Scientific Breakthroughs 10 Years On

September 26, 2016 9:59 PM

Where are some of the celebrity molecules featured in past scientific breakthroughs? Science takes the time to follow up.

Like human celebrities none of these child stars fully lived up to the unrealistic expectations placed on them. Some burned out, a few others complain they never got the chance they deserved, and others are now journeymen, still in the business in their mature years:

Exuded by fat cells, leptin notifies the brain to dial down our appetite when we have ample stored energy. [ . . . I]njections of the hormone transformed the animals' physiques—some mice dropped about 40% of their body weight in just over a month. Photos showing one of the slimmed-down animals next to its corpulent counterpart ran with many news articles [ . . . ] “All the evidence at the time was that this could be a treatment for obesity,” says molecular biologist Martin Myers of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. “But we didn't understand the biology as well then as we do now.” [ . . . ] “You just can't squirt leptin into ‘garden variety’ obese people and get them to lose weight,” Myers says.

Does that make leptin a disappointment? More than 20 years after its flashy debut, researchers still regard leptin as a scientific bonanza because “it was the key to helping us peel back the onion on how the brain regulates appetite,” Cowley says.

posted by mark k (10 comments total)

This is so interesting. I wish we heard more about valiant failures and underwhelming results in other arenas as well. It would give us much more insight than only hearing about wild success.
posted by vorpal bunny at 10:30 PM on September 26, 2016

Yeah! We don't need an article to say "that thing that was going to change everything obviously didn't change everything" but it sure is nice to hear the "why not" part of the story, which this article delivers on. A+.

This one pretty much only talks about medicine. I love to read similar articles about underwhelming advances in other fields too. Though the nature of medical research does mean there's a lot documentation.
posted by aubilenon at 11:01 PM on September 26, 2016

What is it with mice? A steady flow of miracle results you can't reproduce in other species.
posted by Segundus at 11:44 PM on September 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Miracle breakthrough: scientists give up on extending laboratory successes in mice to humans, will now work on turning everyone into mice instead.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:27 AM on September 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

What is it with mice? A steady flow of miracle results you can't reproduce in other species.

They're the mammalian lab rat (wahey!) of choice. If we did virtually all of our medical experiments in, say, ferrets, I bet we'd come up with some miracle results that it turns out only apply to ferrets.
posted by Dysk at 4:39 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mice are usually inbred to be isogenic (no genetic variation). On the bright side, this means less noise in your study and less animals sacrificed. On the downside, your finding stands a high chance of only being applicable to that particular strain of mouse.
posted by benzenedream at 8:32 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

The information on ghrelin is interesting to me. In May I had a vertical sleeve gastrectomy. (a type of weight loss surgery) This removed 80% of my stomach. One of the big reasons they think this surgery is so beneficial for weight loss is that you've removed a good portion of the organ that produces ghrelin.

Hunger is weird now. I haven't had the stomach-knawing-on-itself sensation since the surgery. I wonder if ghrelin had something to do with that.

(That said, it's much harder to break the 'it's time to eat' mental gymnastics. This whole thing has really opened my mind to how much hunger is a mind game for me)
posted by INFJ at 8:44 AM on September 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

I never, never, never want the dose of reality, unless it is delivered by Quince Strudel. The molecule type thinking is always "in the box" thinking. Take the whole world, and every influence that brings an individual to recognize they have a problem, it is rarely ever one molecule, unless they are, say, drowning.
posted by Oyéah at 9:18 AM on September 27, 2016

So, basically: mice studies are not worth the hype and journalists love to over-hype mice studies. Throw in some too-excited scientists, blend, and you can see how the average person ends up completely confused by the headlines.
posted by librarylis at 10:53 AM on September 27, 2016

I've long tried to remind myself that when I read about science, I should only do if I actually care about the science. Science articles are for if I care about the biochemistry of hunger. If I only care because the impact this will have on my diet I need to stick to the business section. It is actually very hard for me to divorce "and then, if we are lucky, we will understand this thing better" from "and then we can manipulate it" in my mental landscape but they are very different things.

My default mode when I can't do this is not to buy the hype, but to think the whole exercise is useless and the researchers are scam artists, which is totally unfair. Hence the reason I liked the article and highlighted the leptin part--it was a great success, just not commercializable.

Reporters and academics both contribute to the problem. Academics are who reporters go to for expertise, but even if they could be 100% impartial they seldom have much experience in assessing whether things will have an impact outside the scientific community. The simple, cheap scientifically boring solution will often be just as effective in practice so even when the science pans out the predicted utility can be nil.

FWIW I don't think this is mice studies so much as "early stage research." It would apply to a prototype for a new fusion reaction under construction, novel rocket propulsion, the hyperloop idea, photovoltaic technology, or a million other things.
posted by mark k at 10:15 PM on September 27, 2016