Cloning Cats

Researchers at Texas A & M were in the news this week when word leaked that they managed to successfully clone a cat. A number of research efforts are underway to clone cats and dogs, but this was the first such success.

Much of the media coverage focused on the possibility of cloning pets. The Canadian Press quoted Texas A & M researcher Duane Kraemer as claiming that some people have already stored cells from their departed pets in the hope that cloning might one day bring back copies of said pets.

A more important possibility is the role that cloned cats may play in medical research. This possibility brought condemnation from the Humane Society of the United StatesWayne Pacelle who described the announcement as “unfortunate news” and told the Canadian Press that researchers should move away from using animals in medical research.

But research in cats has provided important information about a variety of issues related to human physiology, especially about vision. The way cats process vision is very similar to the processes in human beings. In fact, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research in cats and monkeys that completely revolutionized understanding of how vision is processed.

Pacelle and animal rights activists are free to maintain that advances in human knowledge thanks to animal research are “unfortunate,” but they will have to excuse the rest of us for finding this to be incredibly exciting news.

Source:

Texas researchers announce successful cloning of a cat; dogs are next. Malcolm Ritter, Canadian Press, February 15, 2002.

More than nine lives for this cat. Antonio Regalado, The Wall Street Journal, February 14, 2002.

Is Sleeping Killing You?

One of the more ludicrous examples of a study being used as part of a scare campaign were reports last week of a new study that found sleeping 8 to 10 hours each night increases the risk of dying. Unfortunately, not only was this study poorly designed but its results weren’t all that impressive.

Researcher Daniel Kripke used surveys filled out by 1.1 million men and women from 1982-1988. Among the survey questions were several pertaining to the amount of sleep the individuals received as well as whether or not they took sleeping pills.

Kripke’s study, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, found that those who slept 8 hours increased their risk of dying by 15 percent, those who slept 9 hours increased the risk by 20 percent, and those slept 10 hours a night had an increased risk of 35 to 40 percent.

Even if all of the data is absolutely correct, a 15 to 40 percent increased risk in this sort of epidemiological trial is hardly anything to get worked up about. This is a level of risk that is difficult to distinguish from background noise in this sort of study.

Moreover the validity of the data here are highly questionable. First, the study relies entirely on people’s self-reporting of how much they sleep. As one critic of the study noted, however, people generally respond to such questions with an estimate of how much time they spend in bed rather than how much they sleep. Even then, it’s questionable whether people can give reliable estimates (how many people reliably track what time they go to bed and wake up — allowing for events such as waking up in the middle of the night, etc.?)

As Dr. Russell Rosenberg, director of the Northside Hospital Sleep Medicine Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, told CNN,

The data can’t be used to establish a cause and effect relationship because there are flaws in the study. You can’t tell how people rated their own sleep quality and looked back at their sleep, which is a subjective reaction to how much sleep they were getting.

Secondly, the study does not appear to have controlled for confounding factors. People who are already ill, for example, would be expected to spend more time in sleeping than people who are not ill. Kripke could simply be measuring the fact that people who are sick tend to sleep more which is hardly groundbreaking news.

Either way, there is plenty of research suggesting that the amount of sleep people receive strongly affects their ability to remain alert. Based on the weak findings of this study, it would be a mistake to alter sleeping patterns to try to achieve a likely non-existent benefit in life expectancy.

Sources:

Experts challenge study linking sleep, life span. Rhonda Rowland, CNN, February 15, 2002.

Study links 8 hours’ sleep to shorter life span. Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post, February 15, 2002.

Massive Avantgo Breakage

Yikes. Avantgo is about to create massive breakage in its custom channels. According to Tom’s Hardware reports that businesses — including several large companies — were uusing the custom channels for enterprise use rather than paying upwards of $10,000 for the dedicated server that Avantgo wanted to sell them.

Avantgo’s solution — any custom channel with more than eight subscribers will have to pay a minimum of $1,000 per year. Over 100 subscribers? Try a minimum of $4,000 per year.

Of course a lot of hobbyist-type web sites use Avantgo for custom feeds and those are about to disappear. As Tom’s Hardware puts it,

But what about antagonising users? Capping readers for each custom channels at eight seems generous: tomorrow thousands of Avantgo subscribers will see links to their custom channels break. Avantgo advises users to email custom channels, asking them to provide a full subscriber service, but if the content providers don’t play ball, the service becomes somewhat less necessary.

This apparently doesn’t impact full channels, but it would seem like only a matter of time before folks there with thousands of subscribers are asked to pay up as well.

Personally I don’t think it is unreasonable to charge for this sort of service, but I think Avantgo is targeting the wrong market when restricting itself entirely to large corporate clients who may (or may not) be willing to pay $4,000 – $10,000 per year for their service. They’d do well to consider a second tier service at more reasonable prices for smaller web sites.

And long term, both Microsoft and Palm should build this sort of functionality into the OS. I should be able to set up an XML file on my site and then go to my Palm or Pocket PC, enter the URL for the XML file, and then have my PDA update automatically every time I synchronize based on the parameters in the XML file.

Cuba vs. the United States on Infant Mortality

Recently released statistics on the infant mortality rate in the Western hemisphere yielded an odd conclusions — Cuba’s infant mortality rate, 16 6.0 per 1,000, is now lower than the U.S. infant mortality rate, at 7.2 per 1,000. Given Cuba’s poverty level, its 6.0 rate is very impressive, but is it accurate to say that Cuba now has an infant mortality rate lower than the United States? No.

The problem is that international statistics on infant mortality are helpful in revealing large differences, but when it comes to small differences such as that between Cuba and the United States, often other factors are really behind the numbers.

The primary reason Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States is that the United States is a world leader in an odd category — the percentage of infants who die on their birthday. In any given year in the United States anywhere from 30-40 percent of infants die before they are even a day old.

Why? Because the United States also easily has the most intensive system of
emergency intervention to keep low birth weight and premature infants alive
in the world. The United States is, for example, one of only a handful countries that keeps detailed statistics on early fetal mortality — the survival rate of infants who are born as early as the 20th week of gestation.

How does this skew the statistics? Because in the United States if an infant is born weighing only 400 grams and not breathing, a doctor will likely spend lot of time and money trying to revive that infant. If the infant does not survive — and the mortality rate for such infants is in excess of 50 percent — that sequence of events will be recorded as a live birth and then a death.

In many countries, however, (including many European countries) such severe medical intervention would not be attempted and, moreover, regardless of whether or not it was, this would be recorded as a fetal death rather than a live birth. That unfortunate infant would never show up in infant mortality statistics.

This is clearly what is happening in Cuba. In the United States about 1.3 percent of all live births are very low birth weight — less than 1,500 grams. In Cuba, on the other hand, only about 0.4 percent of all births are less than 1,500 grams. This is despite the fact that the United States and Cuba have very similar low birth rates (births where the infant weighs less than 2500g). The United States actually has a much better low birth rate than Cuba if you control for multiple births — i.e. the growing number of multiple births in the United States due to technological interventions has resulted in a marked increase in the number of births under 2,500 g.

It is odd if both Cuba and the U.S. have similar birth weight distributions that the U.S. has more than 3 times the number of births under 1,500g, unless there is a marked discrepancy in the way that very low birth weight births are recorded. Cuba probably does much the same thing that many other countries do and does not register births under 1000g. In fact, this is precisely what the World Health Organization itself recommends that for official record keeping purposes, only live births of greater than 1,000g should be included.

The result is that the statistics make it appear as if Cuba’s infant mortality rate is significantly better than the United States’, but in fact what is really being measured in this difference is that the United States takes far more serious (and expensive) interventions among extremely low birth weight and extremely premature infants than Cuba (or much of the rest of the world for that matter) does.

This does not diminish in any way Cuba’s progress on infant mortality, which is one of the few long term improvements that the Cuban state has made, but infant mortality statistics that are that close to one another are often extremely difficult to compare cross-culturally.

Owner of Cow Used in Fundraiser Says PETA Wrong about Mistreatment Allegations

The owner of a cow used as part of a fundraiser for Florida Southern College called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ claims that the cow was mistreated are “ridiculous.”

The animal was used in a game of Cow Bingo, where participants bought $10 tickets corresponding to parts of a field where the cow would heed the call of nature. PETA claimed that the cow was fed laxatives and gave birth shortly after the event. The cow’s owner, Mike Hiestand, says neither of those claims is true.

“The cow did not give birth,” Hiestand told the Lakeland Ledger. “Why would I take a chance on hurting a calf and feed a cow laxatives? Some of the kids asked me if I could use laxatives to make the game move along faster, but I refused.”

Hiestand also disputed claims by PETA’s Amy Rhodes that the cow was stressed by the event. “If she was stressed, she would have torn down the pen,” Hiestand said. “She doesn’t know the difference — whether you take her to a pasture or the Lakeland Square Mall.”

Hiestand challenged PETA up or shut up. “I’d like them to prove there was any mistreatment of the cow,” Hiestand told the Lakeland Ledger. “My family spends more money on that cow than some people spend on their kids.”

Whatever you do, Mr. Heistand, just do not let PETA “rescue” your cow. Animals given that treatment by PETA do not tend to live long enough to be stressed out.

Source:

Owner: Cow was treated fine. Erik Ortiz, The Lakeland Ledger, February 17, 2002.