Welcoming the Annual Review of Cancer Biology

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I’ve been looking forward to this series for a long time, and I’m glad to see the first volume fully published. Browse the table of contents for the Annual Review of Cancer Biology, Volume 1.

The autobiography by Harold Varmus, “How Tumor Virology Evolved into Cancer Biology and Transformed Oncology,” is a wonderful starting place for this series.  As Dr. Varmus tells his story, he introduces us to a field that constantly changing:

The story I will tell here is about the path that led to this new state of affairs. In that sense, this article differs from the kind of intellectual autobiography that commonly opens a volume of an Annual Reviews journal. Those articles, which I have read with pleasure over several decades, instructively track the development of new methods and the discovery of new facts within a single laboratory in the course of a senior scientist’s long career. I intend to provide my perspective on how a field of biological research—represented by this first volume of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology—began, grew, evolved, and prospered: not an impersonal account, but one that discusses my views of changing tides in cancer research more than the ebb and flow of people, ideas, and findings in my own laboratory.

ca1-varmusIt is a thoughtful and interesting history of not only Dr. Varmus’s career but how the field of cancer biology has developed.

Brandon Faubert & Ralph J. DeBerardinis introduced me to new methodologies in their article “Analyzing Tumor Metabolism In Vivo.” Working with live tumors is a new idea for me, and I was amazed at the wealth of information researchers are obtaining.

A comprehensive description of the pathways altered in cancer, the mechanisms by which they are perturbed, and the resulting metabolic vulnerabilities could drastically alter how we understand cancer and how we treat it. A key challenge is to apply systems that reliably report the metabolic features of intact tumors, particularly in patients. Although many current concepts in cancer metabolism derive from observations made in cultured cancer cell lines, research on the metabolic features of living tumors in mice and humans has begun to accelerate. We review some classical concepts in metabolic reprogramming, asking why metabolism is altered in cancer cells (i.e., the benefits of metabolic reprogramming to the cell) and how it is altered (i.e., the mechanisms of metabolic reprogramming). From there, we discuss approaches to investigating the metabolism of intact tumors and new principles in cancer biology arising from these studies.

Last on my reading list is “Resisting Resistance” by Ivana Bozic & Martin A. Nowak because I wanted to know more about the difficulties with targeted therapies and what the latest research looks like.  What I discovered was that I’m going to need to dust off my biology textbooks to refresh my background, and that these therapies can evolve resistance.

Targeted therapies, immunotherapies, and improved chemotherapies are being developed to reduce the suffering and mortality that come from human cancer. Although these approaches, and in particular combinations of them, are expected to succeed eventually to a large degree, they all suffer one obstacle: Populations of replicating cells move away—typically in a high-dimensional space—from any opposing selection pressure they encounter. They evolve resistance. It is possible, however, to develop a precise mathematical understanding of the problem and to design treatment strategies that prevent resistance if possible or manage resistance otherwise.

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, Volume 4

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Investigate the full table of contents for Volume 4 of the Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application.

st4-fingerprintOne topic I’ve been tracking for a while is addressed by Stern’s article “Statistical Issues in Forensic Science.”  In the past decade, there have been many challenges to accepted forensic science—such as fingerprint analysis. Fingerprints are used by the author to demonstrate how statistical methods could be used to address current problems:

Another concern expressed in the 2009 NRC report is whether the forensic practitioner community has a full appreciation of the role of uncertainty in forensic examinations. For many years (through the early 2000s), it was common for latent print examiners to support a claimed identification by noting that the process they followed had zero error rate. Another popular claim was that the source of a print was identified to the exclusion of all other people that had ever lived or ever would live. Those who work in scientific disciplines and appreciate the role of uncertainty know that such claims are not credible. Recent studies have demonstrated a low but nonzero misidentification error rate for latent fingerprint examiners. In other forensic disciplines, it is common to have examiners testify to a “reasonable degree of scientific certainty.” This language was recently criticized by the NCFS because it does not have a standard definition and might confuse or mislead jurors (NCFS 2016).

Jeffrey T. Leek & Leah R. Jager tackle another much discussed topic in their article “Is Most Published Research Really False?” This has been a concern in many fields for the past several years, and because a lot of the discussion has involved some high-level statistics, I was very glad to find more information from this perspective. The introduction is especially good at laying out some of the possible concerns:

But this system was invented before modern computing, data generation, scientific software, email, the Internet, and social media. Each of these inventions has placed strain on the scientific publication infrastructure. These modern developments have happened during the careers of practicing scientists. Many laboratory leaders received their training before the explosion of cheap data generation, before the widespread use of statistics and computing, and before there was modern data analytic infrastructure. At the same time, there has been increasing pressure from review panels, hiring committees, and funding agencies to publish positive and surprising results in the scientific literature. These trends have left scientists with a nagging suspicion that some fraction of published results are at minimum exaggerated and at worst outright false.

Statistics articles ripped from the headlines? We have one! For example, Dwork et al.’s article “Exposed! A Survey of Attacks on Private Data” offers an introduction to an interesting facet of the privacy discussion: How do we use information publicly while protecting a sensitive dataset:

We focus on the simple scenario in which there is a dataset x containing sensitive information, and the goal is to release statistics about the dataset to the public. These statistics may be fixed in advance or may be chosen by the analyst, who queries the dataset. Speaking intuitively (because we have not yet defined privacy), the goal in privacy-preserving data analysis is to protect the privacy of the individual records in the dataset, even if the analyst maliciously chooses queries according to an attack strategy designed to compromise privacy.

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

Annual Review of Cancer Biology – now available online

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We are delighted to announce the launch of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology, the 47th in our collection of highly cited review journals. It seems appropriate to focus on Cancer Research, a field that is deeply linked to the investigation of central themes in the life sciences, during our 85th year of service to the research community. It is also a natural fit for the interdisciplinary coverage of our portfolio of existing journals.

Co-Editors Dr. Tyler Jacks (Director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT) and Dr. Charles L. Sawyers (Chair of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering) said:

“Cancer Biology covers a wide range of disciplines that are converging to provide a deep understanding of the cancer cell and the various biological and physiological processes that contribute to tumor initiation and progression. These advances—coupled with the application of an increasing array of powerful technologies—have paved the way for the development of numerous new medicines that are greatly benefiting cancer patients.”

Annual Review of Cancer Biology cover icon

Their introduction to the first volume summarizes the goals of this new publication. The first volume of the Annual Review of Cancer Biology contains more than twenty reviews that address the basic mechanisms of cancer development and the translation to therapeutic strategies today and in the future. The journal scope includes three broad themes to cover a broad spectrum of the rapidly moving cancer biology field: Cancer Cell Biology, Tumorigenesis and Cancer Progression, and Translational Cancer Science.

The first volume also contains a review by Dr. Harold Varmus (Weill Cornell Medical College) entitled How Tumor Virology Evolved into Cancer Biology and Transformed Oncology (published Open Access). Dr. Sawyers expanded, “Cancer research has become deeply linked to investigation of the central themes in the life sciences. Dr. Varmus’s work has been important to the evolution of our interdisciplinary science.”

Tyler Jacks, MIT.

Dr. Jacks is also involved in the Cancer Moonshot, where he serves as the Scientific Panel Co-Chair. Former US Vice-President Joe Biden updated attendees of SXSW on March 12th with progress of the Moonshot. To learn more about Dr. Jacks’ dedication to cancer research, check out his presentation at TEDxCambridge: Tyler Jacks (Life lessons from 34 years of fighting cancer.)

Charles L. Sawyers, MSKCC.

Dr. Sawyers is involved in Stand up to Cancer, a groundbreaking initiative created to accelerate innovative cancer research and quickly provide patients with access to new therapies in the hope of saving lives. He is the co-leader of the Scientific Research Dream Team on Precision Therapy for Advanced Prostate Cancer.

This journal is now available online (March 6th, 2017). If you are a journalist, writer, or blogger who wants access to this and/or other Annual Reviews journals, please email us. The official Press Release is available in our Press Center.

Annual Reviews is a nonprofit publisher dedicated to synthesizing and integrating knowledge for the progress of science and the benefit of society.

 

Eugene Garfield – 1925-2017 – a life of impact

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Eugene Garfield. May 9th, 2007.

By Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-In-Chief of Annual Reviews. 

It is with great sadness that I write to share the news that Dr. Eugene Garfield, one of the longest serving members of the Annual Reviews Board of Directors, passed away yesterday (26th February 2017) at the age of 91. Throughout his tenure Gene provided invaluable and enthusiastic support to us.

That Gene’s life created an impact is undisputed.

He first mentioned the idea of an impact factor in science in 1955 and an article in JAMA tells the story of how he and Irving H. Sher created it. In research that he conducted in the late 1950s, he developed the concept of citation analysis, which provided researchers with a powerful network to identify, connect and retrieve information, decades before the internet.

Although he was an information scientist at heart, Gene’s entrepreneurial flair is revealed in a catalogue of highly successful business ventures. The products that he developed from this research, including Current Contents and the Science Citation Index, are still in use today. Gene founded a very successful business, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), to produce these products and they were for many years part of Thomson Reuters until their IP and Science business was bought out in 2016 (now Clarivate Analytics). 

His influence extended well beyond scientific information.  Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin acknowledged Gene in their academic work on PageRank, the algorithm that powers their company’s search engine, leading Gene to be described as “the grandfather of Google.”

My relationship with Gene and his wife Meher goes back prior to my arrival at Annual Reviews in May 2015. I was privileged to work with him between 2002 and 2010 as Editor and Publisher at The Scientist, a professional magazine for life scientists that Gene founded in 1986. He had boldly envisaged it as a daily newspaper for scientists distributed at campuses across the country, and we brought his vision to reality with The Scientist Daily, launched a decade ago. Ellis Rubinsten, an early employee of The Scientist who became Editor of Science, says that Gene’s encouragement of great science journalism ended up transforming both Science and Nature’s research coverage.

Gene was also a pioneering employer. The ISI office had a state-of-the-art childcare facility attached, maximizing convenience for the staff. And he trained and supported many of the female leaders in the publishing industry today. The awards that he inspired also give an indication of his interests, including The Eugene Garfield Residency in Science Librarianship and the ALISE Eugene Garfield Doctoral Dissertation Competition. He also supported and was a Board Member of Research!America.

News of a memorial service will be forthcoming and we will share it here. All of us at Annual Reviews offer our sincere condolences to his family. We are grateful for his life. He will be greatly missed. 

Image credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation to Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA.

Ken Arrow and the Annual Review of Economics

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From Sam Gubins, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, Annual Reviews

Kenneth Arrow.

It is achingly sad to report the passing of Kenneth Arrow. As described by Michael Weinstein in Monday’s New York Times, Ken Arrow was a brilliant economist, the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Economics. He was also the founding Co-Editor of the Annual Review of Economics.

Update: due published in August 2019 – The Economics of Kenneth J. Arrow: A Selective Review.

At a lunch at the Stanford Faculty Club in April, 2007, I invited Ken to launch an Annual Review in economics. Although Annual Reviews had been publishing journals in the social sciences for several decades, none were in economics. While this publishing house is well known in many disciplines, it was largely unknown among economists. For this reason I was concerned that Ken would be unconvinced of the need for extended reviews written by leading economists, and additionally, that leading economists would not easily be persuaded to write them. Ken quickly dispelled both concerns. He said that he was a regular reader of articles in many Annual Reviews series and understood how valuable they were in synthesizing developments in fields. He had been introduced to them by the sociologist Robert K. Merton and the psychologist Gardner Lindzey. In addition to the social science journals, Ken read articles in several Annual Reviews, including Public Health, Neuroscience, Environment, Ecology, and others. So to my request that he take on the task of serving as inaugural editor, he agreed enthusiastically, inviting Timothy Bresnahan to serve as a Co-Editor.

Most of those he invited to join him on the inaugural editorial committee were unfamiliar with Annual Reviews, yet all agreed to serve.  And most of those invited to write reviews accepted and delivered a manuscript.  Ken was so beloved and revered that the community was eager to join any endeavor of which he was a part.

His colleagues persuaded Ken to write an essay for Volume 1, Some Developments in Economic Theory Since 1940: An Eyewitness Account, which is a personal reflection on his relationship to the development of economic theory over 70 years.

Tim Bresnahan captured the essence of Ken when he wrote, “he was a great man, a great colleague, and a great economist.” We were privileged to have known him.

Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Service, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

“Queen of Carbon Science” Mildred Dresselhaus Dies

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Screen Shot 2017-02-22 at 17.20.21.pngMildred S. Dresselhaus, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist known as the “Queen of Carbon Science,” died at the age of 86 years in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Monday, February 20, 2017. She was the first woman at MIT to attain the rank of full, tenured professor, and the first woman to receive the National Medal of Science in Engineering.

Dr. Dresselhaus spent her career studying the properties of carbon and was instrumental in developing carbon nanotubes, which have shown promise in the creation of better electricity conduction and stronger materials. She also contributed to the development of thermoelectric materials, which can transform temperature difference into electricity.

Read her autobiographical article in the 2011 Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics.

Friday at AAAS 2017: A Science Salad

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schedule-boardToday was a little bit of everything as I continued to get a feel for this years conference. I started off by checking in on some of the results from Obama’s 2013 BRAIN initiative to research new methods of treating and preventing brain disorders. This was the first all female panel I have seen at AAAS! It was really heartening to watch these engineers and researchers describe their projects. My favorite being the wearable PET scan!  No more having to lay perfectly still in a big tube and pretend you’re on a roller coaster. Now there’s a chance of getting valuable diagnostic data from people who cannot hold still or safely lay down. It’s quite amazing.

From there I headed to a lively discussion about the ethics of gene editing. I found one speaker’s comparison of IVF treatment and gene therapy very compelling. I next found myself listening to Daniel Nocera talk about the chemistry behind his artificial leaves that can turn sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into fuel. I had to pull on all of my old high school chemistry lessons but I followed the discussion enough to be very impressed with the idea.

I especially enjoy the astronomy panels at every AAAS meeting, and usually come away counting down the months until a favored project launches. This year I was introduced to a coming exploration of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. Europa has an ocean over a rocky sea bed that is covered by a thick sheet of ice. Those rocks and water make it a good candidate for having some sort of life. NASA is planning for 20 days of battery life on the surface while carrying 42 kg of scientific instruments. The mission is currently planned for 2024–25.

With my head full of space dreams, I found a seat at Naomi Oreskes’s Plenary lecture titled “The Scientist as Sentinel” and listened to her history of scientists as political activists. I was thinking about the good timing of that lecture as I followed a group of young scientists out into the hallway and heard them making plans for the protest on Sunday.

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5

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See the full table of contents for the Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, Volume 5.

av5-behrThe autobiography in Volume 5 of the Annual Review of Animal Bioscience, “My Scientific Journey: From an Agrarian Start to an Academic Setting” by Janice M. Bahr, explores her research in reproductive physiology with an emphasis on her relationships with her mentors and students. After completing her PhD, she planned to take a postdoctoral position or attend medical school; however, she learned that the Department of Animal Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign was hiring. “Having been raised on a farm and milked enough cows to have a degree in it, I did know a lot about domestic animals.”

The job did come with challenges:

Little was I aware of the challenges of being the first woman hired in the Department of Animal Sciences of 40 men. I was the only female permanent faculty member for about 20 years. Even though I progressed through the academic ranks at an unprecedented speed, becoming an assistant professor in 1974, an associate professor in 1979, and a full professor in 1983, I was paid less as a full professor than the male associate professors in Animal Sciences. I described this experience as swimming upstream in a stream that had no water. Fortunately, Dr. Reginald Gomes, a distinguished reproductive biologist who became head of Animal Sciences in 1985, realized I was significantly underpaid based on my scholarly accomplishments. Women professors receiving a lower salary compared with their male counterparts were not unusual.

Even after many years of reading autobiographies from female scientists, stories like that still surprise me.

I grew up next to a dairy farm in Southwestern Virginia. Upon moving to Northern California, I found the sight of cows grazing with an ocean view rather befuddling.  Reading Dr. W. Barendse’s article “Climate Adaptation of Tropical Cattle” gave me a similar feeling. There are a lot of variables in how “tropical” is defined, and the cattle that live within these regions face a host of challenges that I had never considered:

The issues associated with cattle in the tropics have been known for some time, and few new issues have arisen. For example, Bonsma identified (a) heat, including radiation, temperature, and humidity; (b) feed, including feed quality and the ability to use the feed available; (c) resistance, including to parasites, especially ticks, and to photosensitivity, especially eye cancer and keratosis; and (d) the ability to avoid noxious plants, not only as a feed source but also the physical aspects of thorns and other plant defenses.

I was also intrigued by Dr. Gerald Shurson’s article “The Role of Biofuels Coproducts in Feeding the World Sustainably.”  I especially appreciated the section on the debate over food versus fuel, which opened up an interesting perspective on how biofuels could be competition for feedstock:

Grains, sugar, and oilseeds are the primary feedstocks used to produce biofuels, but they are also valuable commodities in food production. Thus, increased competition for these resources between biofuels, food, and food animal industries has served as the foundation for the food-versus-fuel debate. Although increases in biofuels production are expected to continue in some countries, production limits will likely be imposed for future expansion. Incentives for using alternative feedstocks (e.g., cellulosic materials) to produce biofuels are being implemented to maintain or reduce competition for traditional grains and oilseeds in biofuels and coproduct production.

Comments are open if you’d like to share what you found most interesting in this volume.

Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne.

First day of AAAS 2017 – Policy, Climate, and Social Media

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Suzanne K. Moses is Annual Reviews’ Senior Electronic Content Coordinator. For 15+ years, she has played a central role in the publication of Annual Reviews’ online articles. Not a single page is posted online without first being proofed and quality checked by Suzanne. 

Suzanne is attending the AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, MA, and we hope you enjoy her dispatches from the meeting.

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Part of the joy of attending the meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the multiple tracks: everyone is going to choose sessions for their own reasons and everyone’s experience will be different. My first day started with the “Wicked Problem” of Climate Change. Wicked problems (if you’re not from Boston) are complex with no clear paths to solutions. They are often dependent on rapidly changing conditions and can’t be tackled in a linear way. The session ended up focusing a lot on how to work with people and the importance of seeing climate change discussions from different angles. For example, there were discussions about religious ecology, the neuroscience of denial, and not getting distracted by politics.

I liked the logic of working not globally or locally, but regionally. Instead of working within state lines, look at the ecosystem. For example, think about coastal wetlands instead of Florida. One of the speakers mentioned that farmers in the Midwest are adapting to changing climate conditions. They think about how to increase yield in the different climate, but they won’t say the words “climate change.” So scientists need to find ways of communicating that don’t invoke politically charged terms. There was a fantastic question from the audience from a high school teacher who pointed out that because the problem is multigenerational, we need to look very carefully at educating middle and high school students to continue the research.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Serving Society Through Science Policy” and there are many policy sessions on the schedule. The concerns about the new US administration’s approach to science and data is certainly fueling a lot of discussion in the hallways of the conference center. There are flyers and information about the March for Science, and panels about how to get involved in crafting government science policy.

The hallway conversations about the other big panel of the day, Social Media and Online Engagement, was much lighter than the talk fallowing the policy panel. It’s been interesting to watch this topic evolve in the six years I’ve been attending this meeting. At first, it was scientists seriously discussing whether it was appropriate for them to have an online presence. There were also presentations about Second Life and massive open online courses (MOOCs). Now we’re talking about using Twitter to network and create communities. There are stories of universities encouraging social media posting and tenure committees who see time spent building those communities as valid and important scholarly work. As one of the presenters said, “It’s not a distraction from my career, it is essential to my career.”

My day ended with the address from Barbara Schaal, AAAS President. This began with a recognition of the Junior Academy of Sciences winners, which made me think fondly of my own experiences in the Virginia chapter. Next, there were some awards presented and it was noted that many of the planned presenters, attendees, and one of the award winners were unable to attend due to the immigration ban. This set the tone for the rest of the evening with the President’s address focusing on the importance of science to society and the necessity to defend basic research.

That was my impression of day one. Tomorrow, things start in earnest with deep dives into specific topics of interest. I haven’t set my schedule in stone, but I look forward to discovering new topics and questions.

If you are also attending the AAAS Meeting, let us know what sessions and panels you attended and what you found interesting.

 

Reengineered website – site video guides

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The new Annual Reviews website was recently reengineered with the unique needs of researchers, librarians and agents, and authors in mind. Recognizing that change usually requires some readjustment, our IT project coordinator Andrea Burtness has developed a series of short videos to quickly walk end-users through our enhancements. Each video has closed captioning available in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Simple Chinese, and Korean.

Feel free to ask questions by responding to this post and we will address them in a timely manner.