Viagra nation

I watched the newest vidcast of diggnation over the weekend, as I usually do. It is a reasonably good show about the most popular stories covered on digg.com. Alex Albrecht is too cool, mostly because he drinks beer, plays pencil and paper D&D, is on the totallyradshow, and kicks Kevin Roses arse at Call of Duty 4. That is some serious geek street cred.
This past eppisode though, they revealed some ignorance about the mechanism of Viagra. Kevin Rose (seriously check out how badly he is pwned by Albrecht on CoD4) thought that you could take Viagra and have a voluntary errection where you would have to 'be in the mood'. Someone from the audience who identified themselves as a 'life scientist' said that it was not voluntary. Well, Kevin Rose was right and the 'life scientist' was wrong. Strange since I find Kevin Rose usually talks out his ass.
As I understand it viagra mearly inhibits the degradation of cGMP, which directly initiates and maintains an errection. However it is produced in response to nitric oxide. The nitric oxide is produced upon sexual stimulation, therefore even with viagra it should still be a voluntary thing. That's got to be a relief for those who take the drug since you are supposed to take it 4 hours before you think you will need it. That would be a long 4 hours if it was involuntary.

Bugs in PLOS ONE

PLoS ONE is the sujet du jour in the bay today. The quality of the submissions in PLoS has been increasing, but how long will that last? We had a journal club concerning a new report in PLoS about P53 mutations in ovarian cancer suggesting that patients with mutated p53 actually respond better to chemotherapy, probably because they have a harder time repairing damage, but can still undergo apoptosis in a p53-independent manner. The findings are not as novel as they might sound since it's been known for a while that in some instances, the oh-so-famous p53 tumour supressor can misbehave. P53 loss of function renders cells suceptible to DNA dammage and p53-mediated senescence of stromal cells may be required for the initiation of certain types of tumour. At the end of the talk, some of the PIs expressed their mistrust of this free-for-all that is PLoS ONE. Is this a generation gap in science? Are we just so used to the wikipedia, facebook, youtube, digg, blog sharing networks that we think science should be freed, liberated. I think if we've learned anything from the internet, it is that the masses are generally less intelligent than the individuals that they are comprised of.

Take the latest hot paper in PLoS ONE, "Order in spontaneous behavior". In that paper they hooked up fruit flies to a flight simulator, and because the fly can generate erratic patterns of flight that are endogenous to their neuronal circuitry at that instance, and not merely pre-wired, the authors concluded that they have a form of free will. Free will as the author points out, is an oxymoron: "the term ‘will’ would not apply if our actions were completely random and it would not be ‘free’ if they were entirely determined. So if there is free will, it must be somewhere between chance and necessity - which is exactly where fly behavior comes to lie."

This echoes what Einstein believed: "I don’t believe in the freedom of the will. Schopenhauer’s saying, that a human can very well do what he wants, but can not will what he wants, accompanies me in all of life’s circumstances and reconciles me with the actions of humans, even when they are truly distressing. This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals".

Which leads me to the quality of the reviewers on PLoS. Most PI's are obviously too busy to give free time to peer-review stuff on the internet that wont get them any type of recognition. Furthermore it blurs the line between "expert in the field" peer review and "random degenerate grad student" review. And really, when the best young minds are free to write anything on the internet, what comes out is probably "I for one welcome our new cyborg fruit fly overlords". What we lack is accountability and a positive reward in your career from contributing to peer-review, or publishing in non-traditional journals (is it even a journal?).

On the one hand some of the reviews appear quite adequate, yet some seem to be overly philosophical, probably because they were written from out-of-field scientists and not experts: "The findings actually have nothing to do with free will. Free will is a feeling I have (when I do something deliberately) that I am doing what I am doing because I feel like it: a feeling that my willing it is the cause of my doing it. It is undeniably true that that is what it feels like to do something deliberately. But whether what feels like the cause -- feeling -- is indeed the cause of my doing is an entirely different matter. The real cause might, for example, be a fractal order mechanism of the kind reported by Maye et al. But that mechanism is the causal mechanism it is irrespective of whether it happens to be accompanied by (or generates) feelings. And it certainly does not explain how or why we (let alone the fruit fly) feel anything at all. And without feeling there is no free will, just mechanisms, whether deterministic or nondeterministic -- unless we are ready to believe in telekinesis."

But what really took me over the edge, is this blog spamming on that paper's annotations. It's one thing for the bayblab to spam digg, but this is a taste of what's to come to the scientific discussion and peer review process if it remains open...

Finally, a Digg for Real Scientists

I got a email today inviting me to try out DiscoveR8, a site that is now in beta testing. For those who know Digg, it's basically that but for peer-reviewed scientific papers. For those who have been hiding under a rock for the last year or so and don't know Digg, the concept is that anyone and everyone can submit their own papers or other papers they'd like to share with others who frequent the website. Anyone who comes across your post then clicks the button next to the story to give it the thumbs down or thumbs up and comments for discussion can also be posted. Based on user voting the website keeps track of the most popular papers. How long until your Discover8 ranking is more important than impact factor?