Breast Cancer’s false narrative.

By: | October 6, 2011

Here we go again. Another October, another flood of pink ribbons. Don’t get me wrong. I hate breast cancer. I want it gone. Three of my aunts have breast cancer, and the disease killed a dear friend of mine. So it pains me to see the science of breast cancer so often misreported by the media.

The problem starts with the basic narrative. As I wrote last year in Miller-McCune:

For years, women were taught the necessity of early detection for breast cancer based on the notion that breast cancer is a relentlessly progressive disease that will inevitably kill you if you don’t remove it in time. That story about breast cancer — call it the “relentless progression” mind model — is easy to grasp, makes intuitive sense and offers a measure of comfort: Every cancer is curable as long as you catch it in time.

But it turns out that this mental model of breast cancer is wrong. Science has shown breast cancer to be far less uniform than the relentless progression model suggests, says H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H., and author of Should I Be Tested for Cancer? A more accurate description might be called the “uncertain future” model. Instead of starting small and gradually growing and becoming more dangerous, cancers can behave in a variety of unpredictable ways.

Continue reading →

Science vs. Tradition

By: | October 5, 2011

After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists.

In my research in this part of the world, one issue has nagged me throughout, and I hesitate even to write about it, because I have yet to get a firm grip on it. The question is what role, if any, the traditional knowledge of local aboriginal people should play in scientific inquiry.

Continue reading →

Local Food: Appetite for Infrastructure

By: | October 4, 2011

You notice the colors first. The crisp orange of carrots, the lustrous reds of tomatoes, the brilliant yellow of peppers and lemons, and everywhere, the thousand shades of green that seem almost to sing the word: fresh. Forklifts and hand trucks whir past crates of asparagus, long beans and onions; shouts ring out in English and Spanish and Chinese. It’s 2 AM, the air is nearly as cold as the walk-in coolers, and the San Francisco Wholesale Produce Market, all 25 acres of it, is alive with the sights and sounds of bustling commerce.

Wholesale produce markets like this are the missing link of the fresh, local food supply chain, providing the crucial connection between producers and the people who live near by. If you don’t have one near you–and you probably don’t–then chances are that you’re paying too much money for produce that was grown too far away. Continue reading →

WWGD?

By: | October 3, 2011

 

Dear WWGD:

I am a postdoc working on an important scientific problem, one that I find rewarding and challenging. But a month before the end of the funding cycle, our team had a budget surplus, at which point my supervisor suggested that I find a way to spend it. Otherwise, he sighed, we’ll never see that kind of money from the NSF again, and he’ll have to eliminate a research assistant.

So I went out and bought the department a 3D photocopier. This purchase, as you might expect, has made me the heroine of the department—not just because I’ve saved an RA’s position, but because I’ve given us all access to a 3D photocopier. Could be cooler? Not much. Continue reading →

Groundwater and Gravity

By: | September 30, 2011

4/20:   I write an email to a scientist.   I explain that I work in an old building that sits in a sort of pit, partly surrounded by a hill.  Midway along the hill is a little terrace on which is a street, and along the street, a sidewalk and a wire fence; and they’re all held in place by a retaining wall.  The scientist is a hillslope geomorphologist.  He knows about how water moves underground; how it percolates through soil of varied porosities and permeabilities; and how, pulled by gravity, it imperceptibly carries soil from one place to another.   I suspect doom is unfolding.  “I have an odd question for you,” I write.

Continue reading →

The Middles of Nowhere

By: | September 29, 2011

As someone preoccupied with odd, mysterious places, I have a longstanding appreciation for an odd, mysterious organization called The Center for Land Use Interpretation. Equal parts arts organization, archive, and amateur detective agency, the Los Angeles-based CLUI (rhymes with gooey) runs bus tours of the Nevada Test Site, mounts exhibitions of hurricane-racked vacation properties on Gulf Coast barrier islands, and otherwise investigates our curious relationship with the ground beneath our feet.

In August, the CLUI crew and the Albuquerque-based Institute of Marking and Measuring organized a tour of the centers of the USA. Centers isn’t a typo: it turns out that visiting the exact middle of the country involves at least a few stops and a hell of a lot of trouble.

Continue reading →

Help Wanted: DIY Dinosaurs

By: | September 28, 2011

Have you ever looked at a chicken? I mean really looked, and not the kind that comes safely shrink-wrapped in a Styrofoam tray? There’s something in the eyes, something still-wild, almost menacing—no, really menacing. Given a little room to move around and enough conspecifics to elicit social behaviors, the animals are aggressive, territorial, and relentlessly voracious. If you spend much time around the birds, you start to feel grateful for our size advantage. These are, after all, the living descendents of dinosaurs.

And yet … there’s something a little underwhelming about the whole birds-are-dinosaurs thing. Living birds, chickens included, share thousands of traits with their extinct forebears. But there’s a certain chill-inducing it-factor that even the most dangerous modern birds just don’t have. One imagines it must be a little like hanging out with Muhammed Ali nowadays, or George Foreman. It would be great—fascinating, inspiring even. But nowhere near as awesome as being around them back in their prime, when they were huge, lethal and unpredictable. Continue reading →