldberg, who has an uncanny sense for hubris, is building a reputation for outing bad apples among cancer researchers, and he has dug up some interesting documents about Potti.
I met Goldberg a year ago at a training course the National Institutes of Health put on for science writers. He was one of the speakers and talked about a lunch cancer researcher whose research was flawed and who failed to disclose the $3.6 million she had received from a cigarette maker.
After I read The Cancer Letter’s special issue about Potti, I called Goldberg and got his permission to link to the documents supporting the stories. Read more…
RTP scientists look to sun to fuel energy research hub
Friday, July 23, 2010, 7:22 pmNorth Carolina’s Research Triangle was bested by California to get federal funding for a solar fuels innovation hub. The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded the $122 million prize to a group led by the California Institute of Technology.
The news was disappointing for the University of North Carolina, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International, which make up the Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute. That was clear when David Myers, RTI’s vice president of engineering and technology, talked to Science in the Triangle the same day the DoE made the announcement.
RTP-area efforts to develop a liquid fuel from sunlight will continue despite the federal funding setback, Myers said. The solar fuels initiative is one of the most active areas of energy research here and a key ingredient in plans to build the Triangle into an energy research hub.
“The area is vastly underrated in the amount of energy research going on,” Myer said.
Watch more of the videotaped Q&A here:
Lancet investigates claims of shoddy research by Potti, Duke colleagues
Friday, July 23, 2010, 2:25 pmNow, the scandal that’s been brewing at Duke University over a researcher and his research methods has expanded to the Lancet Oncology investigating potential errors in a report the medical journal published in December 2007.
Dr. Anil Potti, a Duke cancer researcher, was suspended last week after his claim to have been a Rhodes scholar could not be confirmed. Duke also halted enrollment in three clinical trials that Potti lead. The trials used gene-based test results of drug sensitivity to predict cancer patients’ responses to chemotherapy drugs.
Potti and colleagues at Duke also did the statistical analysis for a report published in the Lancet Oncology three years ago. The report was based on results from a clinical trial involving breast cancer patients. The published report was titled, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.”
The report, which had 19 co-authors, was an important step toward personalized medicine.
But the Lancet Oncology today expressed concern over errors that two of the report’s authors detected in the statistical analysis by Potti and his Duke colleagues.
Here it is: S0140673610701856
The Lancet investigation goes way beyond potentially false claims of one Duke researcher being a Rhodes scholar. Questions of research methods and errors reach beyond one possibly rogue researcher and potentially put patients’ lives at risk.
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 amTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
UNC astrophysicists worry about losing their window to the universe
Friday, July 9, 2010, 9:50 amFirst, the good news about SOAR, the high-powered telescope that astrophysicists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill helped build 1995 in the Chilean Andes.
Sheila Kannapan, a UNC physics and astronomy professor, and a few of her students are using SOAR to measure the mass of large objects and star clusters in the universe. Their work is part of a survey that, for the first time, will allow astrophysicists to determine the mass of the universe and better understand dark matter.
During a visit to the UNC campus Thursday, where scientists access the telescope from a remote control room, David Stark and David Hendel, two of Kannapan’s students, explained some of the survey work they do. Read more…
Gephardt visits Triangle on tour to spur medical innovation
Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 2:12 pmDick Gephardt is traveling across the country to reinvigorate medical innovation and on Wednesday the former Congressman, U.S. House majority leader and two-time Democratic presidential candidate visited North Carolina, a U.S. biotech hot spot.
U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt
He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.
Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines, making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.
“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. Read more…
Pediatrician takes on rare metabolic diseases
Friday, June 4, 2010, 9:48 am
Dr. Maria Escolar
Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.
Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.
“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said. Read more…
3-D learning with fun and games
Saturday, May 15, 2010, 8:01 am(Portions of this story were published May 3 in the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer.)
PHOTO BY TODD SUMLIN – tsumlin@charlotteobserver.com: Northwest Cabarrus High student Brendon Schaumburg, left, works on his senior project with technology facilitator Julie LaChance.
Teens across the country are starting to play computer games in school – and their teachers encourage them.
It’s called three-dimensional learning, and it has little in common with the 1980s video arcades parents remember.
In North Carolina, high school students who take an elective called “Computer Applications 2″ get introduced to Second Life or ReactionGrid, 3-D virtual worlds in which each player has an avatar – like a digital sock puppet that the user controls. In at least one school district, middle school students sit down at computers to play 3-D games in math and language arts classes.
3-D learning makes immediate sense to anybody born after 1985, because the advances in computer technology that stripped video games of their less-than-wholesome image also made the Internet an integral part of everyday life. For teens growing up in a world of Twitter and Facebook and game consoles such as PlayStation and Xbox, it’s no stretch to slip into an avatar and learn about prime numbers, creative writing or citizenship. Read more…
NCSU engineering students unveil their EcoCAR
Saturday, May 1, 2010, 7:05 pmN.C. State University engineering students participating in the national EcoCAR Challenge for the first time Saturday showed off their entry: A Saturn Vue that runs up to 65 miles on electricity.
NCSU's EcoCAR
To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.
The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.
On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities. Read more…
RTP researchers help track diseases linked to climate change
Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 8:53 pmDuke University researchers suspect climate change is a reason why a deadly new version of a tropical fungus is spreading in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.
Cryptococcus gattii
In Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia, crytococcus gattii infects eucalyptus trees and bothers people with compromised immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients and organ transplant recipients, who inhale its spores. But the strain that was first documented on Vancouver Island, Canada, a decade ago and has now spread to Seattle and Portland causes chest pain, fever, shortness of breath and weight loss in otherwise healthy people and has killed at least six of them.
In February 2007, the first North Carolina case, an otherwise healthy man, was treated at Duke University Medical Center, the Duke researchers reported in PLoS One. In a paper they published a week ago in PLoS Pathogen, the researchers wrote that the cryptococcus gattii strain in the Pacific Northwest was new, much more virulent and favored mammals.
