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Hyped-Up Science Erodes Trust

June 12, 2019

Science is often poorly communicated. Researchers can fight back

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In 2018, psychology PhD student William McAuliffe co-published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature Human Behavior. The study’s conclusion — that people become less generous over time when they make decisions in an environment where they don’t know or interact with other people — was fairly nuanced.

But the university’s press department, perhaps in an attempt to make the study more attractive to news outlets, amped up the finding. The headline of the press release heralding the publication of the study read “Is big-city living eroding our nice instinct?”

From there, the study took on a new life as stories in the press appeared with headlines like “City life makes humans less kind to strangers.”

…continue reading ‘Hyped-Up Science Erodes Trust’

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Vox

The War to Free Science

June 11, 2019

How librarians, pirates, and funders are liberating the world’s academic research from paywalls

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The War to Free Science

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

The 27,500 scientists who work for the University of California generate 10 percent of all the academic research papers published in the United States.

Their university recently put them in a strange position: Sometime this year, these scientists will not be able to directly access much of the world’s published research they’re not involved in.

That’s because in February, the UC system — one of the country’s largest academic institutions, encompassing Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and several other campuses — dropped its nearly $11 million annual subscription to Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.

…continue reading ‘The War to Free Science’

By art designer at PLoS, modified by Wikipedia users Nina, Beao, and JakobVoss – http://www.plos.org/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5069489

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Vox

The Man Who Is Aging Too Fast

May 21, 2019

Nobuaki Nagashima has Werner syndrome, which causes his body to age at super speed. This condition is teaching us more about what controls our genes, and could eventually help us find a way to slow ageing – or stop it altogether

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The Man Who Is Aging Too Fast

Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

Nobuaki Nagashima was in his mid-20s when he began to feel like his body was breaking down. He was based in Hokkaido, the northernmost prefecture of Japan, where for 12 years he had been a member of the military, vigorously practising training drills out in the snow. It happened bit by bit – cataracts at the age of 25, pains in his hips at 28, skin problems on his leg at 30.

At 33, he was diagnosed with Werner syndrome, a disease that causes the body to age too fast. Among other things, it shows as wrinkles, weight loss, greying hair and balding. It’s also known to cause hardening of the arteries, heart failure, diabetes and cancer.

I meet Nagashima under the white light of a Chiba University Hospital room, around 25 miles west of Tokyo. A grey newsboy cap covers his hairless head freckled with liver spots. His eyebrows are thinned to a few wisps. Black-rimmed glasses help with his failing eyesight, his hip joints – replaced with artificial ones after arthritis – ache as he stands to slowly walk across the room. These ailments you might expect to see in an 80-year-old. But Nagashima is just 43.

…continue reading ‘The Man Who Is Aging Too Fast’

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by docoverachiever

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Mosaic

A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt

May 9, 2019

One of the viruses used to treat her infections came from the side of a rotting South African eggplant

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A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt

Thursday, May 9th, 2019

In 2010, when Lilly Holst scraped a lump of soil from the underside of a rotting eggplant, she had no idea that this act would help to save the life of a British teenager, eight years later and 6,000 miles away.

Holst, an undergraduate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was participating in a project in which students search through local soil samples for new phages—viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Holst found several, and gave them all names. In a worm farm, she discovered Liefe. In an aloe garden, Lixy. And from that decaying eggplant, Muddy. All three viruses infect a common bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. And all of them were new to science.

…continue reading ‘A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt’

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The Atlantic

Reboot Ethics Governance in China

May 7, 2019

The shocking announcement of genetically modified babies creates an opportunity to overhaul the nation’s science, argue Ruipeng Lei and colleagues

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Reboot Ethics Governance in China

Tuesday, May 7th, 2019

Ruipeng Lei, Xiaomei Zhai, Wei Zhu & Renzong Qiu

As we walked off the aeroplane in Hong Kong in November last year, on the eve of the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing, we had no idea that we were stepping into the epicentre of an unfolding human drama. Just hours earlier, He Jiankui had made his YouTube announcement claiming to have helped make genome-edited babies. As soon as we switched on our mobile phones, they started to vibrate furiously.

Two of us (R.Q. and X.Z.) worked until 4 o’clock the following morning, answering phone calls, helping China’s academic institutions and government agencies to respond to the event, and modifying our plenary presentations for the summit later that day.

In the months since, China’s scientists and regulators have been going through a period of soul-searching. We, our colleagues and our government agencies, such as the Ministry of Science and Technology and the National Health Commission, have reflected on what the incident says about the culture and regulation of research in China. We’ve also thought about what long-term strategies need to be put in place to strengthen the nation’s governance of science and ethics.

…continue reading ‘Reboot Ethics Governance in China’

Image: By P5693852 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21915714

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Nature

From Protégée to Whistleblower

May 1, 2019

A former Theranos scientist says Elizabeth Holmes should ‘come forward and apologize’. She joined Theranos fresh out of Berkeley, a self-described “starry-eyed’’ 22-year-old chemist and biologist who saw Elizabeth Holmes as a role model: the CEO who would revolutionize the blood testing industry

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From Protégée to Whistleblower

Wednesday, May 1st, 2019

She joined Theranos fresh out of the University of California, Berkeley, a self-described “starry-eyed’’ 22-year-old chemist and biologist who saw Elizabeth Holmes as a role model: the CEO who would revolutionize the blood testing industry.

Seven months later, Erika Cheung quit her job as a lab associate at the company and became a disillusioned whistleblower, her life now enveloped by one of the biggest business scandals in American history. She was among those who had made clear to federal regulators that she viewed Holmes as a liar who had put patients at risk. (Holmes, and her company’s former president, Ramesh Balwani, have been indicted on charges of defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars as well as deceiving hundreds of patients and doctors.)

In an interview with STAT, Cheung reflected on how she was duped by Holmes, why she believes the disgraced CEO should spend at least five years in prison and how the rifts between her fellow whistleblower Tyler Shultz, and his famous grandfather, George Shultz, went on longer than people know.

…continue reading ‘From Protégée to Whistleblower’

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by fortuneglobalforum

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STAT

After Ousters, MD Anderson Officials Try to Calm Fears of Racial Profiling

April 24, 2019

Administrators at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, yesterday tried to reassure alarmed employees that its recent dismissals of faculty members alleged to have broken federal funding rules were not connected to race or ethnicity

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After Ousters, MD Anderson Officials Try to Calm Fears of Racial Profiling

Wednesday, April 24th, 2019

“I can assure you 100% that this is not based on ethnicity,” Stephen Hahn, chief medical executive at the institution, told a group of MD Anderson employees who attended a town hall meeting Monday morning. “This is something that we abhor and that we would never do,” he said, according to an audio recording obtained by ScienceInsider.

MD Anderson administrators called the meeting after Science and the Houston Chronicle last week reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had asked the cancer center to investigatepossible rule violations by at least five of its scientists, including failing to protect the confidentiality of peer review and failing to report foreign funding and business ties. In particular, NIH raised concerns about ties to funding programs and institutions in China.

…continue reading ‘After Ousters, MD Anderson Officials Try to Calm Fears of Racial Profiling’

Image via Flickr Some rights reserved by quotlumen

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Science

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

April 22, 2019

Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other elite scientific institutions suggest they’re not alone

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‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

Monday, April 22nd, 2019

Northern San Diego County is a scientific mecca, home to some of the world’s leading biotech companies, renowned research institutions and a world-class university. But the Salk Institute for Biological Research, perched on a cliff above the Pacific Ocean in La Jolla, is distinguished even among its neighbors. Jonas Salk founded the institution in 1963 as a kind of second legacy, after the millions of lives saved with his polio vaccine. He envisioned it as a place where scientists would work in open, collaborative laboratories, free from university bureaucracies: They would be professors, supervising graduate students and postdocs, but with no teaching requirements. He recruited 10 of the top men in biology to join him, including Francis Crick, newly famous for discovering, with James Watson, DNA’s double helix. In a 1960 letter, Watson called the idea “Jonas’s utopia.”

By 2017, the biochemist Beverly Emerson had worked in this utopia for 31 years. She was, at the time, onto an exciting idea — a novel approach to understanding tumor growth — but her 66th birthday was coming up, and with it her contract with Salk would expire. To renew it, the Institute required that she have enough grant money to cover half her salary. She didn’t.

…continue reading ‘‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’’

Image: By TheNose – https://www.flickr.com/photos/tatler/339218853/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1708238

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New York Times Magazine

Page 2 of 27«123 4 5...10 20...»Last »

Hyped-Up Science Erodes Trust

Hyped-Up Science Erodes Trust

The War to Free Science

The War to Free Science

The Man Who Is Aging Too Fast

The Man Who Is Aging Too Fast

A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt

A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt

Reboot Ethics Governance in China

Reboot Ethics Governance in China

From Protégée to Whistleblower

From Protégée to Whistleblower

After Ousters, MD Anderson Officials Try to Calm Fears of Racial Profiling

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’

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