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Opinion: Science Denialism Is Dangerous. But So Is Science Imperialism.

July 11, 2018

Philip Loring writes that calls for strict science-based decision making on complex issues like GMOs and geoengineering can shortchange consideration of ethics and social impacts

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Opinion: Science Denialism Is Dangerous. But So Is Science Imperialism.

Wednesday, July 11th, 2018

July 5, 2018 — “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” – Jeff Goldblum as Ian Malcom in “Jurassic Park.”

With the extreme politicization of major issues like climate change, vaccines and the teaching of evolution in schools, scientists (including myself) are clamoring to learn more about how people receive and respond to scientific information. Our ostensible goal is to ensure that important decisions, whether made in our homes or halls of government, are informed by the best available science. However, it is essential that we learn to recognize the kinds of questions that science can, and cannot, answer.

In this struggle to ensure that science is not pushed out from its well-earned place in our polity by those with political or economic motivations to do so, there is a risk of coming on too strong. Indeed, some scientists and science advocates are responding to those who question or deny scientific advice with what can only be described as a haughty imperialism that embodies a mistaken assumption that social problems can or should be solved by science alone.

…continue reading ‘Opinion: Science Denialism Is Dangerous. But So Is Science Imperialism.’

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Ensia

The Flint Water Crisis: How Citizen Scientists Exposed Poison Politics

July 6, 2018

Mark Peplow extols two books on broken pipes and promises in Michigan

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The Flint Water Crisis: How Citizen Scientists Exposed Poison Politics

Friday, July 6th, 2018

The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban TragedyAnna Clark Metropolitan (2018)

What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City Mona Hanna-Attisha OneWorld (2018)

LeeAnne Walters and her family endured months of ill health before they discovered the source. In mid-2014, they developed skin rashes, lost clumps of hair and suffered mysterious aches. One of Walters’s three-year-old twins stopped growing. By January 2015, the water supply in her home in Flint, Michigan, was brown. When she showed bottles of it to officials, they refused to believe it had come from her kitchen tap.

…continue reading ‘The Flint Water Crisis: How Citizen Scientists Exposed Poison Politics’

Image: By Ildar Sagdejev (Specious) – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5204599

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Nature

The Neuroscience of Pain

July 5, 2018

Brain imaging is illuminating the neural patterns behind pain’s infinite variety

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The Neuroscience of Pain

Thursday, July 5th, 2018

… continue reading ‘The Neuroscience of Pain’

Image: By DrOONeil – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32175815

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The New Yorker

Can a Parent’s Life Experience Change the Genes a Child Inherits?

June 21, 2018

Inside the controversial world of epigenetics research

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Can a Parent’s Life Experience Change the Genes a Child Inherits?

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

By Carl Zimmer,

“Tim over here has the original Linnaeus flower.”

I had come to Cold Spring Harbor National Laboratory for its plants. A transplanted Englishman named Robert Martienssen met me in front of his lab, and we spent the morning admiring his mats of duckweed and tall stands of experimental corn. We went to one of the laboratory greenhouses to meet the farm manager, Tim Mulligan. He brought with him a black plastic pot with a flower.

…continue reading ‘Can a Parent’s Life Experience Change the Genes a Child Inherits?’

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The Atlantic

Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology

June 20, 2018

If Misused, Synthetic Biology Could Expand the Possibility of Creating New Weapons; DOD Should Continue to Monitor Advances in the Field, New Report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Says

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Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology

Wednesday, June 20th, 2018

WASHINGTON – Synthetic biology expands the possibilities for creating new weapons — including making existing bacteria and viruses more harmful — while decreasing the time required to engineer such organisms, concludes a new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Although some malicious applications of synthetic biology may not seem plausible right now, they could become achievable with future advances.

Synthetic biology, a field that creates technologies for engineering or creating organisms, is being used for a variety of purposes that benefit society. Applications include treating diseases, improving agricultural yields, and remediating pollution. Even though synthetic biology holds great promise in many areas, it is possible to imagine harmful uses that could threaten U.S. citizens and military personnel. To better prepare for potential misuse, the National Academies were asked by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to develop a framework for evaluating security concerns related to advances in synthetic biology. The task included assessing the levels of concern warranted for such advances, and recommending potential options to anticipate and respond to such threats.

…continue reading ‘Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology’

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NASEM

New Human Gene Tally Ignites Debate

June 19, 2018

Some fifteen years after the human genome was sequenced, researchers still can’t agree on how many genes it contains

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New Human Gene Tally Ignites Debate

Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

One of the earliest attempts to estimate the number of genes in the human genome involved tipsy geneticists, a bar in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, and pure guesswork.

That was in 2000, when a draft human genome sequence was still in the works; geneticists were running a sweepstake on how many genes humans have, and wagers ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Almost two decades later, scientists armed with real data still can’t agree on the number — a knowledge gap that they say hampers efforts to spot disease-related mutations.

The latest attempt to plug that gap uses data from hundreds of human tissue samples and was posted on the BioRxiv preprint server on 29 May¹. It includes almost 5,000 genes that haven’t previously been spotted — among them nearly 1,200 that carry instructions for making proteins. And the overall tally of more than 21,000 protein-coding genes is a substantial jump from previous estimates, which put the figure at around 20,000.

…continue reading ‘New Human Gene Tally Ignites Debate’

Image: By Pixabay – File:Dna-163466.jpg, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57133011

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Nature News

How Much Can We Know?

May 9, 2018

The reach of the scientific method is constrained by the limitations of our tools and the intrinsic impenetrability of some of nature’s deepest questions

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How Much Can We Know?

Wednesday, May 9th, 2018

“What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning,” wrote German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was the first to fathom the uncertainty inherent in quantum physics. To those who think of science as a direct path to the truth about the world, this quote must be surprising, perhaps even upsetting. Is Heisenberg saying that our scientific theories are contingent on us as observers? If he is, and we take him seriously, does this mean that what we call scientific truth is nothing but a big illusion?

People will quickly counterstrike with something like: Why do airplanes fly or antibiotics work? Why are we able to build machines that process information with such amazing efficiency? Surely, such inventions and so many others are based on laws of nature that function independently of us. There is order in the universe, and science gradually uncovers this order.

…continue reading ‘How Much Can We Know?’

Image: By Rhoda Baer (Photographer) – This image was released by the National Cancer Institute, an agency part of the National Institutes of Health, with the ID 7993 (image) (next).This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information.English | Français | +/−, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24029309

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Nature

NIH’s Francis Collins on Gene-Editing, His Truck-Driving Aspirations, and What He’d Change About Science

May 3, 2018

If 7-year-old Francis Collins had his way, we might never have seen the Human Genome Project. (We’d have a pretty savvy truck driver, however)

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NIH’s Francis Collins on Gene-Editing, His Truck-Driving Aspirations, and What He’d Change About Science

Thursday, May 3rd, 2018

LOS ANGELES — If 7-year-old Francis Collins had his way, we might never have seen the Human Genome Project. (We’d have a pretty savvy truck driver, however).

The 68-year-old physician-geneticist has led the National Institutes of Health for nine years, with zero plans of slowing. The organization is on the verge of launching a massive endeavor — the “All of Us” effort to sequence the genomes of 1 million Americans from all walks of life.

STAT sat down for a chat with the ever-avuncular Collins at this week’s Milken Institute Conference in Los Angeles — a Davos-like confab stacked with Wall Street glitterati, Hollywood change agents, industry titans, and academics.

… continue reading ‘NIH’s Francis Collins on Gene-Editing, His Truck-Driving Aspirations, and What He’d Change About Science’

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STAT

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Opinion: Science Denialism Is Dangerous. But So Is Science Imperialism.

Opinion: Science Denialism Is Dangerous. But So Is Science Imperialism.

The Flint Water Crisis: How Citizen Scientists Exposed Poison Politics

The Flint Water Crisis: How Citizen Scientists Exposed Poison Politics

The Neuroscience of Pain

The Neuroscience of Pain

Can a Parent’s Life Experience Change the Genes a Child Inherits?

Can a Parent’s Life Experience Change the Genes a Child Inherits?

Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology

Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology

New Human Gene Tally Ignites Debate

New Human Gene Tally Ignites Debate

How Much Can We Know?

How Much Can We Know?

NIH’s Francis Collins on Gene-Editing, His Truck-Driving Aspirations, and What He’d Change About Science

NIH’s Francis Collins on Gene-Editing, His Truck-Driving Aspirations, and What He’d Change About Science

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