First patient to get stem cell therapy comes forward

The Washington Post reports today that

In the six months since scientists announced they had infused a drug made from human embryonic stem cells into a partially paralyzed patient’s spine, the identity of the recipient has been shrouded in secrecy......

After undergoing emergency treatment......(the patient) agreed to let doctors inject him with.....more than 2 million cells made from stem cells into his spine.......

The trial is primarily assessing safety, but doctors are also testing whether the cells restore sensation and movement.......

"We’re just in the early stages right now. It’s not at the stage to really know what’s going on,”

The repair of spinal injury through the use of stem cells is one of the dreams of medical research. This study is a very preliminary one, but it is a ray of hope for a lot of people.

This is the kind of research that the Bush administration blocked!

From Donald Kennedy's Editorial titled "Mixed Grill"

Science 31 August 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5842, p. 1145

"Secrecy and concealment. I've complained about policy-makers in the U.S. administration who suppress scientific results if they don't support a particular political objective. Although most attention went to the case of Jim Hanson at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and a few others, a rich lode of new material is opening up. Julie MacDonald, deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks at the Department of the Interior, may be the champion science-buster of them all. The department's inspector general revealed that MacDonald interfered regularly by bullying staff to change recommendations on endangered species habitat, exposing the department to litigation. She resigned abruptly, shortly before being called to testify before Congress. And in a different space, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) learned that some of the agency's trailers occupied by Hurricane Katrina victims had formaldehyde concentrations 75 times the maximum recommended dose. What did the general counsel do? He advised employees not to initiate testing because it might 'imply FEMA's ownership of the issue' and invite litigation. Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA), on learning this, pronounced it 'sickening…an official policy of premeditated ignorance.'"

"'Abstinence only' education does not slow the spread of AIDS"

Read the full article in The Economist of September 20th 2007.

"Abstinence-only does not work. Abstinence-plus probably does."

Last month Dr Underhill published a review of 13 trials involving 16,000 young people in America. The trials compared the sexual behaviour of those given an abstinence-only education with that of those who were provided with no information at all or with whatever their schools normally taught. Pregnancies were as numerous in both groups. Sexually transmitted diseases were as widespread. The number of sexual partners was equally high and unprotected sex just as common.

Having thus discredited abstinence-only teaching, Dr Underhill and her colleagues decided to evaluate the slightly more complicated message of “abstinence-plus” using 39 trials that involved 38,000-odd young people from the United States, Canada and the Bahamas. Their results are published in the current issue of Public Library of Science Medicine.

This tuition—compared, as before, with whatever biology classes and playgrounds provide—reduced the number of pregnancies in three out of seven trials (the remaining four recorded no difference). Four out of 13 trials found that abstinence-plus-educated teenagers had fewer sexual partners, while the remainder showed no change. Fourteen studies reported that it increased condom use; 12 others reported no difference. Furthermore, in the vast majority of cases, abstinence-plus participants knew more about AIDS and HIV (the virus that causes the disease) than their peers did. And the tuition often reduced the frequency of anal sex (which brings a greater chance of passing on HIV than the vaginal option). In contrast to the fears of the protagonists of abstinence-only education, not one of the trials found that teenagers behaved in a riskier fashion in either the long or the short term after receiving abstinence-plus instruction.

Comment: I would characterize this as "Duh", except that the Bush administration does not seem to have thought of this obviously likely possibility. Of course, it is important to have meta-analysis of a body of research on so important an issue to be sure. But Duh! JAD

The Bush Administration and Children

Source: "United States Has Higher Death Rate Than Most Other Countries"
Excerpted from a report prepared by Save the Children

"Although the under-5 mortality rate in the United States has fallen in recent decades, it is still higher than many other wealthy nations – 2.3 times that of Iceland and more than 75 percent higher than the rate of the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden."

So why did President Bush veto a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program? According to the WP, 72 percent of Americans supported the bill Bush vetoed.

According to last week's Science magazine:

After U.S. high school students did poorly on TIMSS in 1995, the government has decided not to participate in another version to be given next year.

In 1995, the United States lagged behind most of the world on a test of advanced mathematics and physics taken by graduating high school students from 16 countries. That won't happen again, if the Bush Administration has its way: It has decided not to participate in the next version of the test.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA, an advanced version of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given quadrennially to younger students, because it can't fit the $5 million to $10 million price tag into its flat budget.....

But many leaders in the mathematics community believe that the Administration opted out because it feared another poor U.S. performance would reflect badly on its signature education program, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.....

Leaders from the U.S. mathematical community, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society, are up in arms at the department's decision, first reported last month by the newspaper Education Week. They argue that this elite group of students needs to be monitored because they are most likely to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields in college and become the next generation of scientists and engineers. "It's inconceivable to me that the government wouldn't fund our participation," says Stanford mathematician R. James Milgram, a member of the IES advisory board that expects to take up the issue at its 30 to 31 October meeting. "The 1995 test was extremely important in showing that a problem exists," he notes. "And the only way to know if we're beginning to turn things around is by looking at new data to see if we've made any progress."

Comment: If the Bush administration gets its way, the cost to the government of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon reach $600 billion. How important is the so-called "war on terror" as compared to our children and our future (which depends on those children)? The government will be able to afford to assure medical insurance for all children if it asks for just a little more tax from the rich, and the decision that we can't afford a few million dollars to see how well our kids are doing in school as compared with those in other countries is simply ludicrous! JAD

Musing about historiography

It occurs to me that history is very often written about the succession of rulers, ruling parties, and ruling regimes. Clearly, when there are changes at the top others things are often changed as well. Indeed, when a people are conquered by another people, wholesale changes are triggered.

It also occurs to me that change seems to characterize the modern world, and that some changes occur much more rapidly than others. Thus, for example, the cadre of political appointees can be changed relatively rapidly, while it takes years for a population to learn a new language. People change religion at a different rate than they change their agricultural or industrial technology. New laws can be passed and promulgated, but the people may chose not to obey them for a long time. The understanding of which causes in the past resulted in which changes must be very hard to develop -- more so than the histories I read would suggest.

Would it not be nice to have good mathematical models describing cultural dynamics? Such models might represent the inertia inherent in different aspects of culture, and the forces available for inducing social and economic change. Even qualitative information might be useful.

Aspects of culture are interdependent, and ideally one would like to see a matrix that showed how the an overall set of social forces collectively influence the overall set of cultural elements.

The point I am making is that history, as it is generally written, may emphasize political forces for change while leaving out other forces; it may emphasize the modifications of relatively sensitive cultural properties, while neglecting the cultural properties with more inertia.

When the Bush administration forced regime change in Iraq, prosecuted deBathification, disbanded the Iraqi army, changed the constitution and laws, and introduced a variety of radical economic reforms, they seem to have had a very inaccurate view of the likely outcomes. Was their misunderstanding of the complexity of the situation, and of the resistance of key cultural elements to change, simply the result of reading histories that misrepresented the complexity of culture?

"SCIENCE AND SOCIETY: Framing Science"

Read the full article by Matthew C. Nisbet1 and Chris Mooney in Science, 6 April 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5821, p. 56.

"Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up. Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively 'frame' information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside."

The authors give the example, among others, of climate change.

many surveys show major partisan differences on the issue. A Pew survey conducted in January found that 23% of college-educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats (6). Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans rank global warming as less important than over a dozen other issues (6). Much of this reflects the efforts of political operatives and some Republican leaders who have emphasized the frames of either "scientific uncertainty" or "unfair economic burden" (7). In a counter-strategy, environmentalists and some Democratic leaders have framed global warming as a "Pandora's box" of catastrophe; this and news images of polar bears on shrinking ice floes and hurricane devastation have evoked charges of "alarmism" and further battles.

Recently, a coalition of Evangelical leaders have adopted a different strategy, framing the problem of climate change as a matter of religious morality. The business pages tout the economic opportunities from developing innovative technologies for climate change. Complaints about the Bush Administration's interference with communication of climate science have led to a "public accountability" frame that has helped move the issue away from uncertainty to political wrongdoing.

Comment: How about framing the issue as one of the responsibility of citizenship? By the end of the 21st century the climate will have changed greatly. The social and economic costs of that change will be huge. The greenhouse gas emissions of the United States are the major cause of this climate change, and the refusal of the Republican party in general and of the Bush administration in particular to act responsibly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions domestically or to lead in the effort to do so globally have hamstrung efforts to reduce the rate of growth of the problem, much less to reduce the problem.

In democracies, the people get the government and the policy they deserve. If you accept policies that favor only a small minority to your own disadvantage and to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else out of ignorance, you deserve what you get. Understanding climate change is not rocket science.

It should be abundantly clear that this is a crucial issue of our time. All voters have a responsibility to understand this issue, and should take the time to become informed on it. JAD

Source: "Bangladesh: Up to their necks," The Economist, August 9, 2007.

Do you think it is unrelated to climate change that the fact that the Subcontinent is experiencing the worst flooding in living memory, with tens of millions of people flooded and a health emergency facing the world, in a year of exceptional weather in Europe? Are you willing to take the risk that this is only a harbinger of things to come?

"A Modern History Of White House Spin"

Read the full article by Peter Baker, The Washington Post, August 13, 2007.

Excerpt:

Kumar, a Towson University professor, got most of the important figures of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies to talk with her about their strategies for spinning journalists -- including Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Joshua B. Bolten from this administration. What emerges is a portrait of a rapidly shifting environment in which the White House has had to adapt to keep a quicker pace because of cable news, talk radio and the Internet.

Nothing is left to chance, she writes. Take the backgrounds during President Bush's speeches, which the White House makes sure are plastered with slogans so that the television shot conveys the chosen message even without sound. Bush, she reports, speaks from a special podium called "Falcon," designed so that it does not block the background message in televised close-ups. "Winning the picture is important," Rove told her.

Kumar recounts how the Bush White House shifted communications strategies in its second term, as political troubles accumulated. At first, she writes, the Bush team did not pay much attention to the daily news cycle. Bartlett, then the communications director, said Bush staffers considered themselves "more like long-term investors" while Democrats were "more day traders." By 2006, Bartlett's views had changed. The White House, he said, needed to be both or it would suffer the consequences.

When a politician speaks you can be pretty sure his mouth is moving, unless he/she is a ventriloquist. As for the rest???

Steiger Said to Have Blocked Surgeon General's Global Health Report on Political Grounds

William R. Steiger has been identified as the
HHS official who blocked the report on global health.
Office of Global Health Affairs via the Washington Post

"Bush Aide Blocked Report: Global Health Draft In 2006 Rejected for Not Being Political," by Christopher Lee and Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post, July 29, 2007.

The article states:

A surgeon general's report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration's policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.....

Richard H. Carmona, who commissioned the "Call to Action on Global Health" while serving as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, recently cited its suppression as an example of the Bush administration's frequent efforts during his tenure to give scientific documents a political twist.....

Three people directly involved in its preparation said its publication was blocked by William R. Steiger, a specialist in education and a scholar of Latin American history whose family has long ties to President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Since 2001, Steiger has run the Office of Global Health Affairs in the Department of Health and Human Services.....

After a long struggle that pitted top scientific and medical experts inside and outside the government against Steiger and his political bosses, Carmona refused to make the requested changes, according to the officials......

In 65 pages, the report charts trends in infectious and chronic disease; reviews efforts to curb AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria; calls for the careful monitoring of public health to safeguard against bioterrorism; and explains the importance of proper nutrition, childhood immunizations and clean air and water, among other topics. Its underlying message is that disease and suffering do not respect political boundaries in an era of globalization and mass population movements.

The report was compiled by government and private public-health experts from various organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, the Catholic Medical Mission Board and several universities.

Read "Hill, Aid Groups: One Opaque System Replaced Another," Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post, July 22, 2007.

Excerpts:

"The fight over U.S. foreign aid has been largely hidden from the public, but it is likely to emerge Tuesday, when the Senate holds confirmation hearings for Henrietta H. Fore, the undersecretary of state for management and the nominee to replace Tobias as the deputy secretary of state for foreign assistance.

The bulk of the $23 billion in annual U.S. foreign aid goes to a handful of key countries, leaving about 120 nations to battle over $3 billion of the pie. India, for example, is one of the big losers in Rice's foreign aid revolution. All U.S. aid to assist India in education, women's rights, democracy and sanitation is terminated under the new system. Overall aid to India -- where 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day -- would be cut 35 percent in 2008, to $81 million, on the theory that India has one of the best-performing economies in the world."

Comment: Let us work to bring attention of the public to the perversion of foreign aid that has occurred under the Bush administration as a result of its war oriented foreign policy, and its lack of humanitarian and environmental concerns, not to mention its lack of a reasonable long term strategy in the international arena. JAD

The Pattern of Terrorism as an Emergent Property

One of the outcomes of the theory of complexity has been the recognition that patterns can emerge from the behavior of large numbers of independent actors, each working with only local information. Read more about emergent properties.

Emergent properties are examples of teleonomic processes. Teleonomy is the term applied to the effect of apparent purpose in a system. It can be contrasted to teleology which is applied to planned or purposeful activity.

Thus, the effect of large numbers of independent emitters of greenhouse gas increasing their emissions, results in more of that gas in the environment, in more heat being trapped in the atmosphere. The added heat in the atmosphere leads to more heat in the oceans and a change in sea surface temperatures and more evaporation. The molecules in the atmosphere somewhat modify their behavior as a result of increased heat and moisture in the air, and cloud formations and storm patterns change. It appears as a result that more and/or more hurricanes form as one of the results of the process.

In the past, people unable to understand the complex causality, would have been likely to attribute the change in weather to planning. Since such planning would be beyond the scope of any human in the past, they would attribute the effect to super-human planning, or action by the gods.

I suspect that an increase in terrorism may be largely the result of large numbers of cells forming and acting independently. That more form and act now may be largely the result of more feeling of anomie among increasing numbers of immigrants, increasing anti-immigrant prejudice in indigenous populations of countries receiving more immigrants, increasing communication about the problems of Muslims and immigrants, increasing access to information about how to conduct terrorist activities, and a social cascade effect as potential terrorists see more examples of terrorist activity in the media. If so, rather than increased terrorism being primarily and indicator of increased effectiveness of planning by international terrorist masterminds, it may be an example of an emergent unplanned pattern from changes in what we might call a social climate related to terrorism, and in part a response to globalization and the improving international information infrastructure as well as to the expanding and worsening conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Pakistan, etc.

If this is right, the metaphor of a "War on Terror" may be especially misleading. You can perhaps conduct a "war" against those responsible for a planned campaign of terror, but you can not conduct a "war" against a climate conducive to terror. The approach to a social climate must be made through education and other actions to change social conditions and to change peoples minds.

I suspect that President Bush and his administration, as well as many of the administration's supporters would find this argument unintuitive. Evolution is a prototypical teleonomic theory, seeing the emergence of species, including Homo sapiens, as the result of random genetic changes and natural selection. Those who reject evolution in favor of "intelligent design" reject teleonomy in favor or teleology. Similarly, those who believe the biblical story of creation reject teleonomic arguments from cosmology, geology, and biology for a theistic teleological argument. Such people may have considerable difficulty accepting a teleonomic explanation for the development of international terrorism, preferring a teleologic argument; they may as a result prefer war to education and social change as a response to a perceived pattern of increased terrorism.

The inner core of the Bush administration may itself find the teleologic argument more emotionally appealing than the teleonomic, and/or it may find that making teleologica arguments more acceptable to its base.

This discussion perhaps illustrates a reason why scientific literacy is important for the electorate, Scientifically literate people must understand and be familiar with teleonomic explanations for natural phenomena. Indeed, scientifically literate people should have an understanding not only of the physical sciences but also of the social sciences. Indeed, one of the first teleonomic arguments in science was that of Adam Smith, explaining the "hidden hand" underlying market efficiency. Economic markets are seen to have prices emerge as teleonomic properties from the independent action of large numbers of individual buyers and sellers, each working with locally available information, rather than of central planning. Indeed, a key failure of communist government was due to the fact that central planning did a worse job at setting prices than the free market.

(It is perhaps ironic that the party most ardent in its defense of the free market is now identified with those most ardent in the rejection of the theory of evolution.)

"Ex-Surgeon General Says White House Hushed Him"

Read the full article by Christopher Lee in The Washington Post, July 11, 2007.

Apparently, two Surgeons General were censored by the Clinton administration, but the censorship of the Surgeon General under the Bush administration is much worse than in previous administrations. Dr. Koop, Surgeon General under Reagan, was famous for speaking out on controversial public health issues. The issue was raised during a hearing yesterday before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (Click here to go to the Committee webpage for the hearing.)

The Surgeon General is the head of the Public Health Service, a uniformed service of the United States Government. I believe it should be his judgment, informed by his staff and public health advisors, as what public health messages are important to give out to the public, not the judgment of non-public health specialist politicians. Professional judgment is needed to evaluate the credibility of the scientific evidence, the seriousness of risks to public health, and the capabilities of the health services system to respond.

I am sufficiently outraged by this testimony to quote at length from the article:

(Former Surgeon General) Carmona, a Bush nominee who served from 2002 to 2006, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that political appointees in the administration routinely scrubbed his speeches for politically sensitive content and blocked him from speaking out on public health matters such as stem cell research, abstinence-only sex education and the emergency contraceptive Plan B.

"Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is often ignored, marginalized or simply buried," he said. "The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds."

In one such case, Carmona, a former professor of surgery and public health at the University of Arizona, said he was told not to speak out during the national debate over whether the federal government should fund embryonic stem cell research, which President Bush opposes.

"Much of the discussion was being driven by theology, ideology, [and] preconceived beliefs that were scientifically incorrect," said Carmona......'This is a perfect example of the surgeon general being able to step forward, educate the American public.' . . . I was blocked at every turn. I was told the decision had already been made -- 'Stand down. Don't talk about it.' That information was removed from my speeches."......

Carmona said that when the administration touted funding for abstinence-only education, he was prevented from discussing research on the effectiveness of teaching about condoms as well as abstinence. "There was already a policy in place that did not want to hear the science but wanted to just preach abstinence, which I felt was scientifically incorrect," Carmona said......

He (Carmona) is the latest in a string of government employees to complain that ideology is trumping science in the Bush administration.

In January, the leader of the National Institutes of Health's task force on stem cells, Story Landis, said that because of the Bush policy -- which aims to protect three-day-old embryos -- the nation is "missing out on possible breakthroughs." And in March, NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni called the Bush policy "shortsighted."

Last year, NASA scientist James E. Hansen and other federal climate researchers said the Bush administration had made it hard for them to speak in a forthright manner about global warming. In 2005, Susan F. Wood, an assistant FDA commissioner and director of the agency's Office of Women's Health, resigned her post, citing her frustration with political interference that was delaying approval of over-the-counter sales of Plan B.

People Want to Donate Embryos for Research

A new study published in Science says:

Of the 1020 respondents who reported that they have embryos currently stored, 495 (49%) indicated that they were somewhat or very likely to donate their embryos for research purposes. These 495 individuals controlled the disposition of from 2000 to 3050 embryos. Even if only half of these embryos ultimately were donated, this finding suggests that around 1000 of the 3900 to 5900 embryos currently stored by the infertility patients in our sample would be available for research purposes.

Respondents to the survey expressed even greater willingness to donate embryos to research when certain characteristics of the research were specified. In particular, the percentage reporting that they would be somewhat or very likely to donate increased from 49% for medical research (in general) to 60% for research in which stem cells are derived. [Similar increases were observed for research to understand or develop treatment for human disease or injury (62%) and for research to improve infertility treatment (61%)]. Perhaps most surprising, 28% indicated that they would be somewhat or very likely to donate embryos to improve cloning techniques for medical science.

Our data suggest that it is reasonable to assume that 50% of infertility patients with cryopreserved embryos would be willing to donate their embryos for stem cell research. If only half of these embryos were to be donated, then, based on the Hoffman et al. (7) finding that 400,000 embryos are currently cryopreserved in the United States, as many as 25% of them, or 100,000 embryos, could be available for stem cell research. If we continue with the Hoffman et al. assumptions about the success of deriving lines from cryopreserved embryos, we can calculate that if 65% of the embryos survive the freeze-thaw process, then 65,000 embryos would be available, 25% of which (16,250) could be expected to develop to the blastocyst stage. Of these, a conservative 15% could be expected to become a viable stem cell line, resulting in roughly 2000 to 3000 viable stem cell lines, about 100 times the number of lines currently available for federal funding.

The study is "EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS: Willingness to Donate Frozen Embryos for Stem Cell Research" by Anne Drapkin Lyerly1 and Ruth R. Faden. (Science 6 July 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5834, pp. 46 - 47)

Comment: This is another indication of how wrongheaded is the Bush administration policy on embryonic stem cell research. JAD

"Bush's Mistake and Kennedy's Error"

"Skeptic: Bush's Mistake and Kennedy's Error"; May 2007; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; subscription needed to read this online.

Shermer says, in part:

We all make similarly irrational arguments about decisions in our lives: we hang on to losing stocks, unprofitable investments, failing businesses and unsuccessful relationships. If we were rational, we would just compute the odds of succeeding from this point forward and then decide if the investment warrants the potential payoff. But we are not rational—not in love or war or business—and this particular irrationality is what economists call the “sunk-cost fallacy.”......

Imagine what would happen if George W. Bush delivered the following speech:

This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, “An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.” We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors.... We’re not going to have any search for scapegoats ... the final responsibilities of any failure are mine, and mine alone.

Bush’s popularity would skyrocket, and respect for his ability as a thoughtful leader willing to change his mind in the teeth of new evidence would soar. That is precisely what happened to President John F. Kennedy after the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, when he spoke these very words.

The Bush Manned Space Program Guts Environmental Research from Space

The Blue Marble from Appolo 17

Read "Cutbacks Impede Climate Studies: U.S. Earth Programs In Peril, Panel Finds" by Marc Kaufman in The Washington Post, January 16, 2007.
Lead paragraphs:

The government's ability to understand and predict hurricanes, drought and climate changes of all kinds is in danger because of deep cuts facing many Earth satellite programs and major delays in launching some of its most important new instruments, a panel of experts has concluded.

The two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, determined that NASA's earth science budget has declined 30 percent since 2000. It stands to fall further as funding shifts to plans for a manned mission to the moon and Mars. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, meanwhile, has experienced enormous cost overruns and schedule delays with its premier weather and climate mission.

Read the full study from the National Academies: Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond

Summary of the study:

Half of the country's environmental satellites will stop working by 2010, which could lead to a loss of data used to study climate change, predict natural disasters, and monitor land use. NASA and NOAA should secure long-term funding to maintain existing and previously planned satellite missions and to undertake a set of 17 new missions between 2010 and 2020, says a new National Research Council report

Comment: I understand that the acronym TTIA stands for Title Tells It All. JAD