Sigh. My partner works in physics, I work in medicine. His field is so much better at using computers in a number of ways. Besides the preprint archive, the major journals in his subfield also all allow online submission and electronic signatures, which is much more efficient than the muddled methods used in medical journals. I recently got an article accepted at a journal that shall remain nameless in the hopes that they’ll be embarrassed by their policy someday. Anyway, the disclosure of conflict and copyright transfer forms had to be downloaded from email, signed, then scanned back into the computer and sent back by email. Given that there were eight authors on the paper this ended up taking a substantial amount of time. (Ok, I’ll stop whinging now–this isn’t the how to reform medical publications thread.)

The editorial can be read here and shows that the anti-choice crowd is definitely jumping all over this one to the extreme degree. Ted you damn near seem like a prophet, all things considered:

JAMA Changes Name After Fetal Pain Story
by Nathan Tabor
Aug 25, 2005

JAMA normally stands for The Journal of the American Medical Association. It is has “officially” changed its name to the Journal of the American Murderers Association.

Why? Because they printed corrupted research saying a fetus doesn’t feel pain until seven months. This is irresponsible and unethical. Congress should hold hearings to censor or fine JAMA.

JAMA should be ashamed of themselves. They have entered into a political debate when, according to their website, their purpose is “to promote the science and art of medicine and the betterment of public health.”

What does publishing falsified and corrupt data have to do with that mission statement? Even worse, they are defending the research.

Douglas Johnson, legislative director of the National Right to Life
Committee in Washington, said, “If Congress wants an objective evaluation of whether calves and lambs are being slaughtered humanely, they will not rely too much on the report from the operators of slaughterhouses.”

Know why? Because the two “researchers” are involved in the abortion
industry. The lead author, Susan J. Lee, is a medical student who once
worked for NARAL Pro-Choice America. The other is Eleanor Drey, a medical director of the abortion clinic at San Francisco General Hospital. JAMA did not include information about the authors’ ties to the abortion industry in its publication. That is like entrusting Uncle Frank, the drunk, to watch the liquor cabinet.

Let JAMA know you don’t agree with their bias, corrupted research.

Yes, that’s exactly my point, and I apologize for not making it clearer.

I find it really disturbing that someone is claiming that they “hid” their personal and professional stances somehow, since, according to the information I first saw about this issue, that would be a blatant lie.

Remind me not to post at five AM during contractions in the future. ;)

I suppose it depends on how you look at it. From my perspective I think it is not an arrogant viewpoint because it is a neccessary extension of the belief that all emotions, mental states, etc., have a neural correlate that can be empirically measured. If one believes that mind and body are seperate and the mind exists in a rhealm outside of standard biology (I’m not much at thinking about this belief because I find it intrinsically hard to grasp) I suppose it is. I also suppose it could be arrogant, on a personal level, if I thought it was important to have an emperical measure of your love for your daughter. I certainly don’t think that is important, you know you do and that is quite enough for the 2 of you I’m sure. On the other hand, being able to measure such things in general might be extremely important for gaining insight into certain diseases, such as autism or schizophrenia, wherein it could offer some measure of disease severity as well as an empirical measure of improvement with treatment.

Dianne, I hope you’re right (and suspect you will be). The new NIH guidelines are going to be a real boon for open access. If only we could get a preprint archive going in the biological sciences like they have in physics/math. Then we’d really be cooking with gas!

I suspect that this will change over time. If a journal is open access, one can download it directly from pubmed and read it immediately instead of having to go to the library and get the print copy or (even worse) order it from the journal, which means that people are more likely to read open access articles and therefore more likely to cite them, which will gradually improve the impact factors of open access journals. That doesn’t solve your immediate dilemma, of course, but it does seem likely that the natural evolution of scientific literature, so to speak, is likely to be towards, rather than away from, open access.

This is just a wee bit arrogant, don’t you think?

My love for my baby daughter is derived from biological processes; you’re not going to come up with an objective external measure for it.

Reductionist science is incredibly powerful, but it has limits. Everything mortal does.

I guess I don’t see that the authors took any position on abortion one way or the other, but were giving their opinion, based on current evidence, on fetal pain and whether analgesia for fetus’s during abortion was a good idea. I think JAMA is a good forum for this type of article and that experts should weigh in on the issue. The former attorney worked for NARAL but is not stating an opinion on access to abortion here, it is a purely medical opinion. We all have biases, obviously, but I’ll take medical advice from qualified professionals over anyone else any day (especially when they are OB/GYN and pain experts, I don’t think too many of these people are walking the halls of our institutes of higher learning).

I would also have to disagree on your comment of things that are immeasurable. Some of the items in your list might currently be hard to measure, but that will be conquered eventually with technological improvements and a little cleverness. Unless one is going to envoke the dualistic approach to mind/body, all aspects of consciousness/alertness/etc., will eventually be measurable because they are derived from biological processes.

Finally, you mentioned on several occassions that all scholarly journal articles should be open access. I agree completely. NIH also agrees and within the next year they will start phasing in their open access policy for all federally funded research. There are also a growing number of open access journals. I recently published some work in one and found it to be a nice experience and my research has been met by a wider international audience via this avenue. Needless to say I’m planning on publishing more in this format. Problem is that impact factors are low now, and for a youngster like myself, trying to find a full tenure-track position, I have to weigh the impact factor issues against my own personal feelings of how I would like my work to be published. NIH is making this easier for me and I have deposited several of my non-open access articles in their database (which can be accessed through PUBMED) so that they can reach a wider audience (both internationally and through interested members of the US public). In other words, times are changing in the publishing world, por fin!

No mention of executions for the person who has the abortion. If this is ever brought before a court of law and argued as a ‘murder’, it would have to get thrown out because if it’s murder, there’s a second killer, the mother. You can’t execute just the doctor.

I wonder how many anti-choice parents are interested in seeing their daughters die alongside the doctors who perform the abortions.

I suspect it’s a non-zero number.

What?

The anti-abortion movement tells me so. Shouldn’t I trust them?

But fascinating to hear about the later synapses between periphery to dorsal horn neurons - although I don’t understand how one can get reflexive reactions in that case.

I guess when I say idealistic I’m responding to your thoughts on bias, disclosure, etc. Seems like we differ on whether the authors (at least the exlawyer for naral) should have come clean up front. I think that scientists who think about the issue of abortion/choice as part of the current national debate (which btw, might extend to those authors that don’t have explicit connections to one movement or the other) absolutely will come into any study with inherent, often unconscious bias. Regardless of the side they’re on.

Hairy has nothing to do with pain per se, its just to do with the fact that as neuroscientists we’re trying to reach conclusions about lots of things that are inherently immeasurable when it comes to consciousness, cognition, awareness, blah blah. thats all.

yes, its wierd in a good funny way to have a little private conversation between 2 neuro geeks when we didn’t go out searching for it!

I’m also a Ph.D. neuroscience (University of Texas), we don’t run across one another so often in blogs :-), hence, sorry for the assumption. But, I’d still like to know, why is pain neuroscience “hairy?”

I read your linked post. I don’t understand the the argument in terms of an idealistic view of science. I personally don’t see that the JAMA authors reached any conclusions and they, in fact called for more work in certain areas (which you did in your post as well). BTW you have some references to PNS neurons connecting to the thalamus. Although they do that indirectly, all nociceptors synapse first in the dorsal horn and then the second order neurons cross and go to the thalamus (different from low threshold mechano-sensitive neurons which go on up to the gracile or cuneate nuclei, but still not directly to the thalamus). Quite a bit of work has been done on when nociceptors develop their formal synapses in the dorsal horn and this might actually come along later than thalamo-cortical connections (making that whole point mute).

I’m with you on the ’standard neuroscience’ for nociception not equal to pain.

Indeed, picomoo, the reviewers at JAMA have access to ‘all the data’ - actually, its pretty much the data in the paper - which is not data, just the method for the search. When it comes down to it, for a review, there is no abstract independent way to verify reviewers framing and selection of points. Peer reviewers don’t reread ever paper referenced in the review, but yes, they should be experts in the arena and confirm that major points have been covered. Should.

Reviews are more impacted by the credibility, fame, authority, etc. of their authors than primary research, because when it comes down to it, we’re trusting reviewers to ’summarize’. If the review just listed, say, the # of articles found from the search under any category, then its pretty verifiable and objective. But that wasn’t the case here, the authors certainly were moving beyond a tabulation of activity in the field as is the case in most reviews, especially those that are trying to make a case about cognition.

(Aside: This discusson on Alas has been really interesting, and I’m trying to figure out how to trackback to the bayosphere article which also brings up why I disagree with Ted on his idealistic notion of science … perhaps this?
http://bayosphere.com/node/1094/trackback )

Being a neuroscentist in the pain area, I am interested to know exactly what you mean by: “The neuroscience behind adult pain, let alone fetal pain, is a big hairy area”. It is always interesting to know what the general public thinks those of us in medical research are actually up to. I am primarily interested because your conceptions about what myself and my colleagues do tells me alot about what kind of a job we are doing on a personal and professional society wide basis of getting the word out about what we are doing and why.

Do you have the article? Email me if you want it (I owe you a return from long ago, if you remember). The article is incredibly non-controversial, succinct and well written. Based on all the furor, its bound to disappoint, their conclusions are carefully worded, based on solid evidence and not particularly far-reaching.