Should Politicians Defer to Scientists?

That's among the questions a new high-powered group in Washington, D.C., will consider as it launches the first major nonpartisan effort to study how the government ought to use scientific information to make decisions. "We will be looking at what policymakers can do that is legitimate and what is beyond the pale," says David Goldston, an organizer for the 13-member panel. They'll meet for the first time next month and hope to release their one-and-only report in June.

Goldston says the group is not trying "to dissect what the Bush Administration has done right or wrong" in the consideration of scientific information for decision-making. Instead, it will examine federal advisory boards, conflict-of-interest policies, how different agencies consider scientific advice, and what role scientists should play in decisions by regulatory agencies such as the FDA or EPA.

So far, most of the work on the topic has been by journalists or the left-leaning nonprofit group Union of Concerned Scientists, whose reports have criticized the Bush Administration on issues including the editing of federal scientific reports and the pressure that government scientists may encounter as they seek to influence policy or speak to reporters about their findings. But this group includes former Bush Administration officials, former Science Committee chair Sherry Boehlert, former Science magazine editor-in-chief Don Kennedy, industrial officials, academics, and even, yes, the UCS, represented by its president, Kevin Knobloch.

Goldston, a former staff director for the House Science and Technology Committee, says the effort is sponsored by the Packard and Hewlett foundations as well as ExxonMobil and is run out of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a relatively new Washington group.

—Eli Kintisch

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How lizard spit aids diabetes cure

A year ago, when 58-year-old retiree B S Wig, saw the scales tip at 149 kg, he was dismayed. He was diabetic and also increasingly obese. His blood sugar hit a dismal 350 mg/dl after meals. The normal should be under 140 mg/dl. "I had become weak and refused to socialise. My life had gone haywire," says Wig. Till he was put on to a new drug, which not only reduced his weight to a healthy 118 kg, but his sugar levels to normal. "I can now be dated," he says happily.

Wig is lucky. Most diabetics have difficult lives, with an unending cycle of ill health, weakness and obesity as the pancreas produce little or no insulin, the hormone that converts glucose to energy. Plus, diabetic drugs usually make the patient obese, which adds to the risk of high BP, heart problems and strokes. So it's essential to have drugs which control sugar levels and reduce weight.

And that's what a new injectable drug, Byetta, does, say experts. It's made from the saliva of the Gila monster, a venomous lizard found in Southwest America. It's the first in a new range of anti-diabetic medicines and is FDA-approved. However, it can be used only on Type 2 diabetics.

It came to India exactly a year back and now, experts can quantify its success. By 2009, an upgraded version may be available.

Unlike Type 1 diabetes where there's no insulin secretion, in Type 2, insulin production from the beta cells of the pancreas isn't sufficient. And for Byetta to work, viable beta cells are needed, says Dr Ambrish Mithal, senior endocrinologist, Apollo Hospital, Delhi.

It works in three ways: It signals the pancreas to make the right amount of insulin after a meal; stops the liver from making too much glucose when the body does not need it, reduces appetite and the amount of food eaten and slows the rate at which glucose leaves the stomach.

Type 2 diabetics form 90% of the estimated 40 million diabetic cases in India. Almost 80% of them are obese, says Mithal. Adds Dr Pradeep Talwalkar, professor, diabetology, Raheja Hospital, Mumbai. "It suppresses rise in sugar levels by suppressing glucogon, a hormone which has the opposite effect of insulin."

"Byetta" says Mithal, "can produce nausea and vomiting in some patients. It is a niche drug, not for all diabetics, but is a good choice for those who need to lose weight with high post-meal blood sugar rises that remain uncontrolled even on oral medicines."

"Byetta also carries a lower risk than insulin of causing hypoglycemia, a dangerous condition where the patient can lose consciousness and slip into coma as insulin drops to very low levels," says Talwalkar.

Wig's case is an ideal example. "I was not judicious about my medicines and kept oscillating between oral medicines and insulin. Meanwhile, my weight and sugar levels went for a toss till I started taking Byetta," he says.

It's important for obese diabetics to lose weight, says Chennai-based Dr A Ramachandran, president, India Diabetics Research Foundation, as obesity makes them resistant to diabetic treatment. "It is, in fact, an analog for hormones which produce insulin called incretin." A weight reduction of 5-6 kg a year is good, says Mithal. Byetta is normally given with oral medicines.

But it's expensive — around Rs 7,500 monthly. Rimi Dasgupta, a 41-year-old diabetic, who lost 12 kg and with sugar levels which came down to 140 mg/dl from 390 mg/dl, says, "It's easy to inject, but I don't know how long I can take it as it's expensive. I hope to continue it for a year."

Byetta comes in a prefilled injection pen which uses a small needle. This pen contains pre-measured doses, so the patient doesn't have to adjust the dose. It's injected twice daily before morning and evening meals.

Generally, the patient is started off on a dose of 5 micrograms (mcg) twice a day for at least 30 days, but this could be increased to 10 mcg based on individual results. In clinical trials, it was found that on an average, patients lost five pounds in 30 weeks. However, Byetta cannot be used simply for weight reduction.

Though there are other new medicines which stimulate the pancreas to make insulin without producing hypoglycemia such as Januvia and Glavus, says Ramachandran, these don't make a patient lose weight.

Byetta could just be that shot that makes a difference.

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Is it true that no two snowflakes are alike?

by Matt Soniak

Up in the winter sky, water vapor in a cloud condenses into a droplet and freezes into a tiny bit of ice, with the water molecules bonding together as a hexagonal crystalline lattice with a six-fold symmetry. As water vapor condenses on its surfaces, the ice crystal grows into a hexagonal prism. As the crystal gets larger and larger, branches begin to form at the corners of the hexagon. When the crystal is heavy enough, it falls through the atmosphere toward the ground, where we call it a snowflake.

Many of those snowflakes have fallen onto the small town of Jericho, Vermont, the home of Wilson Alwyn Bentley. As a teenager, Bentley became interested in snowflakes, and he attempted to draw them while looking at them through a microscope his mother had given him. He found that he couldn’t get the complex structures of the flakes down on paper before they melted, so he attached a camera to a microscope using an adjustable bellows mechanism and photographed his first snowflake on January 15, 1885.

Over the next few decades, Bentley continued to study snowflakes, taking 5,381 photographs of them and developing a system to categorize over 80 different flake types and shapes. In 1920, he became a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society and was awarded the Society’s first research grant ($25). Bentley sometimes told people that he had never seen two snowflakes that looked alike and published several magazine articles arguing that no two flakes are identical. That idea stuck in the public imagination, which brings us to today’s question: was he right?

Scientists have discovered that as an ice crystal gets blown around in the air while it grows, the environmental conditions it is exposed to and the timing of the exposure determine the shape of the snowflake. With different factors determining the snowflake’s shape, and that shape changing as the growing snowflake moves through different conditions, you get a lot of variety in snowflake shape. Here’s a handy little graph from a Caltech physics professor that shows which shapes occur in which conditions:

If two growing snowflakes are exposed to the same temperatures and humidity and water saturation levels at the exact same time (live out the exact same lives, if you will), they may look exactly alike at the macroscopic level. In fact, in 1988, the Nancy Knight was studying snowflakes as part of her work with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and found two identical snowflakes of the hollow column type in a Wisconsin snowstorm.

But Caltech physics professor and snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht (the man who made the above graph) points out that if you look at any two flakes – even seemingly identical ones – on the atomic level, you’ll find numbers of water molecules and different layouts of those molecules (most water molecules contain an oxygen atom of ¹⁶O, but one molecule in every 500 has an ¹⁸O). One thing you won’t find? Two snowflakes that are exactly alike.

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