Current Events
jstemwedel | October 4, 2006As Bora noted, this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Roger D. Kornberg for a piece of research (the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription) that strikes lots of folks as being within the bounds of biology rather than chemistry.
I can't do an elaborate discourse on this (as I have sprog-related errands I must do this afternoon), but I want to get some initial responses to this on the table:
There is no Nobel Prize in Biology, although there is one in Medicine or Physiology. Do the biologists think Kornberg's research would be a better fit for the Medicine or Physiology…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2006Since, as I mentioned, my mom worked with data from COBE, and thus, was in a position to cross paths with newly-minted Nobel Laureates John Mather and George Smoot, I shook her down for some information about the pair.
Disclaimer: I suspect Mom exaggerates more in her anecdotes about her children than in the ones she tells about her work place, but I'm counting on her for the details here.
Here's what Mom emailed to her children upon hearing the news that Mather and Smoot won the Nobel Prize:
Your mother worked with this year's Nobel physics prize winners.
Mather was NASA PI for all of…
jstemwedel | October 3, 2006Chad broke the story, at least in the ScienceBlogs galaxy, but I wanted to add my own "Woo-hoo!" for John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, who have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
I didn't want this one to go unnoted, as my mom worked to analyze piles of COBE data and, during this period of her life, made the acquaintance of George Smoot, who (from what I can gather) is not only a really smart scientist but also a good and decent human being.
I'm hoping Mom will leave some good Smoot tidbits in the comments.
jstemwedel | September 20, 2006In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn't raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:
The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. ...
During the first trial [in 2004], the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome's Tor Vergata University, to examine the…
jstemwedel | September 1, 2006This morning, the Free-Ride family heard the news that McDonald's had finally capitulated to hedgehog campaigners and redesigned the container for its McFlurry ice cream so that it is no longer a hedgie death-trap.
Elder offspring: What was the problem?
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: The hedgehogs would find the containers and push their heads in to lick the sweet leftover ice cream, but then they would get stuck --
Younger offspring: I don't think ice cream is good for hedgehogs.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: -- and because they couldn't get back out, they'd starve to death.
Elder offspring:…
jstemwedel | August 16, 2006So, in the Free-Ride house we're pleased as punch that Pluto hasn't lost its planetary status. (No, we don't consider the "plutons" lesser planets. Eccentric in their orbits, perhaps, but there's nothing wrong with that.)
As well, we are pleased that the "tenth planet", whose local fans call it Xena, will be recognized as a plutonic planet. Indeed, we welcome the other two plutons to the fold.
The only problem is, we'll be needing a new song.
"Nine planets, fine planets" is a nice little ditty, but now there are twelve. What would we even rhyme with "twelve" in the chorus to an update of…
jstemwedel | August 15, 2006In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them.
So, I'll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed.
Textbook prices are soaring into the hundreds of dollars, but in some courses this fall, students won't pay a dime. The catch: Their textbooks will have ads for companies including FedEx Kinko's and Pura Vida coffee.
Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, Web sites and television…
jstemwedel | August 11, 2006Well, I can't smell it from here on the Left Coast, but those of you in nose-shot of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden may soon get to partake of the wonder that is the Amorphophallus titanum, aka "corpse flower".
Yes, you guessed it, this fragrant bloom smells like a dead animal. Flies loooove it.
If you're not going to be near Brooklyn in the near future (or, you know, you don't want to hurl), you can follow the blooming of the corpse flower vicarously on a BBG blog, or watch it on webcam. (There is no live smell-o-cast, but undoubtedly someone is working on that technology for next time!)
jstemwedel | July 30, 2006Judging from some of the comments on my latest post about the Tonegawa/Karpova kerfuffle, it's clear that there is not consensus about precisely what relationship a scientist should pursue (or avoid pursuing) with another scientist working on similar research. Part of the disagreement may come down to a difference of opinion about how important it is for scientists to share knowledge relative to protecting their own interests in the hyper-competitive world of academic science. Another part of the disagreement may come down to standards of similarity (i.e., when can we say that project X and…
jstemwedel | July 28, 2006Three Bulls is on top of this, but I want to add a few comments of my own (as is my habit).
The story about Susumu Tonegawa sinking MIT's attempt to hire Alla Karpova is not over yet. Sure, the Boston Globe (and the MIT News Office) report that MIT has formed a committee to try to get its neuroscientists to collaborate with each other better. But it looks like they've got their work cut out for them, judging by the email exchange between Tonegawa and Karpova, obtained by the Globe.
On the surface, the emails sound respectful, maybe even friendly. But, anyone who's been in the snakepit that…
jstemwedel | July 27, 2006Bitch Ph.D. links an interesting op-ed piece in the Washington Post about the challenges of being a single parent and paying for grad school. Given the academia/parenting discussion we've been having here, I figured this was another relevant issue to consider.
I've mentioned before that the standard practice in science Ph.D. programs in the U.S. seems to be that students get tuition plus a stipend that, depending on the local cost of living, ranges from barely-adequate to almost-comfortable. There are also a good number of U.S. Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences that offer…
jstemwedel | July 20, 2006I'm working against a deadline today in the three-dimensional world, but the Union of Concerned Scientists has just released the results of a new survey of scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration, and I thought it was worth passing along. I'm never sure what to make of the proportion of the people who get a survey that actually respond to it; UCS sent this survey to almost 6000 FDA scientists and only about 1/6 of them responded. Will the statistics mavens pipe up to tell us whether (and how) this should influence our interpretations of the results?
The UCS press release…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2006Not quite a year ago, I wrote a pair of posts about allegations of widespread plagiarism in the engineering college at Ohio University. The allegations were brought by Thomas Matrka, who, while a student in the masters program in mechanical engineering at OU, was appalled to find obvious instances of plagiarism in a number of masters theses sitting on the library shelves -- paragraphs, drawings, sometimes whole chapters that were nearly identical, with no attribution at all to indicate a common source.
Pretty appalling stuff. But back in November 2005, the OU administration didn't seem to…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…
jstemwedel | June 29, 2006A long time ago, I blogged about Dr. Eric T. Poehlman, formerly of the University of Vermont College of Medicine. He's no longer there because he was caught falsifying and fabricating data in the "preliminary studies" sections of numerous grant proposals submitted to federal agencies and departments.
Today comes the news that Dr. Poehlman will be doing some time for his crimes. From the Burlington Free Press:
Former University of Vermont professor Eric Poehlman on Wednesday became the first academic researcher in the country to be sentenced to prison time for fabricating data in scientific…
jstemwedel | June 28, 2006I'm not going to do this to death, partly because others will and partly because Churchill isn't a scientist. But, given that I'm working the ethics beat at ScienceBlogs, I ought to give you the ethical crib-sheet:
Plagiarism is bad.
Self-plagiarism (that is, recycling stuff you've written and published before without indicating that you're recycling it) is bad.
Ghost-writing pieces for other "scholars" in what purports to be a scholarly anthology might be acceptable under some possible set of circumstances, but it's fishy enough that it's probably best presumed bad.
Citing pieces you've…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2006It's no surprise that the scientific and medical research in which the public tends to show the most interest is the research that is somehow connected to practical issues, like living longer and healthier lives. Scientists who depend on public monies to support their investigations have gotten pretty good at painting the "so what" for their findings.
The problem, of course, is that the "so what" painted for a non-scientific audience is frequently oversimplified, glossing over a lot of the complexities that the scientists deal with daily. It's hard to cram complexities into a sound bite.…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006I think after this one, we'll be ready to move on to cow (or soy) milk and solids!
My last post on the breastfeeding issue pointed you to an academic examination of some of the claims being advanced in support of the superiority of breastfeeding. Joseph from Corpus Callosum left a detailed comment expressing some dissatisfaction with that examination. You really should read the whole comment, but his main points are roughly:
You can find evidence that supporters of breastfeeding are biased, but that doesn't mean you aren't also biased.
In a body of scientific literature, we ought to weigh…
jstemwedel | June 20, 2006A few days ago I pondered the ethical dimensions of breastfeeding given a recent article trumpeting its astounding benefits for infants and mothers. Those ethical considerations took as given that the claims trumpeting in the article were more or less true.
Today, I want to point you to an examination of those very claims by Rebecca Goldin (Director of Research, Statistical Assessment Service, Assistant Professor, Mathematical Sciences at George Mason University), Emer Smyth (Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at Univ. of Pennsylvania), and Andrea Foulkes (Assistant Professor of…
jstemwedel | June 15, 2006From The New York Times:
A chemistry professor at Columbia University who in March retracted two papers and part of a third published in a leading journal is now retracting four additional scientific papers.
The retractions came after the experimental findings of the papers could not be reproduced by other researchers in the same laboratory.
It's a problem if published experiments are not reproducible -- but what kind of problem it is might not be clear yet.
Sometimes experiments aren't reproducible because they didn't really happen (i.e., the results are fabricated), but sometimes they aren'…