As the death toll from the H7N9 virus — the mysterious new Chinese bird flu strain that experts have labeled “one of the most lethal” of its kind — rises, a team of Chinese scientists is taking heat for creating 127 new hybrid influenza types in laboratories by combining “the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus with the highly infectious H1N1 human influenza virus.” Researchers from around the globe described the scientists’ actions as “appallingly irresponsible.”

The team of scientists, led by Professor Hualan Chen, published its results in the journal Science on Thursday. Chen argued that her team was simply trying to learn more about the complexities of mutating viral strains and how animal-only flu strains can spread among humans. In an email to the U.K. paper The Independent, Chen said, “The studies demonstrated that H5N1 viruses have the potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by re-assortment with the human influenza viruses. This tells us that high attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus.”

Other scientists aren’t quite sold on that argument, citing concerns with laboratory safety in Chinese facilities and the limited knowledge gleaned from such experimentation. “The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” said Robert May of Oxford University. “The virological basis of this work is not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold,” added Pasteur Institute virologist Simon Wain-Hobson.

The construction of new pathogens has always been controversial within the scientific community. In highly-controlled environments, it may be used to outline a virus’ interactions with other agents and create effective vaccines. But many in the scientific community are concerned about the possibility of widespread death and destruction from the synthesized contaminants, either due to insufficient lab safety requirements — or something more sinister. Randall Larsen, former executive director of the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, told The Scientist that many countries have biological weapons programs with the express purpose of creating dangerous new pathogens. In fact, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, a defecting scientist revealed that “the Soviet Union had active programs to weaponize Legionnaire’s disease, Ebola, smallpox, and HIV.”

China’s recent project obviously doesn’t have such a nefarious motivation driving it. But given the risks of creating new, possibly drug-resistant strains of viruses — and the difficulty of effectively containing them — the new study has given many in the scientific community pause.

Before sequestration’s automatic budget cuts kicked in, scientists warned that the proposed 8.2 across-the-board cut to the Nation Institute of Health could set back scientific innovation for a generation. Slashing those funds from NIH, one of the agency’s former directors pointed out, could prevent scientists from doing the critical research necessary to develop new treatments for chronic conditions and rare diseases.

And now that the sequester has taken effect, some of those scenarios are beginning to play out. As the Huffington Post reports, medical researchers are already scaling back their projects in areas that could have big implications for public health. At Temple University, one team of researchers hoped to develop a more effective method of repairing the heart to help Americans better recover from heart attacks — but now, thanks to the recent budget cuts, they may have to lay off staff or test a fewer number of potential therapies. Virginia Tech researchers who are studying depression, substance abuse, and post traumatic stress disorder have already been dealt a $640,000 blow to their grant funding, and are bracing for another $1 million in cuts. At the University of Kansas, the funds for behavioral research to help educators learn how to work with children with disabilities are in limbo.

And, since it seems clear that lawmakers aren’t going to take any action to reverse the cuts, scientists are being forced to move forward under this new reality:

Like other doctors and researchers interviewed, [Charles Greenwood, a researcher at the University of Kansas] said he would look to foundations and private philanthropy to help fill the void left by sequestration. But that isn’t a satisfactory replacement, he said, in part because the money tends to have specific strings attached.

“It is a hell of a way to run science,” he says. “We have had science since World War II. In the United States we were smart enough to develop a competitive process where the best ideas out there come up through the agencies responsible. And we get the best minds in the country to compete and the best ones win. Now, if it is up to philanthropy then you are just going to get someone’s theory.”

Mainly, however, Greenwood and others are worried that the budget cuts will cause irrevocable damage to science in America. Investment in research and development was already declining prior to sequestration. NIH reported that it had offered 400 fewer grants in 2012 than in 2010. And as Jonathan Links, the chief risk officer at Johns Hopkins University, told The Huffington Post, funders were cutting back even further in anticipation of sequestration taking place.

“It does seem clear that program officers are now being told moving forward to behave with sequestration. It is shifting from anticipation of to actual sequestration behavior,” said Links. “It is going to be cuts to grants and contracts and other sponsored activities. And our best guess is it is going to be some combination of cuts to future years of already funded grants, cuts to new awards, and cuts in the number of grants.”

Medical research isn’t the only area where Americans’ future health is being threatened threatened by sequestration. The budget cuts could also potentially result in fewer food inspections, fewer mental health resources, fewer people getting screened for HIV, fewer government resources to provide health insurance to low-income Americans, and fewer cancer patients receiving chemotherapy treatment.

Members of the medical community have blasted lawmakers for prioritizing their own convenience over the health sector. The cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which resulted in long delays at airports around the country for lawmakers during their frequent travel, is the one area of sequestration that Congress has rushed to undo — likely because it personally inconvenienced them. Cancer clinic employees have argued that there are more pressing concerns facing the nation, like the funding for their patient’s life-saving treatment, than long lines at the airport. The scientific researchers who are beginning to worry about a future “brain drain,” when the U.S. may not be able to attract and retain talented scientists without enough funding to go around, likely agree with that assessment.

Members of the House science committee want to gain greater control of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) decision making process, in hopes they can influence how the federal agency awards its funds.

Earlier this month, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, authored the High Quality Research Act, a draft bill that would require the NSF to publicly certify that each project it funds, along with meeting the agency’s current standards of intellectual merit and broader societal impacts, meets three additional criteria:

1. [The project] is in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

2. is the finest quality, is ground breaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3. is not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.

The draft bill provides no clarification as to how a project should be judged by these criteria — there are no explanations as to what qualifies as “finest quality” or whether “duplicative” refers to the need to prevent the federal government from paying for the same research projects twice, or whether the committee believes any project that is similar to another, already funded project should not receive funding. And the bill doesn’t stop at politicizing the decisions of the NSF. It also goes on to state that, after it’s put in place, other federal science agencies should adopt the same standards.

In addition to authoring the legislation, Smith wrote a letter last week to the director of the NSF, expressing his concerns over specific projects funded by the agency and requesting access to the agency’s reviews of the projects. The letter drew the ire of Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the science committee’s top Democrat. In a letter to Smith, Johnson asks that he withdraw his request for NSF review documents and cautions that “the moment you compromise both the merit review process and the basic research mission of NSF is the moment you undo everything that has enabled NSF to contribute so profoundly to our national health, prosperity, and welfare.”

This is not the first time that congressional Republicans have taken aim at the NSF’s funding process. Last month, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) attached an amendment to Senate legislation that banned the NSF from funding any political science projects in 2013 unless they promoted “national security or the economic interests of the United States.” The amendment was approved and the legislation, which kept the federal government running past March 27, was passed. Smith’s draft bill, along with Coburn’s — and other Republicans’ — historic skepticism of the NSF add evidence to an increasing number of voters’ attitudes that the party is anti-science.

Prestigious universities such as Stanford, Duke, and Yale failed to disclose the potential risk for blindness and death to the subjects’ parents, The New York Times reported on Wednesday. Of the 1,163 babies involved in a study on various oxygen levels’ effects on premature-birth babies, 18 percent of those who were placed into a high-oxygen environment developed an eye ailment “that in serious cases can lead to blindness,” and 20 percent of the premature babies placed into a low-oxygen environment died — distinctly predictable results that Federal Office for Human Research Protections argues “the researchers had sufficient available information to know, before conducting the study,” yet failed to highlight.

Federal officials claim that this particular study neglected to receive true informed consent, since researchers didn’t bother to tell the babies’ parents or caretakers about the risks. But even if the informed consent documents (ICDs) — which are subject to federal regulations and consumer protections — had been more thorough, it is still debatable whether or not the parents would have truly understood the study’s risks. That’s because increasingly-long ICDs are used to obfuscate pertinent risk data under an avalanche of information, and researchers’ oral explanations of a study’s risks — which patients tend to rely on a lot more than they do on wordy forms — are not subject to the same level of scrutiny as consent documentation is.

Multiple studies have highlighted the evolution of ICDs over the course of the last half century. During that time, the disclosure of risks explicitly addressed in ICDs has grown — but the documents have also gotten significantly wordier in the process:

The logical assumption would be that participants will have a more accurate understanding of a research study when there are more risk details in ICDs. But as a Hastings Center examination of ICDs and research ethics underscores, that’s not how things work out:
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With the passing of England’s Sir Robert G. Edwards on Wednesday, the medical community has lost a giant. Edwards, a biologist and professor emeritus at Cambridge, won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his groundbreaking work on In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) with physician Patrick Steptoe in the 1970s. Together, Edwards and Steptoe pioneered the techniques that led to the birth of Louise Joy Brown — the first ever “test tube baby,” as the media would come to call her.

The countless innovations that Edwards and Steptoe discovered on the way to that watershed moment continue to spur new developments in science to this day, from improved methods of laparoscopic surgery — which Steptoe created in order to facilitate egg extrication — to stem cell research. And IVF itself has allowed millions of couples around the world to have children. However, the controversial nature of the duo’s work induced a significant amount of fear-mongering by the press, the British government, the medical research community, and the Roman Catholic Church. They were accused of trying to play God, and the Medical Research Council — England’s equivalent to the National Institutes of Health — refused to fund Edwards’ and Steptoe’s research for fear of public backlash, even after Brown’s birth.

But as the New York Times reported after Edwards won his Nobel Prize, the outspokenly liberal biologist was not one to bow down to the establishment’s pronouncements that his research was unethical, proactively taking the fight to his critics:

Though in vitro fertilization is now widely accepted, the birth of the first test tube baby was greeted with intense concern that the moral order was being subverted by unnatural intervention in the mysterious process of creating a human being. Dr. Edwards was well aware of the ethical issues raised by his research and took the lead in addressing them.

The objections gradually died away — except on the part of the Roman Catholic Church — as it became clear that the babies born by in vitro fertilization were healthy and that their parents were overjoyed to be able to start a family. Long-term follow-ups have confirmed the essential safety of the technique. [...]

Both Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe had to endure an unremitting barrage of criticism while developing their technique. Dr. Steptoe “faced immense clinical criticism over his laparoscopy, even being isolated at clinical meetings in London,” Dr. Edwards wrote in the journal Nature Medicine in 2001 after receiving the Lasker award. “Ethicists decried us, forecasting abnormal babies, misleading the infertile and misrepresenting our work as really acquiring human embryos for research.”

Dr. Edwards fought back, forming alliances with ethicists in the Church of England and filing libel actions — eight in one day — against his critics. “I won them all, but the work and worry restricted research for several years,” he wrote.

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On Tuesday, mainstream news outlets covered the results from a small survey in Australia that polled just over 100 women about their sexual preferences. One headline atop an NBC story proclaimed, “Science proves women like men with bigger penises.” The reporter includes a few other examples of studies that have reached the same conclusions about women’s predisposition to larger male genitalia, but only after acknowledging that the results from past research on the topic “have been disputed as sexist, or scientifically flawed, or both.”

Sex and science often become entangled in the news, perhaps because the topic makes for eye-catching headlines. This is hardly the first time that the media has latched onto a small study in an attempt to make a larger statement about gender roles, regardless of the potentially shaky scientific relevance of this type of evolutionary psychology. Under the guise of being backed by scientific authority, news outlets will often tout studies’ results — or sometimes, selectively highlight certain results — to reinforce gender-based stereotypes. Of course, citing research also sets up a situation where it’s more difficult for opponents to take issue with the those studies, since it may appear as if they’re objecting to scientific fact simply because they don’t want to believe the truth.

Here are five other examples of this dynamic at play in mainstream media outlets:

1. Women’s hormones affect their voting choices. CNN incited significant backlash right before the 2012 election when the outlet published an article entitled, “Do hormones drive women’s votes?” The study, which consisted of unpublished data from researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, intended to investigate whether a woman’s hormone levels or relationship status contributes to her decision about how to cast her ballot. The study found, among other things, that women who are ovulating tend to favor more liberal political candidates because they “feel sexier.” After a massive outcry, CNN removed the article, explaining, “After further review, it was determined that some elements of the story did not meet the editorial standards of CNN.”

2. Husbands who do housework have less sex. A USA Today article published at the end of January suggested that “traditional chores are linked with more sex for married couples,” citing a study that relied on data collected two decades ago. The researchers believed that their findings — which found that couples in which women did more of the traditionally “female” chores had sex 1.6 times more each month than the couples in which men did all of those jobs — were still relevant despite the passage of time, because “the relationship between sex and housework has changed little since then.” But much of the coverage of the study drew a simplistic connection between chores and sexual activity without giving much consideration to the myriad of other factors that can contribute to a couple’s gender balance, sex life, and household chore break-down — particularly the fact that women and men have been socialized to consider many household tasks to be “women’s work.”

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