A little literary forensics reveals the story. In the very last lines of one of the Nature papers—the part of a paper where researchers typically engage in a bit of speculation—the scientists wonder if the X-derived and Y-derived versions of the proteins encoded by the 12 genes might “exhibit subtle functional differences.” They venture that if this is the case, the possibility of a role in sex differences in disease might be explored in the future. And with that, the study’s most speculative moment became the headline. That's science reporting for you. As a researcher, every journalistic reflection on science that I have been a party to has made me uneasy. Journalists are looking to tell a story, and the facts are presented or excluded in a manner that fits the story that they are trying to tell. When journalists aren't scientifically literate, at best, they can't get a sense of when their story is misleading, at worst, they don't care. That's an odd question. Richardson seems to be uncomfortable with a difference narrative, but shouldn't we be just as uncomfortable with a similarity narrative that isn't supported by sufficient evidence? There are obviously differences between men and women. Whether you examine them from a scientific or cultural perspective can lead you to very different places.How did a study of gene dosage equalization between males and females get framed as a major new finding of sex difference?
How can we break the difference paradigm?
Now the challenge is filtering that understanding to the media and to the public so that we all bring some skepticism to too-tidy findings, and recognize that the real discoveries happen when we free ourselves from old mindsets.
Since you have a PhD in physics, I'm assuming it's mostly radiation-type therapies and imaging?
HOSHIT I have a bit of a side interest in childhood brain cancers myself, especially since they have a huge developmental component, and also recently read this paper in class which was very cool: Nobuoka, D. et al. (2013) Intratumoral peptide injection enhances tumor cell antigenicity recognized by cytotoxic T lymphocytes: a potential option for improvement in antigen-specific cancer immunotherapy. Cancer Immunology. Immunotherapy 62:639-652. Maybe Hubski needs a meetup at SfN, but I'm not going to be able to attend one until 2015.
Have you been to an SfN meeting? They're too big and chaotic for my taste. I haven't been in several years for that reason. I would always recommend going to smaller, more targeted conferences that are more focused on your area of interest, if your primary goals are to learn and network with other researchers. The upside of a 30,000+ attendee conference is that there are always very famous and interesting plenary speakers. Edit: Also, at small conferences you often have free food, coffee, sometimes cocktails; spontaneous parties and dinners happen. It's much more intimate and enjoyable on the whole than being sheep herded and bombarded with ads.
man… why does SfN hate Denver so much? 2014 Washington, DC Nov. 15-19 2015 Chicago, Illinois Oct. 17-21 2016 San Diego, California Nov. 12-16 2017 Washington, DC Nov. 11-15 2018 San Diego, California Nov. 3-7 2019 Chicago, Illinois Oct. 19-23 2020 Washington, DC Oct. 24-28 2021 Chicago, Illinois Oct. 13-17 Not that I would go necessarily…. but I would love to host the hubski meetup.
Mos def. I don't know terribly much about them, but Newlink Genetics (bad link, but you get the picture) is going in to Phase 3 trials for pancreatic cancer, and they've had very good results so far with their immunotherapy options. Then again, other giants have fallen at places farther along than they.I think immunotherapy is where it's at.
Sex difference studies are 'edgy'. You see a lot of them get posted on Reddit in the science subreddit because some morons think it contradicts gender equality on some level when in fact in the long run a lot of the actual neural and non-neural differences (and these are averages from normally-distributed samples; when someone commits the ecological fallacy I want to hit them with my statistics textbook) are negligible in the great scheme of things.
I'm one of those people that gets a little pissy when (especially that dti fMRI pre-pub) gender-based stuff starts popping up. I don't think people are morons, that's not really a working dialogue, but I find that a lot of those people are responding to the interpretation itself, where this information stands in a social context, because there absolutely are shitheads that will use that information as some veneer of 'truth' to support their already pre-disposed notions (which is why I don't like it when people say "of course there are differences between men and womens brains," regardless of the side of the debate they are on). It seems like sometimes both sides are debating about implications of the ecological fallacy (and you have to remember not everyone gets a stats book along with implications, and even in my stats class we were discussing before, philosophy or interpretation weren't even considered to be worthy of a footnote), and that in and of itself is important. The social dialogue hardly ever matches up with the scientific discussion because they have different contexts, but they are most definitely not isolated from one another.
Absolutely, this really is the issue that should be talked about more, but even within the scientific world, gender doesn't exactly get the treatment (silly economists) it deserves. If you don't read it already, I really enjoy the neuroskeptic blog, he does a nice colloquial (enough) analysis that I enjoy, but without being voracious, especially in concern to fMRI and related imaging methodology, which I also tend to be heavily skeptical of. Just an aside. ...some morons think it contradicts gender equality on some level ...
in the long run a lot of the actual neural and non-neural differences are negligible...
I had to review that damn DTI fMRI pre-pub for my honors seminar. There's excellent criticism of it all over the internet. My neuroscience textbook sums it up best: none of these differences we've observed have so far been traced to anything biological and it's very likely that at least half of the reason for the observed difference is sociocultural.