Square One

Can we trust traditional peer review? If it’s broken, how might we fix it?

Former BMJ editor Richard Smith, Medscape founder Peter Frishauf, peer review researcher Liz Wager, health policy researcher Alex Jadad, and computer scientist Thomas (Bo) Adler discuss peer review in this podcast by the Journal of Participatory Medicine (JPM).

This stimulating discussion follows two interesting articles on the subject in JPM’s inaugural issue: In Search of an Optimal Peer Review System, by Richard Smith, and Reputation Systems: A New Vision for Publishing and Peer Review by Peter Frishauf.

The podcast and its transcript can be downloaded here.

Muza Gondwe from Malawi is presently on a six-month fellowship at the Centre of African Studies on the Public Understanding of Science in Africa in Cambridge. She writes on BMJ Blogs about her project which seeks to develop ways of engaging science through communication in Malawi and to identify and celebrate distinguished black African pioneers of science. She was motivated to do this after reading these:

“It will be seen that when we classify mankind by colour, the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race.” – Dr. Arnold Toynbee, The Study of History, Vol. I, page 233. (Vol I: Introduction; The Geneses of Civilizations (Oxford University Press 1934).

“[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really.” James Watson, in 2007 in an interview with the Sunday Times.

And what does she find?

In my investigation I have learnt some startling facts: no black African has won any of the Nobel prizes in science; the UK has six times as many researchers as Sub-Saharan Africa; and, according to the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora (MAD), 0.1% of the total number of mathematicians in the world are of black African heritage.

The full post is here.

Muza Gondwe’s personal blog, “Communicating science, the African way” is here.

Richard Lehman’s Journal Blog on BMJ points attention to this wonderful JAMA article on nutrition this week. In Richard’s words, “this one-and-a half-page commentary article contains more sense than most large books on Clinical Nutrition.”

Here is an excerpt:

Body weight remains stable as long as the number of calories consumed equals the number expended through physical activities and metabolic processes. When energy intake increases above expenditure, the excess is used to build new tissue, and weight gain results. However, weight gain does not continue indefinitely. Carefully controlled overfeeding experiments show that calorie expenditure increases progressively because of the energetic costs of maintaining the newly created tissue.

A person who consumes an extra cookie every day will initially experience weight gain, but over time an increasing proportion of the cookie’s calories will go into repairing, replacing, and carrying the extra body tissue. After a few years of daily cookie eating, weight gain will level off at approximately 2.7 kg. Thus, a one-time step-up in caloric intake will cause body weight to increase asymptotically to a new, stable level.

The converse occurs when an individual reduces food intake. As body size diminishes, so does the amount of fuel needed to maintain and move it, and weight settles at a new steady level. In addition, weight loss produces changes in hormones, the autonomic nervous system, and the intrinsic efficiency of muscle that serve to conserve energy. Therefore, additional weight loss can only be achieved by a more severe diet or a more arduous physical activity routine. Most individuals do the opposite: after having achieved some weight loss, they resume their original diet and exercise habits. Consequently, weight gain recurs rapidly.

The body indeed does have a remarkable ability to keep itself “stable”; a huge evolutionary advantage for any species that is so endowed! The full article is here.