A distinguished Australian scientist says what those of us who have giggled through Don DeLillo’s White Noise know: The smarter we get, the dumber we get. The Age of Information is The Age of the Idjit. “The greater the scientific advance,” one of DeLillo’s characters explains, “the more primitive the fear.”

So universities have to be careful, because millions of highly advanced people believe all sorts of bullshit, especially about medical therapies (“chiropractic, homeopathy, iridology and reflexology”) that don’t belong in university degree programs because no empirical basis exists for them and because they divert resources from legitimate therapies. This blog has chronicled the efforts – often successful in the US – of reputable scientists to keep reputable universities from starting chiropractic programs in particular. A group of concerned international scientists is now “urging the vice chancellors [of Australian universities] to review the teaching of these courses and come up with a statement on the issue when they meet in March.” Quite a number of Australian universities – many of them public-funded – are handing out degrees in pretty whacked-out stuff.

Big intellectual property lawsuit brewing, with the president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center accused of using research generated at his prior lab – the U Penn’s Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute – to start up a potentially very, very, profitable pharma outfit.

… it’s anti-psychotic time!

… gets some high-profile attention.

David Brooks, New York Times:

Anybody who is on antidepressants, or knows somebody who is, should read Marcia Angell’s series “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” from The New York Review of Books. Many of us have been taught that depression arises, in part, from chemical imbalances in the brain. Apparently, there is no evidence to support that.

Many of us thought that antidepressants work. Apparently, there is meager evidence to support that, too. They may work slightly better than placebos, Angell argues, but only under certain circumstances. They may also be permanently altering people’s brains and unintentionally fueling the plague of mental illness by causing episodes of mania, for example. I wouldn’t consider Angell the last word on this, but it’s certainly a viewpoint worth learning about.

The latest study suggests antidepressants work no better than placebos.

UD‘s posts about Angell’s essays are here (scroll down).

Surprised that placebos treat depression just as well as expensive, side-effect-ridden anti-depressant pills? Why?

Start here.

… but since then has not been running the classiest of practices. The FBI has just raided one of his numerous, er, pain management facilities; and then there’s the matter of Medicare fraud as well.

Sanjoy Sundaresan seems to have attained positively medieval levels of sadism, withholding drugs from addicts unless they let him impale them with needles in order to bill the federal government for the impaling.

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UD thanks Bill for telling her that the link up there no longer works. Here’s an earlier story about Sundaresan. The details about the needles are taken from the later article.

… weary unto death if you ask me, produces one farcical story after another.

Insistent on an organic rather than psychiatric basis for their syndrome, some British CFS people make it a point to harass university researchers who fail to find said organic basis.

Professor [Myra] McClure [,tormented for having eliminated one viral candidate, the XMRV retrovirus,] says she will not be doing any further research in this area, and that may be the single most important consequence of this campaign of abuse and intimidation.

CFS is equally farcical on the other side, among scientists. The chick who claimed the now-discredited XMRV viral basis – she was associated with a lab at the University of Nevada – is now under arrest for “possession of stolen property and unlawfully taking computer data and equipment.”

Because… let’s see here… ach, my muscles ache from trying to piece this Keystone Kops plot together… Okay so like after she published her thing about yes there’s this viral basis the paper was retracted because no one can replicate the thing and people in her lab said the result might have just been “contamination” or maybe outright data manipulation or omg whatever.

So the university institute fired her and she apparently tried to steal all her data so she could take the NIH-sponsored work someplace else. Only NIH doesn’t let you do that, you know … just up and decamp with your shit… Plus bigger problem is that you’re not supposed to steal things.

On 22 November, [Judy] Mikovits posted $100,000 bail after spending four nights in jail in Ventura, California, as a “fugitive”, according to a county-court docket. She is accused of possessing stolen lab notebooks, a computer and other material belonging to the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI), a private research centre in Reno, Nevada, where she was research director. Mikovits faces extradition to Nevada, while the WPI is seeking the materials’ return in a separate civil suit.

… lead the headlines at Brown University, where two inexplicable things are happening. Keller remains on the faculty, and a masturbation “spree” is afoot. Ahand?

Keller, as readers of this blog know, is one of the three official biggest baddest boys of academic medicine (along with Joseph Biederman and Charles Nemeroff). All men have undergone titanic struggles with conflict of interest regs, and in the process drawn plenty of attention to their schools, as well as to the quality of their research.

The latest effort to draw attention to the Keller scandal involves the non-profit Healthy Skepticism, which has written a letter to Brown asking its assistance in getting an apparently ghostwritten Paxil article by Keller retracted. Brown has been sitting on its hands.

Which you can’t say about the people involved in what reporter Lucy Feldman describes as “College Hill’s inexplicable months-long masturbation spree.”

Pigs on campus.

… Libra, is “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he’d moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

But Joyce is more likely to have written the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM’s predecessor, four, has a thousand pages, and we may be sure that five will have many more than that. It’s a megaton psychotropic prescription machine. As Allen Frances, editor of earlier, more sane, DSMs, writes, “DSM-5 is suggesting many new and untested diagnoses and also markedly reduced thresholds for old ones.”

Frances offers an example:

‘Attenuated psychosis syndrome’ will have a ridiculously high false positive rate ( 80-90%), no effective treatment, would promote unnecessary exposure to harmful antipsychotics, and would cause needless worry and stigma. Since studies prove conclusively that the symptoms are so very rarely predictive of psychosis, why in the world would DSM-5 give someone the stigmatizing and absurdly misleading label ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ and open the door to inappropriate antipsychotic use? Recognizing all these risks, a large portion of schizophrenia and prodromal researchers are sensibly opposed to the inclusion of ‘attenuated psychosis syndrome’ in DSM-5. But unaccountably, the work group stubbornly clings to its proposal and, without the petition, there is a good chance it may sneak into DSM-5.

In great part, the DSM-5 is a work of the imagination. Like all ambitious novels, it exhibits enormous scope and imaginative energy. Told from the point of view of a detached omniscient narrator, it chronicles the plummeting of populations into pre-psychosis, and their ultimate rescue by “the number one revenue producer of all classes of drugs,” anti-psychotics. Its pages evoke a les misérables America, massively prodromal, holding out its butyrophenone-bowl on every street corner.

In recent years, psychologists have reported a raft of findings on race biases, brain imaging and even extrasensory perception that have not stood up to scrutiny.

… In a survey of more than 2,000 American psychologists scheduled to be published this year, Leslie John of Harvard Business School and two colleagues found that 70 percent had acknowledged, anonymously, to cutting some corners in reporting data. About a third said they had reported an unexpected finding as predicted from the start, and about 1 percent admitted to falsifying data.

The ruler of this universe seems to be ex-Harvard psychology professor Marc Hauser (scroll down), and his long slow downfall is certainly instructive; but really where is the American Psychological Association? UD gathers the APA is the official organization here… UD fears the APA has, at the very least, co-dependency and enabling issues.

A far more healthy research model is the open rollicking naughtiness of the American Psychiatric Association, with its Schatzbergs and Nemeroffs and Biedermans and all. The first APA is getting all weepy and neurotic; the second hums happily along.

… has died. Both immunologists, they worked together at the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s (UD‘s father spent his whole career at NIH).

I can’t find papers they co-authored, but they cited each other a lot. Benacerraf’s name, for instance, shows up as the last reference in this paper (UD‘s father is Herbert J. Rapp), “Heterogeneity of Rabbit IgM Antibody as Detected by C′1a Fixation.”

Forty years ago, when most clinical research took place in academic settings, the main dangers to research subjects came in service to genuine scientific aims. A large regulatory apparatus was developed to protect human subjects from the ambitions of overweening academic researchers. In the early 1990s, however, pharmaceutical companies realized that it was faster and less expensive to conduct trials in the private sector, where the driving force is not knowledge, but profit. And the regulatory apparatus designed for the old era has proved woefully inadequate for the new one.

UD‘s friend Carl Elliott, in today’s New York Times, warns about the disintegration of legitimate research, and the harm that can come – under a new commercial regime – to human subjects.

Felix Salmon reviews Lawrence Summers’ Harvard presidency (get all the details you want by typing any phrase from his sentence into this blog’s search engine).

He forgets to mention his fabled multi-tasking. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time.”

But anyway, everyone’s talking, today, about Summers’ use, in a recent interview, of the word asshole to describe two notorious Harvard students – the Winklevoss twins:

If an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.

So there’s a wee wumpus this morning about a treasury secretary and a university president and all calling someone an asshole. Who cares. But what this does do is allow me to share with you one of my favorite scientific articles. It originally appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and has been collected in a book called Sex as a Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble.

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Title: THE AH GENE: Implications for Genetic Counseling

Excerpts: “[We wish to discuss] evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner…. [T]he percentage of adults in the United States exhibiting chronic AH behavior is about 32% (95% confidence interval, 27-37%)… [Being] a carrier of one of … three genotypes is strongly associated with exhibiting chronic AH behavior (i.e. with being phenotypically a “real AH”)… [It] can be argued that almost all of the world’s problems are due to some degree to the influence of the AH gene….”

And then, for $5,000 a pop, Egija Kuka sold these United States Medical Licensing Exam questions to medical students who had in the past repeatedly failed the test. Kuka promised them they’d pass this time.

“The National Board of Medical Examiners first grew suspicious of Optima University’s owners in 2008 because Kuka took the test several times and scored poorly each time.”

She wasn’t taking it; she was photographing it.

Many doctors who cheated their way through the test now stand to lose their licenses.