Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

In my microbiology class, we're supposed to read a scientific article every week and discuss it during a subsection. The articles that we end up reading are always really cool because even though it's just a biology class, our professor tries to get us to read articles that make us question scientific methods. For example, a couple of weeks ago, we first had to read "Sporulation in mycobacteria" by Ghosh et al and looked at their methods and analyses. We thought it was a pretty cool article backed up by many experiments like flow cytometry and aligning these results with genomics and electron microscopy. In short, we were pretty sold. See it looks pretty legit!:

 However, the next week, we read "Do mycobacteria produce endospores" by Traag et al, which was a response scientific article to Ghosh et al. It turned out that none of the experiments that Ghosh et al had performed were replicable, and some of the electron microscopy pictures were suspected to be fake. We had never questioned the validity of the paper that are in scientific journals before, especially when they're supposed to be peer-reviewed (PNAS is a really well known scientific journal), so this came to a shock to a lot of us. It reminded me of this class, where we had talked about blindly trusting science because it's supposed to be "objective" and based on facts.

Anyways I kind of went on a tangent there but I was actually going to talk about the scientific article that my microbio class went over this week, which was looking at the development of malaria vaccines. At the end of our discussion of the scientific methods and results, my professor asked if we thought that the vaccine trials were ethical-- and when we really looked at the trial methods and what they entailed, we realized we didn't. They were basically purposely giving people a "controlled" version of malaria, which in itself seems very dangerous. While the paper didn't talk about where their trials were, other similar malaria vaccine trials took place in Africa, which immediately reminded me of our discussion of how drug trials are outsourced to third world countries to circumvent policies. 

It was disturbing how when I first read the article, I didn't think at all about the subjects of the trials, but focused mainly on the data and the results of the study instead , by showing quantified graphs and referring to the groups with percentages. I thought it might be interesting if they were like, "Danny was the only one who developed more severe side effects of the malaria we intentionally gave him, so he's in the hospital now" instead. I also thought it was cool how I actually studied a real-time version of what we discussed in class in another of my classes. Yeah, this post wasn't really related to what we're talking about now anymore since we've moved on from science in academia but still. Cool stuff! :)