Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group

On Wednesday, members of the Penn Science Policy Group met to discuss the current regulatory friction between the FDA and the genetic testing company 23andMe. 23andMe provides personalized DNA results that are interpreted to provide information about ancestry and health risks for various diseases. Because the results provided by 23andMe border on medical information, the FDA has been working closely with the company since 2009 to ensure that their marketing and analysis were accurate and in accordance with federal regulations. However, in May of 2013 23andMe ceased communications with the FDA and simultaneously ramped up marketing of their Personal Genome Service (PGS) for providing “health reports on 254 diseases and conditions.” In retaliation, the FDA sent a letter to 23andMe on Nov 22 warning them to stop marketing their PGS without approval or face harsh regulatory actions. This letter sparked a public debate about how much regulation should be imposed on this new technolo...

Dr. Richard Calderone stopped by PSPG last week to talk about the masters program in Science Policy and Advocacy at Georgetown University . Dr. Calderone is a microbiologist with an active laboratory but he also advises lawmakers on public health issues, especially those involving infectious diseases. A few years ago Dr. Calderone started the science policy masters program which was modeled after an undergraduate certificate program in policy that already existed at Georgetown. Students in this interdisciplinary masters program take courses not only on government and policy but also science classes such as microbiology, immunology and pharmacology. About 40% of graduates are currently in policy positions at places like the EPA and Research!America while many others go on to professional school (medical, dental, law). So if you're thinking about a career in science policy you might want to check out the program! Dr. Calderone (from Georgetown University Faculty website )

Adam is the Policy and Advocacy Specialist at Research!America, where he leads a variety of advocacy initiatives to make science and medical research a higher national priority. When he visited PSPG on Nov. 12th he spoke about how and why scientists, especially those in academia, should engage in the political system. Academic scientists in particular are heavily supported by federal funding and taxpayers, so it is important to initiate and maintain a dialog between researchers, politicians and the American people. Research!America has conducted numerous polls to understand the relationship between these three groups, and they have found that while Americans believe scientific research should be a top priority, the public does not have a clear understanding of how this research is funded (only a small fraction of those polled identified the NIH as the main source of basic biomedical research funding). Therefore it is important that we as scientists, taxpayers and constituents take it ...

One goal of PSPG is to make science more accessible to the general public. Our first science spotlight features work by Matt Churgin and the Fang-Yen lab. Scientists who want to understand how specific genes function in specific cells need the ability to manipulate gene expression, but there are few tools that allow us to ask questions at the single cell level. At best these tools can target populations of cells, but that’s not good enough for the developmental biologist who wants to know the fate of a particular cell within an embryo. A recent study out of Penn (Churgin et al. Genes Genomes Genetics, 2013) addresses these limitations by improving on a method that relies on heat-inducible gene expression and a continuous wave laser. This type of laser constantly bombards the specimen with heat and tends to warm up not just the target cell but the cells around it, causing the gene of interest to be expressed in the wrong place. To address this problem the authors used a pulsed inf...

Dr. Paul Offit stopped by PSPG to lead a discussion on snake oil and pseudoscience and how scientists can combat misinformation. An excellent example of this issue is the ubiquitous use of dietary supplements to treat everything from colds to weight loss to depression. Dietary supplements are not regulated by the FDA and are not rigorously tested for safety and efficacy and yet millions of Americans believe that multi-vitamins and supplements keep them healthy. These daily supplement capsules are packed with more vitamins than a person could possibly get from a normal diet, and yet there is no evidence that more is better. Because supplements are unregulated, what you see on the bottle is not necessarily what you get: there have been instances in which the supplement was actually 30x more concentrated than what the label claimed, and there have been cases of contaminated supplements causing death. So why is the general public so easily fooled? Because they believe they're ingesting...

  How is the government shutdown affecting me? Well, it hasn’t… yet. But even if this shutdown is over in the next few days, its impacts will ripple through American scientific research and our innovation-dependent economy for years to come.      No, I have not been furloughed. I am free to keep doing my research since I work in a university lab which are usually state or private institutions. However I, like the vast majority of American scientists (and for that matter most scientists world-wide), work with federal grant money. We scientists have to compete incredibly hard to get those grants, and the process is long and arduous. On October 1 st , the main grant funding departments were shut down including the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). It takes a lot of work for them to sift through the thousands of brilliant grant applications to find the absolutely most brilliant and promising ones. Since many steps of th...

Check out our guest blog on ResearchAmerica! blog- http://researchamerica.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/the-science-policy-group-at-the-university-of-pennsylvania/