The DCA controversy
I'm sure many of you have already heard the hype and controversy about DCA being the new cure for cancer, but I've been reading more about the ensuing reaction and I felt like it was worth a mention here. The paper that ignited the controversy is a seemingly innocuous paper in the January issue of Cancer Cell. Basically, DCA inhibits mitochondrial pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase (PDK) and induces apoptosis in cancer cells and not normal cells (in culture and animals). I am currently working on metabolism in the early stages of breast cancer so this paper caught my attention. I didn't think much about the paper until I saw the amount of press this study has now received, especially by the blog world. A lot of media reports and blogs reported that because this chemical is off-patent it had been kept secret, because drug companies wouldn't make any money. This reaction even spurred an opinion piece by Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, on the American Cancer Society Blog. His blog entry as well as this blog post do a nice job summing up some of the recent debate surrounding DCA. Give them a read if you want to get up to speed on the whole controversy.
This whole situation emphasizes how bad we (the scientific community) are at communicating science to the rest of the world. How can a Cancer Cell paper result in entire websites devoted to people taking a drug without the supervision of a physician? What responsibility do we have as scientists to make sure our results are communicated accurately and properly? I think the topic of science communication gets thrown around a lot, but I think this is a perfect example of how we haven't improved things yet. Hopefully this will be a wake up call for all of us to think about how to communicate more effectively. Hopefully this site and other science blog sites can help with this dialogue. It is important that scientists get involved in this dialogue so that it isn't just a handful of misinformed bloggers (names withheld) with non-scientific backgrounds leading the discussion about the accuracy and implications of scientific papers.
More about DCA
The New Scientist has a new article about the DCA controversy. The interview quite a few people in the middle of the internet groups advocating DCA. One person who was taking DCA illegally, but in consultation with his oncologist, just stopped taking it because of numbness, possibly due to DCA. Is this going to turn into one of those stories we wish never happened? Will unregulated use of DCA make it too risky to do a proper clinical trial?
Science Communication
This editorial about the 10 year anniversary of Dolly, the cloned sheep, has a paragraph about the need for better science communication:
The researchers who cloned Dolly had kept their research under wraps. But learning from their media experiences with embryonic cloning, they had hired a public-relations company and collaborated on a television documentary to be broadcast after publication. Their approach misfired, but their intentions still serve as a model for others: researchers and their institutions have a responsibility to provide their perspective of the context and implications for a broad audience when announcing startling results, both to the media and through their own websites. Journals, including this one, can no doubt do more to help them convey that context.
I think the DCA controversy is another example of why we have a "have a responsibility to provide [our] perspective of the context and implications for a broad audience".