SciBlogs

Archive Science and Society

New Zealand’s National Science Challenges announced Siouxsie Wiles May 01

11 Comments

NZ’s National Science Challenges announced alongside a massive funding boost

In the beautiful blue Ocean gallery at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Prime Minister John Key, the Honourable Minister for Science and Innovation Steven Joyce and the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor Sir Peter Gluckman, today announced the 10 National Science Challenges.

The PEAK panel*, chaired by Sir Peter Gluckman, was charged with developing the Challenges using the following criteria:
1) Target high level goals, which if achievable would have a major public benefit to NZ
2) Be seen as being of public importance, hence the public engagement campaign
3) Have scientific research as essential to solving the Challenge
4) The scientific capability and capacity existing in NZ

The panel considered 223 submissions from the science and research sector, 138 from the public via the web, and 616 ideas and comments posted to the Great NZ Science Project website and Facebook page. The main 10 Challenges are listed on the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment’s website here, and the document explaining them in a little more detail is here.

The big surprise came with the announcement that the budget for the Challenges had been more than doubled with the allocation of an extra $73.5M, bringing the total budget over the next four years to $133.5M. It will be interesting to see where this money has come from. The second exciting announcement was of a special extra ‘Science and Society leadership Challenge’ brought about by what the panel identified as deficits in science education, science communication, science literacy and the application of evidence in all levels of decision making. This challenge therefore covers a huge array of themes, from promotion of science literacy in schools, to developing science communication as an academic discipline and encouraging members of the public to participate in science as ‘citizen scientists’.

But other than the Science and Society Challenge, is it ‘business as usual’? It does look awfully like it. Just looking at the biomedical related Challenges, I was really shocked to see that infectious diseases don’t get a mention. In fact, in the Challenge 3 Healthier Lives: Research to reduce the burden of major New Zealand health problems, they are specifically excluded as the focus is on non-communicable diseases (NCDs). I do hope the 792 people who ‘voted’ for my illustrative ‘Fighting Diseases‘ Challenge on the Great NZ Science Project didn’t think they were actually voting for me! I asked Sir Peter about this at the Science Media Centre’s media briefing afterwards and he explained that they had considered infectious diseases, but that more people die from NCD’s in NZ, and that in the panel’s opinion, infectious diseases research in NZ didn’t meet the criteria of having sufficient capability and capacity to address a Challenge. This is depressing as NZ is bucking international trends, with our rates of infectious diseases on the increase rather than decreasing, which is what would be expected of a developed country like ours.

At the media briefing I also specifically (and rather cheekily) asked Steven Joyce and Sir Peter how much of the funds would be used to support post-doctoral fellows and PhD students to actually do the science, and how much would be spent on the salaries of Principal Investigators. It is an important question, especially given that the Challenges have multi-disciplinarity and collaboration at their heart. If the Challenges are funded like normal contestable granting bodies like the Marsden and Health Research Council, we could find most of the money going to pay the time contribution of the ‘silverbacks’ and not on salaries for younger researchers. Both the minister and Sir Peter answered that ‘workforce development’ would be a key measure of success so we’ll see how that works out.

*PEAK panel members: Peter Gluckman, Jacqueline Rowarth, Ian Ferguson, William Denny, Elf Eldridge, Peter Hunter, Mary O’Kane, David Penman, Te Ahu Karamu Charles Royal, Richie Poulton and Rachel Wiltshire.

UPDATE: I live-tweeted the announcement so have storified the tweets here.

Monday Micro: living night lights Siouxsie Wiles Apr 29

No Comments

One of the latest Kickstarter projects to create a buzz is promising its backers a living nightlight that shines without electricity. Enter the Glowing Plant project, developed by a group of biohackers from BioCurious* in California. Launched just a few days ago, Antony Evans, Omri Amirav-Drory and Kyle Taylor have already exceeded their $65,000 target needed to create a genetically engineered plant that glows in the dark. In fact, they have already passed the $115,000 mark with over a month left to go. Their new goal is $400,000 to create a glowing rose. Check out their short video by clicking the link below:

Glowing plant vid

So how are they going to do it? Back in 2010, Alexander Krichevsky and colleagues published a paper in PLOS One showing that tobacco plants could be engineered to glow in the dark by incorporating the genes (known as the lux operon) which make the marine bacterium Photobacterium leiognathi** glow (1). The light generated by one of the plant lines they created could be detected by eye in a dark room after about 5-10 minutes suggesting they could make quite neat night lights. This was exciting stuff as previous attempts to make glowing plants had revolved around getting the plants to express the luciferase gene from the firefly, which required plants to be sprayed with luciferin, the substrate for the reaction, in order for light to be produced. In contrast, cells that express the whole bacterial lux operon glow without needing any additional cofactors.

Glowing tobacco plants

Glowing tobacco plants

Interestingly, Krichevsky declares in his PLOS One paper that he is founder of BioGlow Inc, a company which aims to develop commercially available glowing ornamental plants. BioGlow Inc is listed as a tenant of the Bio-Research & Development Growth (BRDG) Park at the Danforth Plant Science Centre in Missouri, but otherwise doesn’t have much of a web presence.

But back to the Glowing Plant project. Antony and his team say they are planning on building on the work of Krichevsky and colleagues, making a synthetic version of the bioluminescence genes so that they will be better expressed by the plant cells. Fingers crossed!

Reference:
1. Krichevsky A, Meyers B, Vainstein A, Maliga P, Citovsky V (2010) Autoluminescent Plants. PLoS ONE 5(11): e15461. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0015461

*The BioCurious ethos is that innovations in biology should be accessible, affordable, and open to everyone. They have built up a complete working laboratory and training centre for citizen scientists and hobbyists to get together to do science.

**I’ve blogged about P. leiognathi before. They use their light to trick zooplankton into eating them. In a nutshell, the zooplankton ingest the glowing bacteria but are unable to digest them. The glowing bacteria mean the hapless zooplankton are then more visible to their own predators, nocturnal fish, who devour them. P. leiognathi are unfazed by all this, ending up in the fish’s digestive system which is where they wanted to be in the first place. Genius.

Why stereotyping scientists matters Siouxsie Wiles Apr 27

10 Comments

I’m always interested to find out what people think I do for a living. No one has ever said scientist. It’s usually something in the arts or fashion*. You know, creative industries. I’m guessing it’s because of my hair. What is interesting about this though is that somehow people don’t think of science as being creative. Such misperceptions are largely due to the way scientists are portrayed in the media. It’s really interesting looking at stock photos to see how different professions are portrayed; some of the best of scientists have been collected together by various bloggers. Male scientists are usually older with crazy hair, while women scientists are scantily clad or have completely forgotten to wear any clothes. White coats abound, as do glass vials of coloured liquids. But how representative are these images of scientists? Not very, I’d say. But should we care? Yes!

This 'scientist' remembered her gloves and safety glasses but forgot her clothes!

This ‘scientist’ remembered her gloves and safety glasses but forgot her clothes!

A few days ago I gave a talk to primary school teachers about why stereotyping scientists matters. It was partly inspired by data looking at pictures of scientists drawn by school children before and after a visit to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, which specialises in high-energy particle physics. Lots of the before images are of crazy haired old men in white coats, with many children describing careers in science as unobtainable. But after the visit, the scientists start to look just like normal people, and the children even start to suggest they could see themselves as scientists one day.

After my talk, the lovely Dr Sally Birdsall sent me a paper published in 1999 that looked at children’s portrayals of scientists [1]. The authors collected 562 drawings done by 281 children aged 5-13 living in different socioeconomic areas of London. I’ve plotted some of the data showing the percentage of drawings that represented male and female scientists, as well as those where scientists are portrayed wearing a lab coat or doing chemistry-type experiments. As you can see, more males are portrayed than females, a trend which increases as the children get older, at least until the age of 10. What is really interesting is that the numbers of drawings of scientists in white coats/doing chemistry increases with age, presumably as children are exposed to media portrayals of stereotypes.

How kids portray scientists

How kids portray scientists

It seems clear to me that being exposed to more realistic portrayals of scientists makes a difference, at least to children. Meeting real scientists is even better. If you are a scientist reading this, consider getting in touch with your local school and volunteering to go in and meet some of the kids. The younger the better! In the absence of having any scientists volunteer, in my talk I pointed to some online resources that teachers could use to show scientists in all their real glory. There is the fantastic ‘This Is What a Scientist Looks Like‘ which has pictures and profiles for over 600 scientists of all colours, shapes and sizes. There is also the ‘100 Women, 100 Visions‘ project, a series of 100 pictures taken by photographer Jackie King in 2009 to celebrate the variety of women scientists and engineers at Imperial College London**. And finally, there was the Great NZ Science Project, the public engagement campaign for the National Science Challenges***, which used 8 scientists to illustrate the diversity of science going on in New Zealand. What I love about this campaign is that it showed that science happens everywhere, not just in labs. And only three of the 8 scientists are wearing lab coats****. The TV advert below got a lot of airplay on NZ TV so I hope that will go someway to busting some of the stereotypes.

YouTube Preview Image

Slides from my talk:


Reference:
1. Changing children’s images of scientists: can teachers make a difference? Brian Matthews and Daniel Davies (1999). School Science Review. 80 (293): 79-85.

*Fashion always cracks me up. I got the award for being the worst dressed two years running in high school. True, the award was coveted by the ‘alternative’ crowd – it meant your efforts to be different had been recognised :)

**See if you can spot a familiar face.

***Which are being announced on Wed 1st May…

****Make no mistake though, the campaign wasn’t perfect. One of it’s main features seemed to have been to perpetuate the myth that all scientists are bad communicators. One stereotype at a time I guess.

Press Complaints Commission upholds homeopaths complaint Siouxsie Wiles Apr 16

101 Comments

Tauranga homeopath Clive Stuart has had part of his complaint against an article on homeopathy (Homeopathy – Trick or Treatment?) by Stacey Anyan, published in the July 2012 edition of North & South, upheld by the Press Complaints Commission (PCC)*. While the PCC did not agree with his complaint that balance needed to be numerically equivalent (there were quotes from two people critical of homeopathy and one defending) or that his letter to the editor should not have been accompanied by a response from a critic of homeopathy (Dr Shaun Holt), they did uphold his complaint that the article was wrong to say that “homeopathic remedies have failed every randomised, evidence-based scientific study seeking to verify their claims of healing powers”.

The article title is a reference to the excellent book ‘Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial’ by Dr Simon Singh and Prof Edzard Ernst. Prof Ernst is a doctor and former homeopath who was the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, at the University of Exeter. This is what they conclude about homeopathy:

“Hundreds of trials have failed to deliver significant or convincing evidence to support the use of homeopathy for the treatment of any particular ailment. On the contrary, it would be fair to say that there is a mountain of evidence to suggest that homeopathic remedies simply do not work. This should not be such a surprising conclusion when we recall that they typically do not contain a single molecule of any active ingredient.”

But lets not take their word for it. In 2009-2010 the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee performed an ‘evidence check‘ on homeopathy, calling defenders and critics alike to present the evidence for and against homeopathy. Their conclusion:

“…the evidence base shows that homeopathy is not efficacious (that is, it does not work beyond the placebo effect) and that explanations for why homeopathy would work are scientifically implausible.”

It would seem from these that the scientific evidence points to homeopathy having no effect beyond placebo, when evaluated using methodologically sound protocols by people without a vested interest in homeopathy. However, the PCC:

“found the article inaccurate in so far as the state of scientific research into homeopathy is not
as conclusive as North & South had suggested.”

If only Stacey Anyan had included the words ‘well-designed’ in her sentence. What a difference a couple of little words would have made. There is certainly an important lesson for journalists in this debacle.

It is interesting to read in the judgement* how the PCC came to their conclusion. They seem to have been swayed by a 7 page letter from a Dr David St George. We’ll get to who he is in a moment. This is what the PCC say:

Dr St George believed the statement in North & South’s article arose from a misunderstanding of the Lancet study, which had compared 110 published placebo-controlled trials of homeopathy with the same number of published placebo-controlled trials of conventional medical drug treatments. He said most of the 110 homeopathy trials in that study were “randomised, evidence-based scientific studies” which demonstrated an effect beyond a placebo effect.

Actually the Lancet study Dr St George is quoting concluded “Biases are present in placebo-controlled trials of both homoeopathy and conventional medicine. When account was taken for these biases in the analysis, there was weak evidence for a specific effect of homoeopathic remedies, but strong evidence for specific effects of conventional interventions. This finding is compatible with the notion that the clinical effects of homoeopathy are placebo effects.”

Two disturbing things come to light from this case. The first is that the PCC breached its own rules by accepting Dr St George’s letter which was the third submission in this case (two submissions are allowed by both sides) so it will be interesting to see why this was allowed. The second is finding out who Dr David St George is and what he does for a living. Dr St George has a medical degree from the University of Auckland and a degree in epidemiology from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He worked as a consultant clinical epidemiologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London and then as Director of Research and Clinical Effectiveness at Southampton University Hospital. He was also the first Director of Research at the Foundation for Integrated Health, a controversial charity founded in 1993 by the Prince of Wales to promote alternative and complementary medicine, lobbying for its inclusion in the UK’s National Health Service. The charity closed in 2010 after it’s finance director, accountant George Gray, was convicted of theft and sentenced to three years in prison. It is unclear what research, if any, the Foundation undertook.

Dr St George’s other ‘achievements’ include helping Middlesex University set up an undergraduate degree in traditional Chinese medicine**, being research committee chairman of the (now defunct) Scottish School of Herbal Medicine and a former member of the British Acupuncture Accreditation Board***. But now he is back in New Zealand and working for the NZ Ministry of Health as ‘Chief Advisor – Integrative Care’. I wonder if this swayed the PCC at all into accepting his unorthodox, rather lengthy and over technical submission. This is what it says on the Ministry’s website about Dr St George’s role:

Dr David St George’s role is to provide professional leadership, direction and advice on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and on the integration of CAM with conventional health care, particularly in the area of primary care and chronic care conditions.

Oh dear. I think we need to find out exactly what ‘direction and advice’ Dr St George has been giving to the Ministry for Health. Because by his submission to the PCC I’m not entirely confident it will be based on unbiased methodologically sound scientific evidence. Dr Prue Williams, General Manager of Science Investments for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, announced at the recent NZ Association of Scientists annual meeting in Wellington that there are plans for all ministries to have scientific advisors in place. I suggest whoever is appointed for the Ministry of Health starts by looking into Dr David St George.

*It’s case 2320, the judgement for which isn’t up on the PCC website yet.

[Update: 14:20 on 16/04/2013 - judgement now available online here]

***On the subject of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) Singh and Ernst conclude: “Some elements may be effective for some conditions, while others (e.g. cupping) are unlikely to offer any benefit above placebo. Many aspects of TCM are potentially harmful. Some individual herbs used in TCM (e.g. liquorice, giner, ginko) undoubtedly have pharmacological effects.. On the other hand, some.. are toxic … may also contain non-herbal ingredients (e.g. endangered animals), contaminants (e.g. heavy metals) or adulterants (e.g. steroids).”

***On the subject of acupuncture Singh and Ernst conclude: “..there is no evidence at all to demonstrate the existence of Ch’i or meridians [the basis for acupuncture points]. There are some high-quality trials that support the use of acupuncture for some types of pain and nausea, but there are also high-quality trials that contradict this conclusion. In short, the evidence is neither consistent nor convincing – it is borderline.”

Reference:
Shang A, Huwiler-Müntener K, Nartey L, Jüni P, Dörig S, Sterne JA, Pewsner D, Egger M (2005). Are the clinical effects of homoeopathy placebo effects? Comparative study of placebo-controlled trials of homoeopathy and allopathy. Lancet 366(9487):726-32.

The legacy of the MMR debacle Siouxsie Wiles Apr 15

3 Comments

Wales in currently in the grip of a measles epidemic, with nearly 700 people diagnosed with the highly contagious virus since the outbreak began in November last year. To put this in perspective, in 2012 there were 2,016 cases of measles in the WHOLE of England and Wales, with 116 of those in Wales.

Measles is preventable with the combined Measles, Mumps and Rubella vaccine, more commonly known as MMR. Rates of MMR uptake in the UK are well below the 95% needed for herd immunity to protect those too young or vulnerable to be vaccinated. In 2011-2012, uptake rates for the 2 doses stood at 86% in England and 82.4% in Wales. Dr Meirion Evans of Public Health Wales has said that there are an estimated 40,000 children across Wales who have not been vaccinated and that the number of cases could easily double. This is a frightening prospect as measles can mean more than just a fever and rash – it can also lead to ear infections, pneumonia, inflammation of the brain and death.

Most people would now agree that the low uptake rates for MMR are a result of a now retracted paper by discredited gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield (who was struck off by the medical register by the General Medical Council in the UK in 2010) linking the MMR vaccine with autism, the refusal of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair to disclose whether his son Leo had been vaccinated, and some pretty shocking media coverage. While the health service in Wales has been setting up mass drop in vaccination clinics in an attempt to reduce the pool of potential measles victims, it was therefore a strange and dangerous decision by the Independent newspaper’s Health Editor, Jeremy Laurance to run a press release from Wakefield along with an article which appeared on the front page of the newspaper under the headline:

MMR scare doctor Andrew Wakefield breaks his silence:
Measles outbreak in Wales proves I was right

Wakefield claims that the drop in vaccination was due to the government’s decision not to grant an import licence for single vaccines, which at the time he was suggesting be offered in place of the MMR vaccine. Turns out he had a vested interest in pushing single vaccines, which would have increased the time taken before children were fully protected against measles, mumps and rubella. True, the article written by Laurance is critical of Wakefield, but why provide any fuel for the fire? Perhaps this description of Laurance from the Independent’s webpage says all we need to know:

Jeremy Laurance is Health Editor of The Independent and the i and has covered the specialism for more than 20 years. He thinks the harm medicine does is under-appreciated, the harm it prevents over-rated, and that cycling works better than most drugs. He was named Specialist Journalist of the Year in the 2011 British Press Awards.

Monday Micro – World TB Day Siouxsie Wiles Mar 25

No Comments

Yesterday, the 24th of March, was World TB Day which aims to build awareness for tuberculosis, a lung disease which kills about 2 million people around the world each year. That’s 3 people a minute. Why the 24th March? This was the day, in 1882, that Dr Robert Koch* announced he had discovered the bacterium that causes TB, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

TB, or consumption as it was known, had long been thought to be a hereditary disease. In 1869, French physician Jean-Antoine Villemin showed the disease was infectious. He injected rabbits with material taken from people who had died of TB. Not surprisingly, the rabbits became ill. Thirteen years later, Robert Koch, purified the microorganism responsible, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1905.

But despite it being over 100 years since M. tuberculosis was discovered, we are a long way from eradicating TB, hence World TB Day. The Global Fund, supported by the Gates Foundation and others, have put together this nice infographic highlighting some facts and figures.

GatesTB20130321FINALJPG

M. tuberculosis is one of the organisms my lab at the University of Auckland are busy working on. If you want to know what we are doing, here’s the little animation I made with graphic artist Luke Harris and his team to show how we are using fireflies to make TB research faster and more humane.

YouTube Preview Image

*Koch is best known to microbiologists for what we now refer to as Koch’s Postulates, four criteria he stated needed to be proven to establish a causal relationship between an microorganism and a particular disease. These are:

1. That the microorganism is found in all cases of the disease examined, while absent in healthy organisms
2. That the microorganism be isolated from a diseased host and grown in a pure culture
3. That the microorganism should be capable of producing the original infection when introduced into a healthy host, even after several generations in culture
4. That the microorganism is retrievable from an inoculated/experimental host and cultured again.

As with everything though, it turns out that there are exceptions to every rule, and we now know many microorganisms that fail one or more of Koch’s Postulates but are still clearly the cause of a particular disease. For example, many nasty microorganisms can be carried asymptomatically by healthy people (including Vibrio cholerae, the agent responsible for cholera), while there are a number of microorganisms which we are unable to culture in the laboratory (including Mycobacterium leprae, the agent responsible for leprosy, which can only be grown in the footpad of a mouse, or a nine-banded armadillo).

Monday Micro – Fantastic Farts Siouxsie Wiles Feb 18

3 Comments

So here is a question. When you feel a fart brewing, do you let it rip or hold it in until out of the range of others?*

Old fart by Chris Tucker

If you are of the ‘hold it in’ persuasion, what do you do when in an enclosed space? Like on an aeroplane. Last week the New Zealand Medical Journal published a ‘viewpoint’ article by a group of Danish doctors asking just this question**. Alas, the article is behind a paywell but it goes something like this:

1. People fart.

2. Farting in a confined space is unpleasant to those who encounter the fart (reducing their quality of life***).

3. People may fart even more when on a plane as they may produce more intestinal gases because of the lower partial pressure in the cabin, not to mention the food served.

4. People may try to hold in their farts because they are embarassed/don’t want to impair people’s quality of life. This can cause discomfort, bloating, indigestion and heartburn. The authors even go so far as to say that the stress of holding in those farts could cause a person’s blood pressure and pulse to rise and reduced oxygenation of the blood, which could lead cardiovascular complications, like strokes.

5. If the pilot is the one holding in the farts, it could impair their performance.

Yikes! I’d never thought of farting on planes as that serious an issue. Fortunately, the authors have suggested some solutions. The most extreme is to use some kind of methane breath test to divide passengers into “flatulent and non-flatulent flyers”. They suggest flatulent flyers could be “restricted to concealed areas” or made to buy “flatus quotas” – in other words, a ‘fart tax’.

But the easiest solution, they suggest, is to install activated charcoal into aeroplane seats. Activated charcoal is a form of carbon processed to be riddled with small, low-volume pores, which are able to absorb gases. Farts, in other words. Just one gram of activated charcoal has a surface area in excess of 500 square metres. Failing this, they suggest people could wear activated charcoal undies, or perhaps socks, which could intercept farts escaping down a trouser leg.

So if you find yourself worrying about your next long haul flight, you could invest in some Under-ease undies, complete with removable activated charcoal filter, for which their inventor, Buck Weimer won the 2001 IgNobel prize for biology.

Reference:
Hans C Pommergaard, Jakob Burcharth, Anders Fischer, William E G Thomas, Jacob Rosenberg (2013). Flatulence on airplanes: just let it go. New Zealand Medical Journal. 126:1369.

*Just in case you are wondering why this Monday Micro post is about flatulence, it’s because farts (or flatus as it is known in medical circles) are mostly produced as a byproduct of bacterial fermentation in the gastrointestinal tract. According to Wikipedia, people produce 476 to 1491 ml of flatus every 24 hours, depending on diet.

**I am quite curious as to why a group of Danish doctors are publishing this in the NZ Medical Journal. Perhaps because we are one of the furthest places away from Denmark?! Air New Zealand take note!

***I kid you not. They actually say that.

What Kiwis die of – Part III: Changes with age Siouxsie Wiles Feb 15

10 Comments

Over the last month we have been looking at the data on the primary causes of death recorded by the Ministry of Health for the 29,204 people who died in New Zealand in 2009. First we looked at what people thought they would die of, and then we looked at differences in the causes of death recorded for men and women. Accompanying each post was a gorgeous infographic by Mike Dickison.

This week we decided to look at how causes of death differ with age. We’ll start with a table of the total numbers of people who died in each age bracket:

I was interested to see that the number of people who died under the age of 80 was really similar to the number of people over 80 (14,371 under 80 versus 14,833). Striking also to see the greater numbers of males dying than females for all age brackets, except the over 80′s.

To show how some of the causes change with age, Mike has chosen to represent as little line graphs:

No surprises for dementia and Alzheimer’s, with the graphs skewed towards the upper age brackets. And probably no surprises that the deaths from traffic accidents peaks for people in their the 20′s. But I’m blown away by the data on assaults. I would never have expected there to be such a huge peak for children, similar to the number of people assaulted in their 30′s. Shocking.

To see if people’s perceptions tallied up with reality, again we took to social media and asked people what they thought was the major cause of death for different ages*. So what did the Kiwis we surveyed think? Results are summarised in the slideshare presentation below.



People were pretty much spot on with the major cause of death for children under five being accidents. But interestingly, while of our survey respondents were right thinking traffic accidents were the major cause of death for people on their 20′s, the number of people committing suicide is almost the same (98 versus 95). For people in their 30′s the major cause of death is cancer, but less than 20% of our survey participants picked this option. More popular choices were accidental death and transport accidents (with about 30% of the votes each). For people in their 40′s, cancer is again the biggest killer, by quite a margin. But again only 20% of our respondents picked this option. The most popular choice was circulatory diseases (heart attacks and strokes). I wonder if this misperception around cancer means those in their 30′s and 40′s are more less likely to miss early warning signs.

* We used Twitter, Facebook, and email to entice over 100 people to fill out our survey using the SurveyMonkey website. Like all online surveys, ours should not be considered representative of the population of New Zealand, but rather of people on social media who were happy to fill out our survey.

This post is the second in a series inspired by the Guardian newspaper’s infographic ‘What we die of’ and is a collaboration between myself, chief number cruncher Dr Paul Gardner and data visualisation extraordinaire Dr Mike Dickison. Dr Paul Gardner (@ppgardne) is a Royal Society of NZ Rutherford Discovery Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics at the University of Canterbury’s School of Biological Sciences. He gets very excited about RNA. Dr Mike Dickison (@adzebill) is a freelance information designer with a PhD on the evolution of giant flightless birds. He quite likes ukuleles too. Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) is a Health Research Council of NZ Hercus Fellow at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Medical & Health Sciences. She is rather keen on nasty bacteria and anything that glows in the dark.

So just how did I get my name? Siouxsie Wiles Feb 04

9 Comments

“Where the fuck did the author of those Sciblogs posts get her absurd name?”

So writes ‘Alf Grumble’ on his blog today. Normally if people know how to pronounce my name, it tells me a little something of their misspent youth. Alf is obviously a model citizen. Because I am named after 70′s punk icon Siouxsie Sioux*. Which gives me the opportunity to play one of my favourite Siouxsie and the Banshees songs, Spellbound.

YouTube Preview Image

Siouxsie is pronounced just like Susie but I do get all sorts. Like when University of Otago’s Prof Kurt Krause called me Sushi when we were interviewed live on TV One’s former current affairs programme Close Up. It was hard not to giggle. A close friend used to pronounce it S-eye-ook-see. But that was just to wind me up.

But today is the first time I’m aware of that someone has taken to their blog to be rude about my name**.

Chief Sitting Bull circa 1885. Image from Wikipedia

I guess I should be flattered that Alf took the time to write so eloquently. He even went to the trouble of finding a video on You Tube explaining how to pronounce Sioux. I’m guessing that as well as not being a punk fan, he also hasn’t heard of one of the groups of people who originally inhabited North America. In which case, I think Alf’s post says far more about him than me.

*I wasn’t always. But over 20 years ago, I had a crush on someone who adored Siouxsie. He started spelling it that way and it stuck. I still carry a torch for him.

**I do wonder if he would have written the post had I not been white?

Monday Micro – just who are we? Siouxsie Wiles Feb 04

No Comments

Hi, I’m Siouxsie. I’m 5 ft 2 inches tall (short?), on the rather rotund side, and have green eyes. I sport an abundance of pink/red hair although I’m naturally a brunette. That’s me. Or is it?

Because what I like to think of as me, my Homo sapiens cells, is outnumbered 10:1 by the microbes that live in and on my body. There are trillions of them. It’s not that I don’t like to bath or shower. On the contrary. No, these microbes are my microbiome. Only over the past few years have scientists come to realise just how important our microbiome is. It performs essential functions like digesting food and synthesising vitamins. It also keeps pathogenic microbes at bay, and regulates our immune system. In fact, our microbiome is thought to be responsible for many gut disorders, as well as eczema and chronic sinusitis, and may also play a role in our mood and behavior.

So wouldn’t you like to know more about this important part of you? Well, now you can. The uBiome project, on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, is offering to sequence your microbiome. Just US$79 (NZ$94) and you get your gut microbes. Or you can spend US$335 (NZ$395) for your gut, mouth, skin, nose and genital microbes. If you have the cash, you can really splash out with the Delta^5 deal (US$1,337/NZ$1,582), which will allow you to sample five different areas of your body on five occasions. Want to see how changing your diet affects your microbiome? Then this is the one for you!

So how does it work? It’s pretty easy. They send you a kit, you take a sample (a bit of poo for gut microbes, a swab up your nose for those microbes, you get the picture) and answer a health survey. You then send your sample back to be sequenced and when the data is ready, they send you a link to their website. Here they will you what’s in your sample and how it correlates to other people in the project (you can opt out of having your data included but the more people opt in the better for science).

So far, the campaign has raised over US$250,000 (NZ$300,000) with 2 weeks left to run. This project is inspired. The NIH funded Human Microbiome Project is looking at the microbiomes of 600 healthy individuals and the scientific questions addressed reflect the interests of the researchers. The uBiome project is opening up the technology to everyone. There is even a ‘Philanthropist’ supporter level, where you pay for someone in the developed world to have their microbiome sequenced. To date, over 1,800 people have contributed to the campaign and nearly 1,100 of those have opted to sampled some bit of their microbiome. That’s almost double the number of people sampled in the Human Microbiome Project.

Even more excitingly, the uBiome team want to involve the public in analyzing the data and generating and testing hypotheses. The data of those people who opt in will be open to the world, anonymised of course! Is this the future of science? I can’t wait to find out.

So watch this space, I hope to be posting my gut microbiome for all to see later in the year. And if you fancy joining me, then hop on over to uBiome and choose which bit of your microbiome you want to get to know better!

« Older Entries

Network-wide options by YD - Freelance Wordpress Developer