Two new recent stories are, according to ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross, both eligible to receive honorary status in the false claims department for their misrepresentation of facts and science. The first is discussed in an article published in The New York Times. Andrew Pollack investigates the recent surge in sales of telomere testing kits that claim to offer clues to people s longevity and biological age.
As part of the tips of chromosomes, telomeres are structures that are lost as people age. Now, various companies, such as SpectraCell Laboratories in Houston and Life Length in Spain, are offering tests whose costs range from $200 to over $700 that use telomere length as a scientifically-questionable indicator of longevity.
Even Nobelist Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, has joined the telomere test bandwagon by promoting her own version that costs $200. What s surprising is that Dr. Carol Greider, a molecular biologist at Johns Hopkins University who shared a 2009 Nobel Prize with Dr. Blackburn for their work on telomeres, is also one of her biggest critics. Outside of a small 1 percent of people with the shortest telomeres who have been shown to possess an increased risk of certain diseases, the science really isn t there to tell us what the consequences are of your telomere length, Dr. Greider tells The Times.
In another example of scientific distortion at least bordering on quackery that has infiltrated the media, a Fox News LiveScience blog chastises big pharma for their alleged reluctance to engage in cancer research involving a chemical known as dichloroacetate (DCA), due to their inability to patent it, thereby eliminating the profit motive. The piece chronicles the work of Dr. Evangelos Michelakis, a cancer researcher at the University of Alberta, whose claims that DCA can kill cancer cells are based solely on test tube experiments, animal testing and an extremely small clinical trial he conducted, which was composed of only five patients. Though even he admitted that with the small number of treated participants in our study, no firm conclusions regarding DCA as a therapy ¦can be made, he still attacks pharmaceutical companies for not investing in further research.
But not so fast. As Gary Schwitzer points out on his site, healthnewsreview.org, wherein he links to another blogger s exposé of the DCA-conspiracy theory, the claims regarding DCA as an effective cancer treatment have been largely exaggerated: since there have been no clinical trials using the chemical, there is no basis for the researchers to allude to a cure.
And even if the claims were true, pharmaceutical companies actually could obtain protection via a use patent. This permits patent protection for old products (or drugs) where a new use has been discovered, explains ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom. So this whole story is chock full of misinformation," he observes. "What is more likely is that Dr. Michelakis approached drug companies and they were just not interested.
