Feature Channels: Ethics and Research Methods

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The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) recently welcomed H. Timothy Hsiao, Ph.D., as its new Director of Scientific Affairs, where he will provide strategic leadership to advance the impact of research and innovation in radiation oncology through ASTRO's research funding, fellowships, workshops and scientific collaborations with public and private partners.

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February 11 is International Day of Women and Girls in Science, designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and UN-Women to promote the critical role women and girls play in science and technology communities. BIDMC has a long history of women researchers in medicine and science. Below is a brief list of only a few of our distinguished women leaders.

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An interdisciplinary team led by Penn State has received a five-year $3.7 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation’s new program on convergence research. The grant is in two phases, depending on successful completion of phase one milestones.

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Augustana University and The Center for Western Studies announced that free tickets for the 24th Boe Forum on Public Affairs featuring keynote speakers Drs. Robert Green and Jamie Metzl will be available beginning on Friday, Feb. 7.

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When it comes to adapting to the effects of climate change, scientists and policymakers are thinking too small, according to a new research review.

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Dr. Chen Hou and his research collaborators have found an answer to the decades-old question of why naked mole-rats with high oxidative damage live 10 times longer than mice of comparative weight.“The long lifespan of the East African naked mole-rats raises one of the most serious paradoxes in the study of aging,” says Hou, an associate professor of biological sciences at Missouri S&T.

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Brenda Drier, Chief Operating Officer of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), has earned her Certified Association Executive (CAE) designation from the American Society of Association Executives. The CAE the highest professional credential in the association industry.

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The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) welcomes members of the press to write about rheumatology research presented at the State-of-the-Art Clinical Symposium (SOTA) in New Orleans on March 27-29.

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The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation today announced 41 finalists for the 2020 Hertz Fellowship in applied science, mathematics, and engineering

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Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) celebrates the 60th anniversary of its incorporation. Watch the new video about its many sight-saving accomplishments over the past six decades.

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The Allen Institute has extended its contract with the Coriell Institute for Medical Research for the storage and distribution of its Allen Cell Collection, a cutting-edge collection of gene-edited human induced pluripotent stem cell lines. This collection was launched in 2016 with five cell lines, and since has grown to include more than 40 lines. The new agreement will continue this relationship for an additional three years.

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A new network of researchers and community officials is working to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges within the Mississippi River watershed.

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The Materials Research Society (MRS) and Springer Nature have signed a strategic new publishing agreement that will come into effect starting on January 1, 2021. At that time, the two organizations will partner to publish all five journals in the MRS portfolio—MRS Bulletin, Journal of Materials Research (JMR), MRS Communications, MRS Energy & Sustainability, and MRS Advances—as well as books. In addition, Springer Nature will host the archived content of the long-standing MRS Online Proceedings Library (OPL) and the MRS Internet Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research (MIJ-NSR).

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The Center for Western Studies (CWS) has issued a call for paper and panel proposals on the topic of "The Roaring Twenties... Again?" as part of the Dakota Conference, which will be held on April 24-25, in the CWS Fantle Building on the Augustana University campus.

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The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) is offering grants ranging from $10,000 to $35,000 to support new proposals, as well as ongoing programs that engage communities with science. Applications are open now through March 31, and applicants must be members of ASCB.

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The University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing (Penn Nursing) retains its top spot for research funding for the 2019 fiscal year, among other schools of nursing, with $11.3 million in awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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The six projects selected will be seeded with more than $100,000 in total to help the scientists generate preliminary investigative results to prepare applications for competitive federal and foundation awards.

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DHS S&T announced that eight faculty members from MSI across the United States were recently selected to receive funding awards totaling $373,000 to continue their 2019 SRT Program for Minority Serving Institutions research projects at several DHS S&T COE.

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Team members from eight Hackensack Meridian Health medical centers raised nearly $330,000 for Giving Heals, Meridian Health Foundation’s comprehensive fundraising campaign, which supports four important initiatives: strengthening oncology services, improving clinical outcomes, enhancing the patient experience and broadening clinical research and academic programs. To date, nearly $110 million has been raised toward a goal of $150 million to support Hackensack Meridian Health medical centers in Monmouth, Ocean and Middlesex counties.

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Has the newly revealed baseball cheating scandal – especially the signal-stealing scheme by the Houston Astros – got you down? Cedars-Sinai ethics and Jewish law experts agree that cheating in the national pastime can be jolting, and offer tips on keeping things in perspective while acknowledging that the revelations have been painful.

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A protein called Sestrin might be responsible for many of the benefits of a good workout.

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The American Association of Neuromuscular & Electrodiagnostic Medicine (AANEM) is now accepting abstracts for its 2020 annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.

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A new special issue of AERA's peer reviewed journal Educational Researcher, titled “Randomized Controlled Trials Meet the Real World: The Nature and Consequences of Null Findings,” focuses on important questions raised by the prevalence of null findings—the absence of expected or measurable results—particularly in randomized control trials.

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A major goal of tuberculosis (TB) research is to find a way to treat people with the latent (or inactive) form of the disease to keep them from developing symptomatic TB. A breakthrough study using a new animal model developed for this purpose showed a combination of two classes of antibiotics can wipe out this hidden threat.

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Analysis of more than 6 million clinical and life science papers shows articles with male lead authors are up to 21 percent more likely to use language that frames their research positively Papers that use positive framing, including words like “promising,” “novel” and “unique,” in headlines and abstracts are more likely to be cited by other authors than papers without positive framing Differences in the way men and women describe, discuss and convey their research could contribute to persistent gender gaps in pay and career advancement in life sciences and medicine This is the first large-scale study to quantify gender differences in linguistic framing in biomedical research

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A multi-disciplinary team of University of Illinois at Chicago researchers received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation to form a new data science institute.

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In an article published in Cancer Medicine, Moffitt Cancer Center scientists describe a community-based program called the Rapid Tissue Donation (RTD) protocol. It enables patients to consent to donating tumor tissue and blood samples for research purposes after their death. The samples provided by patients postmortem enable researchers to study the genetic and molecular makeup of primary and metastatic tumors after the patient failed treatment, and to compare those finding with what was known about the patient during earlier phases of their therapy.

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David Weindorf collaborated with Florida teenager Julia Kagiliery to determine the sulfur content of lignite coal using portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry and an optical color sensor.

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Federal regulations may keep lung cancer patients out of clinical trials simply because these patients are on medications that might affect the electrical system of the heart.

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The Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) is pleased to announce the winners for best papers in Risk Analysis: An International Journal and the best research posters for 2019. The editorial staff of Risk Analysis selected the 2019 Best Paper award winners. These papers made the most significant impacts on the theory or practice of risk analysis. Judges, as well as members of the society via popular vote, selected the poster winners during the meeting’s annual poster session the evening prior.

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Queen’s University has become a signatory of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA).

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One year after surpassing $500 million in research grant and award funding, University of Alabama at Birmingham faculty, staff and administration have hit another institutional milestone for the first time in its 50-year history — exceeding more than $600 million in research funding awards.

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Innovators, researchers and canine training experts are invited to learn about funding opportunities in the detection canine field on December 10, 2019.

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Eighteen scientists from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital were recently named Highly Cited Researchers for 2019 by the Web of Science Group.

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Physician and human rights activist Steven Miles, MD, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Minnesota, won the 2019 MacLean Center Prize in Clinical Ethics and Health Outcomes.

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Kathleen J. Pottick, PhD, MSW, MA, LCSW, a core faculty member at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research (IFH) and professor in the School of Social Work, has been selected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare (AASWSW).

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The FAIRshake Toolbox Developed to Promote Information Exchange in Biomedicine

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Demonstrating expertise across many domains including cybersecurity, health research, and defense, experts from MITRE are regularly published in leading journals. Invited to enter the company’s annual Best Paper Competition, this year’s winning submissions were announced.

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Involving the public in scientific research can help to solve complex environmental problems, but according to Science by the People, a new book co-authored by sociologists Abby Kinchy of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Aya Kimura of the University of Hawaii-Manoa, effective “citizen science” requires an awareness of potential social dilemmas.

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The 2018 federal Right to Try Act allows patients with a life-threatening illness to be treated with drugs that have not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Many in the oncology community say Right to Try strips away important regulatory protections and view the move as a risky step bound to create ethical dilemmas for physicians whose goal is to guide patients toward safe and appropriate treatment decisions. Oncology is one field at the forefront of requests for unapproved drugs. An interdisciplinary team of bioethicists, oncologists, and lawyers from Penn Medicine and other institutions penned a commentary published online this week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology to offer recommendations to help oncologists navigate this new “Right to Try” world, while maintaining their ethical obligations to patients.

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Barely half of authors of more than 7,000 research papers on health in sub-Saharan Africa come from the country studied in the paper. More than two-thirds of these studies include authors from the U.S., Canada, Europe or a different African country. Overall, about half of first authors were from the country studied. In papers that included co-authors from top U.S. universities, fewer than one in four first authors were from the country studied.

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Harvard Medical School has selected the 2019 media fellows for the second of its two thematic tracks this year: Immunity and Inflammation: A friend, a foe (Nov. 4-8).

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Anecdotes, fake news and social media have created a skeptical and misinformed public who is rejecting the facts. A commentary says that medical researchers must help the public understand the rigorous process of science and help them to discern an anecdote from peer-reviewed scientific results. The best way to do this? By continuing to ensure integrity, rigor, reproducibility and replication of their science and to earn the public’s trust by being morally responsible and completely free of any influences.

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As research involving the transplantation of human “mini-brains”—known as brain organoids—into animals to study disease continues to expand, so do the ethical debates around the practice. A new paper published in Cell Stem Cell by researchers from Penn Medicine and the Department of Veterans Affairs sought to clarify the abilities of brain organoids and suggests an ethical framework that better defines and contextualizes these organoids and establishes thresholds for their use.

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Experts in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in radiology, from many of the world’s leading radiology, medical physics and imaging informatics groups, today published an aspirational statement to guide the development of AI in radiology.

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When concerns are expressed about distrust in science, they often focus on whether the public trusts research findings. A new study, however, explores a different dimension of trust. The study examined how researchers misrepresent their research accomplishments when applying for faculty jobs.