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Honors for Racist Scientists

September 7, 2017

As debate over statues and building names moves from Confederate generals to researchers, editorial in Nature receives intense backlash

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Honors for Racist Scientists

Thursday, September 7th, 2017

Historians like to say that everything has a history. Yet the natural sciences remain somewhat removed from academic debates over what to do with monuments tied to dark chapters in American history.

That’s changing, though.

In a twist to discussions about campus memorials linked to slavery and racism, the natural sciences are facing new questions about monuments tied to eugenics and to individuals who denied basic rights to those nonwhite people on whom they did research.

In one example, scientists and other academics lit up social media Wednesday in a response to an editorial in Nature called “Removing Statues of Historical Figures Risks Whitewashing History.” Some critics objected to the term “whitewashing” itself, saying that leaving memorials to eugenicists and other problematic figures unchallenged is the real whitewashing.

Image: By ESO/M. Kornmesser (photo displayed on the magazine cover) – https://www.eso.org/public/images/ann16056a/ (photo displayed on the magazine cover), CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50998461

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Inside Higher Ed

Open-Data Contest Unearths Scientific Gems — and Controversy

March 8, 2017

Hundreds of researchers pick through clinical trial from a major blood-pressure study, to the dismay of some who collected the information

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Open-Data Contest Unearths Scientific Gems — and Controversy

Wednesday, March 8th, 2017

When a prestigious medical journal challenged scientists to analyse data from a pivotal blood-pressure study in search of new findings, hundreds of researchers around the world rushed to sign up.

The contest, sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine, offered scientists a rare opportunity to access detailed trial data that otherwise might have remained proprietary for another year — if not indefinitely. But the competition, whose winners were announced on 7 March, also illustrates the tension between speeding access to data and protecting the interests of those who laboured to collect them.

Jackson Wright, a pharmacologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, spent nearly a decade designing and carrying out the blood-pressure trial featured in the data challenge. The landmark study, funded largely by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), revealed a surprising benefit of lowering blood pressure below the usual targets — and had the potential to reshape the treatment of millions of patients.

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Nature

2016: The Science Events That Shaped The Year

December 16, 2016

Climate accords, controversial assisted reproduction and the CRISPR patent battle are among the year’s top stories

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2016: The Science Events That Shaped The Year

Friday, December 16th, 2016

From an election that stunned the world to catastrophic technical glitches in space, researchers weathered a turbulent year. But they also announced some remarkable advances — the direct detection of gravitational waves, the birth of a baby with DNA from three people and an artificial intelligence that cracked the one board game that computers had yet to master.

Catching a wave

Physicists bagged some big game this year. On 11 February, researchers announced that they had finally sensed the ripples in the structure of space-time known as gravitational waves — capping a decades-long quest. The signal, spotted in September 2015 by the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in Louisiana and Washington state, came from the merger of two black holes some 1 billion years before.

Nature special: The year in review

The announcement was a stunning affirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, almost 100 years after he had published it. And it provided the most direct evidence yet that black holes — another prediction of Einstein’s theory — exist. Astrophysicists hailed LIGO’s feat as a triumph, saying that it heralded a new way of observing the cosmos, enabling the detection of phenomena that might not be picked up by other means.

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Nature

The Science to Look Out For in 2016

December 22, 2015

Mars missions, carbon capture and gravitational waves are set to shape the year

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The Science to Look Out For in 2016

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015

Cut-and-paste genes

Human trials will get under way for treatments that use DNA-editing technologies. Sangamo Biosciences in Richmond, California, will test the use of enzymes called zinc-finger nucleases to correct a gene defect that causes haemo-philia. Working with Biogen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, it will also start a trial to look at whether the technique can boost a functional form of haemo-globin in people with the blood disorder β-thalassaemia. Scientists and ethicists hope toagree on broad safety and ethical guidelines for gene editing in humans in late 2016. And this year could see the birth of the first gene-edited monkeys that show symptoms of the human disorders they are designed to model.

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Risky research

Scientists will soon hear whether funding for research that makes viruses more dangerous can resume. In October 2014, the US government abruptly suspended financial support for ‘gain-of-function’ studies. These experiments could increase understanding of how certain pathogens evolve and how they can be destroyed, but critics say that the work also boosts the risk of, for example, accidental release of deadly viruses. A risk–benefit analysis was completed in December 2015, and the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity will issue recommendations in the next few months on whether to resume funding — potentially with tightened restrictions on the research.

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Image: “Glaskugel CrystalBall” by Eva K. / Eva K. – Eva K. / Eva K.. Licensed under FAL via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Glaskugel_CrystalBall.jpg#/media/File:Glaskugel_CrystalBall.jpg

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Nature News

Childhood, Disrupted

July 7, 2015

Adversity in childhood can create long-lasting scars, damaging our cells and our DNA, and making us sick as adults

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Childhood, Disrupted

Tuesday, July 7th, 2015

If you saw Laura walking down the New York City street where she lives today, you’d see a well-dressed 46-year-old woman with auburn hair and green eyes, who exudes a sense of ‘I matter here.’ She looks entirely in charge of her life, but behind Laura’s confident demeanour lies a history of trauma: a bipolar mother who vacillated between braiding her daughter’s hair and peppering her with insults, and a father who moved out-of-state with his wife-to-be when Laura was 15 years old.

She recalls a family trip to the Grand Canyon when she was 10. In a photo taken that day, Laura and her parents sit on a bench, sporting tourist whites. ‘Anyone looking at us would have assumed that we were a normal, loving family.’ But as they put on fake smiles for the camera, Laura’s mother suddenly pinched her daughter’s midriff and told her to stop ‘staring off into space’. A second pinch: ‘No wonder you’re turning into a butterball, you ate so much cheesecake last night you’re hanging over your shorts!’ If you look hard at Laura’s face in the photograph, you can see that she’s not squinting at the Arizona sun, but holding back tears.

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Honors for Racist Scientists

Honors for Racist Scientists

Open-Data Contest Unearths Scientific Gems — and Controversy

Open-Data Contest Unearths Scientific Gems — and Controversy

2016: The Science Events That Shaped The Year

2016: The Science Events That Shaped The Year

Catching a wave

The Science to Look Out For in 2016

The Science to Look Out For in 2016

Childhood, Disrupted

Childhood, Disrupted

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