Science Policy
emjohnson | January 21, 2010My friend Henry Gee at Nature Network wrote a few thoughts about how issues of race, gender and communication were discussed at the recent ScienceOnline2010 conference (#scio10 for the Twitter inclined). In his post he raises what he felt were unfair criticisms to his comments about laying ground rules to enforce civil conversation in science blog posts:
I make the point that civility can be encouraged by laying out ground rules - as John Wilkins says on his admirable blog, Evolving Thoughts - and I hope he won't mind my quoting it in extenso:
'This is my living room, so don't piss on the…
emjohnson | January 21, 2010
This is the brief presentation I gave on Saturday, Jan. 16 as part of this year's ScienceOnline conference. I was thrilled to have PZ Myers, Greg Laden and Janet Stemwedel present (the latter of whom posted her thoughts on the session).
John McKay and I led a discussion on the intersection between open access and scientific innovation. See the program description here and these posts for more information. In John's section he emphasized how the early history of scientific publishing was one where individual researchers simply pooled their letters into journals and shared them with one…
revere | January 20, 2010Every two years the US National Science Board does an analysis of how the country is doing on research and development (R&D). While an important measure of the ability to innovate and compete in a highly competitive and globalized world, I have a hard time getting excited about how this is being portrayed as a horse race, who is ahead, who is coming on strong, who is slipping behind. I'm a scientist and I don't think of this as a national competition. I understand how the President's science advisors might, since they are interested in science as a handmaiden to the economy. But if…
emjohnson | January 19, 20102. Rebooting Science Journalism in the Age of the Web (description here):
Sciblings Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science and David Dobbs of Neuron Culture as well as the author of Reef Madness and the forthcoming The Orchid and the Dandelion, joined science writer extraordinaire (and duck sex enthusiast) Carl Zimmer and cell biologist/blogger John Timmer for an excellent discussion of what science journalism means in the age of the internet.
The take home message was that science journalism is in a state of flux. What had previously been traditional journalism in which the reporter…
emjohnson | January 19, 2010This past weekend I was in Durham, North Carolina (my old stomping grounds) attending the annual ScienceOnline Conference that focuses on science communication in the digital age. I am pleased to report that Anton and Bora have built on their previous successes to accomplish something rare for a conference: it was both relevant and refreshingly innovative.
In the next few posts I will highlight some of the workshops I attended and what the important message I got from the panelists involved:
1. From Blog to Book: Using Blogs and Social Networks to Develop Your Professional Writing (…
emjohnson | January 14, 2010Scientific innovation relies on open communication and always has. It has only been through the free exchange of information and ideas that scientific pioneers have expanded the boundaries of knowledge. Through books, pamphlets, letters, journals, and now blogs, scientists communicate their results and imagine new frontiers in the natural world. But even as we reach our highest point of scientific achievement have we failed to learn the lessons that history teaches?
The barriers to science have always come in the form of restricting information. Figures such as Copernicus, Kepler,…
emjohnson | January 4, 2010 Dolphins, such as this individual caught and used by the US Navy, could be granted personhood rights that protect them from such abuse. Image: United Press InternationalIn Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy it turned out that dolphins were super intelligent beings from another world who felt protective of the hairless ape creatures that were dithering about feeling self important:
On the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--while…
emjohnson | December 17, 2009 Wall Street's shadow in New York CityAs the education reformer and philosopher John Dewey once stated, "politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." Unlike other critics of scientific communication, it is my contention that as long as we only address the shadow we will never create substantive change on such pressing scientific issues as health care and the climate crisis. Today James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt has linked to an excellent post highlighting this very concern. The post is from an anonymous employee…
emjohnson | November 7, 2009His birthday is actually on Monday, but today marks the first annual event initiated by Broward College in Florida. In honor of the event, here is Carl Sagan's final interview prior to his death. Amazing isn't it that the science vs. religion debate hasn't changed much after 15 years. But it must be the atheists that are to blame!
You may be interested in my earlier post discussing Carl Sagan's principled stance on nuclear winter that I wrote to accompany Seed magazine's interview with biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Think big thoughts today and take Sagan's message of skepticism and humble awe…
scientificactivist | October 5, 2009Today, the Nobel Committee announced the winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, equally shared between Elizabeth Blackburn of UCSF, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins, and Jack Szostak of Harvard Medical School--all three American. This year's prize was awarded for the discovery of telomeres, the repeated sequences of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that protect the integrity of the chromosomal DNA, and for the discovery of telomerase, the enzyme that builds the telomeres.
This prize recognizes seminal work in molecular genetics and biology that unlocked some of the basic…
scientificactivist | September 17, 2009Members of the Obama Administration have mentioned using science for diplomatic purposes on various occasions, most notably when President Barack Obama himself included this idea in his address at Cairo University in June. Today, SEEDMAGAZINE.COM published an article by Harvard's Sheila Jasanoff on this subject, which you can read here. Seed has asked me to provide commentary on her article as this week's Featured Blogger, which you can read here.
The Jasanoff article focuses specifically on the appointment of science envoys, a central component of the Obama Administration's scientific…
bioephemera | August 6, 2009The initial reviews of Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's new book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future produced a small blogospheric kerfuffle last month. But I think Unscientific America has much more constructive and useful things to offer than provoking more arguments, and there are a lot of reviews focusing on the positives. This surprisingly short but wide-ranging book is a nutshell primer on science policy and communication issues, perfect for dissatisfied lab rats who want to engage in advocacy but don't have communications or policy training outside…
revere | July 30, 2009It seems our enthusiasm for Obama's nomination of epidemiologist David Michaels to be the next head of OSHA was noted over at the high profile Science Magazine blog, ScienceInsider by Jocelyn Kaiser. Ms. Kaiser is among an elite group of science reporters and she almost always gets things right. Recognizing the importance of this nomination is certainly getting things right. My only complaint is that after noting that we (and many others) are delighted by the choice, she also notes that Michaels "is not without critics." That would be fair enough if the "critics" were fair enough. You'll find…
revere | July 9, 2009I'll soon be at the end of my career, funding-wise, although I plan to continue as an active scientist for as long as my neurons will process information in a logical order. I mention this so you won't take this as special pleading. I'm not going to benefit from it. But if we want to continue to make advances in science and health (as well as other things), we're going to have to invest more heavily in basic research. And when we do, we'll have to do it smarter than we've done it before. Notice I didn't say anything about competing economically as a nation, although any nation that fails to…
ddobbs | July 8, 2009
Ed Yong, echoed by Mike the Mad biologist PhysioProf asks what the heck investigative science journalism would look like. I hope to write more extensively on this soon. In the meantime, a few observations:
To ponder this question -- and to do investigative reporting -- I think it helps to have a sense of the history of science, which embeds in a writer or observer a sense of critical distance and an eye for large forces at work beneath the surface. Machinations in government surprise no one who has studied the history of government and politics. Likewise with science.
Science -- the search…
scientificactivist | July 6, 2009When the NIH released its draft guidelines on human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research in late April, they were open to a 30-day period of public comment before the formulation of the final rules. Today, the NIH has released its final guidelines (pdf).
Not much has changed, so there's not really much to say that I haven't already. The bad news is that the fairly restrictive nature of the rules was maintained (i.e. no federal funds for hESC lines derived from embryos generated specifically for research), but the good news is that the government didn't cave into some fairly outlandish requests…
sciencepunk | June 25, 2009Today the motion for creating a dedicated committee to oversee science policy across Government was discussed in Parliament. Good news, we're getting it back. The Campaign for Science & Engineering had this to say:
The Campaign for Science & Engineering (CaSE) warmly welcomed the House of Commons' decision to establish the Science and Technology Committee. CaSE lobbied for it to be established following the merger of DIUS and BIS. In today's debate Phil Willis MP commended CaSE's efforts to bring back the Science and Technology Committee.
Commenting Nick Dusic, CaSE's Director, said…
ddobbs | June 16, 2009SciAm ponders evidence that fish hatcheries are watering down the trout and salmon gene pool.
Matt Yglesias looks at one of many lies being told by those opposing health-care reform â confirming Salon's prediction that the opponents of reform are not going to play nice. See also The American Prospect on How Big Pharma Intends to Kill the Public Option. I should add this campaign is having an effect: On the radio this morning I heard NPR Steve Insky Inskeep vigorously press the "public plan as trojan horse" attack on Kathleen Sibelius; I can only hope he'll as vigorously ask people such as…
ddobbs | June 15, 2009Photo: Tyler Hicks, via Scientific American
What if you could predict which troops are most likely to get PTSD from combat exposure -- and takes steps to either bolster them mentally or keep them out of combat situations? A new study suggests we could make a start on that right now -- and cut combat PTSD rates in half by simply keeping the least mentally and physically fit soldiers away from combat zones.
The study was part of the Millenium Study, huge, prospective study in which US Department of Defense researchers have been tracking the physical and mental health of nearly 100,000 service…
sciencepunk | June 12, 2009As expected, the special report issued by the IUSS Committee recommends the creation of a dedicated committee overseeing science policy in the UK Government. See my report at the Guardian Science Blog:
The Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee issued a special report today calling on the government to safeguard scrutiny of science policy following the merger of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform. The report recommends that proposals for the creation of a separate science and…