RECENT ARTICLES

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Hiking Bass Canyon

March 2007

FROM THE ARCHIVE

CLIENT LIST

Arizona Highways

Audubon

Barnes & Noble Review

I write about science, health, and the environment.

Big Name Hunters

March 2007

A fluctuating reality

January 2007

Monday, February 1, 2010

The Counterfeiter (The Scientist)

On May 25, 2007, Kevin Xu logged into his Gmail account and found a startling message from a man who could have been his biggest client.

From an office suite on the 28th floor of the Plaza Royale in Beijing, the baby-faced businessman had gone from selling shark cartilage and penicillin to Chinese hospitals and clinics to cashing in on the high-profit margins of the European and—he hoped—US pharmaceutical markets. Xu kept a list of 29 brand-name drugs he could deliver at cut-rate prices, from the baldness remedy Propecia to lifesavers like the antileukemia drug Gleevec. If it wasn’t on the list, Xu boasted that he could find a way to get it.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Nature

I just finished a short-term gig writing for the journal Nature, here are a few of my favorite stories:

America overhauls chemical safety law

Lawsuit rekindles gene patent debate

NIH scrutinizes drug-company payments at Baylor

Fraud rocks protein community

Frogs secret disposal system revealed

Ovaries reveal their inner testes

Deep structure imaged under Hawaii

Friday, January 1, 2010

A Pioneer’s Perils (The Scientist)

On a rainy morning at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last fall, Duke University biochemist Homme Hellinga took the stage to sum up what he had been doing over the last 5 years with the $2.5 million Pioneer award he received in 2004. Unlike other NIH grants that require a strict game plan with concrete goals, the Pioneer award is a kind of no-strings-attached slush fund to encourage “high-risk, high-impact research.” Hellinga and his cohort had come to report on their findings and experiences.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Using CT scans to see plaque in coronary arteries (Los Angeles Times)

It seems like the pinnacle of medical science: For just a few hundred dollars, you can walk into just about any hospital in Southern California and ask a doctor to check your arteries for buildup of heart-attack-inducing calcium plaque. Most of the time, what goes on inside our bodies is a mystery, but there's something satisfying in the thought that a sophisticated piece of equipment can measure just how clogged our arteries really are (and how much more junk food we can afford, or not afford, to eat).

Monday, December 7, 2009

Best Science & Nature Books 2009 (Barnes & Noble Review)

My personal picks include Denialism, Lost City of Z, and Ivory’s Ghosts

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

A Treaty on Ice (The New York Times)

A desolate island in a frozen sea brings the world’s nations together with a new type of agreement: one giving an international commission the right to govern a landmass through unanimous vote. The year was 1912; the subject was the island of Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean. Thereafter, it and the surrounding archipelago were to belong to no nation, its natural resources open to all.

That agreement was no doubt on the minds of the drafters of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed to much fanfare 50 years ago Tuesday by 12 nations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and the United States.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Polar Obsession (Barnes & Noble Review)

For National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, the dead penguin was proof that the leopard seal had a tender side. A man who has repeatedly placed his body at the mercy of sub-freezing waters and well-fanged predators, Nicklen sought to demonstrate that these half-ton mammals of the Antarctic are far less dangerous than they have been portrayed. Explorer Ernest Shackleton reported that they had attacked his men and his boat on multiple occasions; and in 2003, a starving seal clamped onto the leg of a British scientist, drowning her. But Nicklen spent four waterlogged days with a massive female who took him under her fin, protecting him and offering stunned, maimed, and half-eaten penguins for his consumption. He politely declined.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Pharma CPR (The Scientist)

Michael Bristow has been in biotech long enough to see more than a few promising drugs flounder in clinical trials, but he’s not ready to give up on bucindolol. Back in the 1990s, the University of Colorado cardiologist and molecular pharmacologist helped guide the Phase III Beta-Blocker Evaluation of Survival Trial (BEST) for the heart failure drug, which was first developed by Bristol Myers and then under license to Intercardia in North Carolina

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

How green are those veggies? (Slate/Washington Post)

I know you can buy local or buy organic, but I've heard that some crops are simply more resource-intensive than others, regardless of how or where they are grown. So what's the key to picking foods that have the smallest environmental footprint?

We've already been over the environmental benefits of choosing poultry over beef and anchovies over haddock. But you're right to suggest that the same sort of logic can apply to picking vegetarian foodstuffs. Certain crops require loads of phosphate fertilizer, for example, which is mined from the ground and can eventually cause stream-choking algal growth. Other fruits and veggies are grown with heavy doses of pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals that can pollute waterways and cause reproductive problems in animals. So how do you know which crops are best to eat? Here's the Lantern's rule of thumb: Try to keep your more extravagant fruit cravings in check, but don't sweat the low-impact calories that come with your carbs.

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Amazon? Still not out of the woods (Slate/Washington Post)

We used to hear so much about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, but lately not a word. So what happened—did we save it or not?

We didn't save it, but we haven't stopped trying. Environmentalists fret over the fate of the Amazon for good reason: It contains more than half of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world's biodiversity. Saving all this was once a rallying cry for green activists, and a few early triumphs made that goal seem likely. But attention soon shifted away from the rainforest to issues like climate change and organic agriculture, and now the Amazon is disappearing at about the same rate it was in the 1980s.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Are proposition 65 warnings healthful or hurtful? (Los Angeles Times)

Whether you are pumping gas or buying a fillet of salmon, your eyes have no doubt landed on an ominous sign documenting the presence of "chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm."

Such alarming notices began appearing in the state in 1986 thanks to Proposition 65, otherwise known as the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, which prohibits businesses from discharging potentially harmful chemicals in drinking water and requires them to disclose the presence of such chemicals on their premises. The 19-page list of hundreds of potentially dangerous chemicals kept by the state is updated annually.

Today, the warnings are everywhere: parking lots, hardware stores, hospitals and just about any decent-sized business including, as of May, those of medical marijuana suppliers -- because marijuana smoke is now on the list of known carcinogens.

Monday, November 2, 2009

In the muck (The Scientist)

Duckweed first appeared in satellite images of Venezuela in 2004 as a mysterious swirl of green on the surface of Lake Marcaibo, doubling in size with each passing day. Marcaibo is one of South America’s largest bodies of water, but with brackish water and few nutrients, it had never harbored this rapid-growing aquatic plant. Local scientists speculated that heavy rains washed sewage and nutrients into the lake along with duckweed colonies from neighboring ponds. By June, they estimated that the world’s smallest flowering plant covered 18 percent of the lake’s surface before it began receding.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Controversial couple dominates U.S. medical tourism (Reuters)

These are heady days for the medical tourism industry. With U.S. healthcare prices spiraling upward, more and more insurers and individuals are looking abroad for treatment. By some estimates, 650,000 Americans will check into foreign hospitals from Mexico to Thailand this year.

The boom has created rich opportunities for entrepreneurs catering to first-time medical travelers, start-up businesses and eager hospital managers in developing countries.

Enter lawyer couple Jonathan Edelheit and Renée-Marie Stephano.

Edelheit and Stephano, both 37, are the founders of the Medical Tourism Association (MTA), a non-profit association they created to further "quality of care, transparency, communication and education" in the industry. They are also the organizers of the industry's annual top conference, under way this week in Los Angeles.

In many ways, Edelheit and Stephano have become the face of medical tourism. That has caused admiration, envy and unhappiness in the tight-knit industry.

Monday, October 12, 2009

Designed proteins debunked (The Scientist)

Duke biochemist Homme Hellinga is facing another potential blow to his troubled career in protein and enzyme design.

Hellinga has been under investigation for possible research misconduct, following the retraction of a Science paper on computational design of enzymes in February 2008. This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hellinga's former postdoc Birte Höcker and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany dispute the conclusions of his studies on ligand-binding proteins, which appeared in Nature in 2003 and PNAS in 2004. The interactions between ligands and their receptor are central to many biological processes and can potentially be tweaked to design novel biosensors and enzymes.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Using forensics to reveal medical ghostwriting (Reuters)

Medical editors are growing increasingly frustrated with top researchers who sign their names to manuscripts but fail to disclose the contributions of ghostwriters paid for by pharmaceutical companies. In an effort to crack down on the practice -- widely viewed as unethical -- one tech-savvy editor has been turning to data forensics worthy of a crime investigation drama.

Monday, August 24, 2009

National Academy as National Enquirer? PNAS publishes theory that caterpillars originated from interspecies sex (Scientific American)

This story inspired a controversy, leading PNAS editors to initiate an investigation, hold the paper back from print publication for about a month, and publish it side by side with a rebuttal.

Caterpillars transform into butterflies and moths via a radical process known as metamorphosis, where their bodies virtually turn to soup and develop anew.

Since Darwin, biologists have believed that the larval and the adult forms of insects evolved from a common ancestor. Indeed, the evolution of metamorphosis is thought to have fueled the incredible diversity of insects today, allowing them to exploit different habitats at different life stages.

Now, a lone scientist claims that the phenomenon arose when two very different creatures accidentally mated.

Here is some of the follow-up coverage from other outlets:

Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True Blog

Times Higher Education

Inside Higher Ed

Nature (Follow-up #1, Follow-up #2)

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Endangered in Africa (Slate)

Three dispatches from my recent trip to Africa:

Pimp My Ostrich

The ostrich chariot lies in the shade of a pepper tree here on the century-old Highgate Farm. . .

Those Doggone Conservationists

When we first spotted Fender through the 8-foot-tall perimeter fence, I could see she was hobbling behind her two pals, Rory and Stellar. . .

Watching Wildlife with White People

At about 5:30 in the morning, I was idling at a stoplight and squinting to read the tiny print on my map when the white chap next to me rolled down the window of his beige Land Rover. . .

Monday, October 12, 2009

Death, delimited (The Scientist)

At about noon on March 26th, Steve Bellan was working in his office at Etosha Ecological Institute in northern Namibia when he got word of a fresh zebra carcass near the Gemsbokvlakte water hole, about 20 kilometers east on a dusty park road. Over the next hour, the bushy-haired Berkeley graduate student got his gear in order and hooked up a trailer to the back of his pick-up before rumbling out of the fortified rest camp with his metal carcass cage, a pipe and mesh box designed to keep scavenging jackals away. His mission: “A randomized control trial, but with carcasses as the participants,” he says, which will hopefully yield clues about how to combat a bacterium that kills hundreds of cattle and wildlife each year in the United States and thousands more in developing countries.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Scientific American

Over the summer, I was filling in for the environment editor at Scientific American. My news articles are here, and my blog entries are here. Here are some of my favorites:

Alien Invasion? Ecologist Doubts the Impact of Invasive Species (8/14/09)

Open-Source Textbooks a Mixed Bag in California (8/14/09)

Modern Toolmaker Uses Fire to Solve 72,000 year old mystery (8/13/09)

Lake Sediments Cast Doubt on Comet-Extinction Theory (8/4/09)

Pre-Columbian Map Could Be Authentic--Or Not (7/22/09)

Did Sen. Boxer direct a “racial slant” at Harry Alford? (7/17/09)

Biofuel Fraud Cases Could Leave the EPA Running on Fumes (7/10/09)

Drugmakers Abandon Nature’s Pharmacy (7/9/09)

A Family Tree, a Rare Cancer, and a Hunt for its Cause (6/26/09)

Carbon Counter Unveiled in New York City (6/18/09)

FBI Sting Catches Alleged Artifact Thieves in Southwest (6/16/09)

Of Telescopes and Ticks: How Mount Wilson Observatory became an Infectious Disease Study Site (6/8/09)