Scientist/layperson relations
jstemwedel | October 4, 2007Fifty years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, Earth's first artificial satellite. I don't remember it (because I wouldn't be born for another decade), but the "BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP" heard 'round the world left indelible traces on the fabric of life for my parents' generation, my generation, and for the subsequent generations, too.
Space was part of the terrain of our imagination for as long as I can remember -- after all, the sibling born right after me landed on Earth pretty much right before the Eagle landed on the moon, and my mom insisted on watching the moonwalk in the…
jstemwedel | September 17, 2007
It has seemed to me for some time now that the landscape of news and information sources has changed since the end of the last century. Anecdotally, I seem to know an awful lot of people who rely primarily on online sources (both online versions of traditional newspapers and magazines and blogs with journalistic leanings that provide solidly researched articles and deep analysis) for their news. But I also seem to know some people who automatically equate information on the internet with the nutty website of a paranoid guy in the cellar.
And it's really hard to assume that the people I…
jstemwedel | September 13, 2007At least, for scientists in the UK.
The BBC reports that the chief scientific advisor to the British government, Professor Sir David King, has set out an ethics code of "seven principles aimed at building trust between scientists and society".
The seven principles:
Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date
Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of interest
Respect and acknowledge the work of other scientists
Ensure that research is justified and lawful
Minimise impacts on people, animals and the environment
Discuss issues science raises for society
Do not mislead; present…
jstemwedel | August 30, 2007Dave Munger pointed me to an article in the New York Times that claims "switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry."
Dave is a critical consumer of information and notes that there is little given in this particular article (which appears in the "Media & Advertising" section) as far as numbers. As I'm not an agronomist, I don't have all the relevant numbers at my finger tips, but I'm happy to set up some equations into which reliable numbers can be plugged once they are located.
First, there's some unclarity in the sentence…
jstemwedel | August 29, 2007Even though I've been frightfully busy this week, I've been following the news about the launch of PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine). I first saw it discussed in this post by Peter Suber, after which numerous ScienceBloggers piled on. If you have some time (and a cup of coffee), read Bora's comprehensive run-down of the blogosphere's reaction.
If you're in a hurry, here are three reasons I think PRISM's plans to "save" scientists and the public from Open Access are a bad idea.
While the PRISM website claims that a consequence of more Open Access publishing…
jstemwedel | August 28, 2007This is a follow-up, of a sort, to the previous post on why serious discussions (as opposed to shouting matches or PR campaigns) about the use of animals in research seem to be so difficult to have. One of the contentious issues that keeps coming up in the comments is how (if at all) such discussions ought to deal with prior bad acts that may not be representative of what's happened since, or even of the actions of most of the scientific community at the time of those prior bad acts.
My sense, however, is that the real issue is who we think we can engage in a serious reasoned dialogue with…
jstemwedel | August 27, 2007Lately it's struck me that when I post on the issue of research with animals, many of the comments I get on those posts see the issue as a black and white one. Mind you, these commenters don't always agree about whether it is the scientists or the animal rights activists who are on the side of the angels. However, many of them feel quite confident in asserting that all animal research is immoral, or that ideally all the judgments about what is necessary and appropriate in research with animals would be left to the scientists doing the research.
I can't help but think that there must be a…
jstemwedel | August 24, 2007 The other day I received a DVD made by Americans for Medical Progress called Physicians - Speaking for Research. (They indicate on their site that the DVDs are free for the asking.)
This is a DVD aimed at physicians, rather than at research scientists or the general public. However, the aim of the DVD is to help physicians to be better at communicating with the general public (primarily their patients, but also their family members and neighbors) about the role animal research has played in medical advances upon which we depend today, and the continued importance animal research will…
jstemwedel | August 22, 2007A regular reader of the blog emailed me the following:
Have you ever considered setting up a section for laymen in your blog where posts related to the philosophy of science, how research is conducted, how scientists think etc. are archived? An example of what I think might be a good article to include would be your post on Marcus Ross.
Part of why I like reading your blog is because you analyze these fundamental issues in science, and I believe that this will help any laymen who stumble upon your blog for the first time quite a bit. It certainly helped me! I had to trawl through tons of…
jstemwedel | July 31, 2007Today a number of doctors affiliated with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) filed suit against the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) alleging that state funds are paying for research that violates the Animal Welfare Act. Among the big concerns raised in the suit:
Experiments that were "duplicative" -- i.e., whose outcomes were essentially known before the experiment from experiments already conducted.
Experiments where there was no documentation that the researchers had considered alternative that would minimize the animals' distress.…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2007
The average American's lack of scientific literacy has become a common complaint, not only among scientists but also among those who see our economic prospects as a nation linked to our level of scientific know-how. Yet somehow, science has become an area of learning where it's socially acceptable to plead ignorance. Adults leave the house without even a cocktail-party grasp of the basics they presumably learned in middle school and high school science classes, and the prospects of herding them back into a science classroom to give it another go seem pretty remote.
Natalie Angier's new…
jstemwedel | July 19, 2007When I was growing up in New Jersey, hurricanes were "on the radar" for us, one of many possible (if infrequent) weather patterns during summer and fall. Later, in my first semester of college in Massachusetts, the morning of my first broadcast on the college radio station was made memorable by the landfall of Hurricane Gloria; I remember the name of the storm because I closed my show by playing the U2 song "Gloria" before signing off the air at 7 am. (The governor of the Massachusetts had just declared a state of emergency, although it wasn't until some 30 minutes later that the trustees…
jstemwedel | July 17, 2007The July 9 issue of Chemical & Engineering News (alas, behind a paywall -- but worth checking to see if your library has an institutional subscription) has an interesting piece [1] on the recently-settled trial in which the makers of Equal (an artificial sweetener based on aspartame) sued the makers of Splenda (an artificial sweetener based on sucralose) over their claim in advertisements, "Splenda is made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar." The makers of Equal (a company called Merisant) asserted that this claim was deceptive.
Most of the C&E News piece focuses on the ways the two…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2007In my last post, I allowed as how the questions which occupy philosophers of science might be of limited interest or practical use to the working scientist.* At least one commenter was of the opinion that this is a good reason to dismantle the whole discipline:
[T]he question becomes: what are the philosophers good for? And if they don't practice science, why should we care what they think?
And, I pretty much said in the post that scientists don't need to care about what the philosophers of science think.
Then why should anyone else?
Scientists don't need to care what historians,…
jstemwedel | July 5, 2007In his book Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (reviewed in the last post), Greg Critser includes a quotation from a physician (in a self-help book [1]) that I found really striking:
In your search ... you are going to come across physicians who may initially be skeptical of any medication, technique, or new technology that has not already been proven to be successful with an indisputable double-blind study. This would not be the right physician for you. The very essence of Vitality Medicine has to do with flexibility, change, and a…
jstemwedel | July 3, 2007Planting incendiary devices, whether under vehicles or on doorsteps, even if you think the people you're targeting are doing something very, very bad.
Kant grounds ethical considerations in the imperative to respect the rational capacity in yourself and in others. Among other things, I take this to mean that when we see the ethical landscape differently than others -- including when we see others engaging in activities that we take to be unethical (because they violate Kant's categorical imperative) -- we have an obligation to engage them in a discussion where we ask them for their reasons…
jstemwedel | June 30, 2007A recycled post from the ancestor of this blog, before anyone read it.
In my "Ethics in Science" class, we regularly use case studies as a way to practice reasoning about ethics. There's a case I've used a few times involving research with animals where the protagonist airs some of her concerns (specifically, about her PI telling her to change the approved protocol several weeks into the study) to a (non-scientist) roommate. In our class discussions of this case, the question arose as to whether the roommate should even be counted as an interested party in the situation. After all, she wasn'…
jstemwedel | June 25, 2007There's another piece in the New York Times today about how birth order and family dynamics might play a role in "intelligence" (as measured by IQ -- an imperfect measure at best). This is a follow up to their earlier story about research reported in Science and Intelligence that claims, based on research on male Norwegian conscripts, that "social rank" in a family accounts for a "small but significant" difference in IQ scores. (Zuska reminds us of the dangers of drawing too strong conclusions from limited data.)
Today's Times piece seems to be a round-up of anecdata of the sort that…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2007I'm late to this round of the discussion about scientists and journalists (for which, as usually, Bora compiles a comprehensive list of links). The question that seems to have kicked off this round is why scientists are sometimes reluctant to agree to interviews, especially given how often they express their concern that the larger public seems uninterested in and uninformed about matters scientific.
As I have some interest in this topic, I'm going to add a few thoughts to the pile:
Does reporting on science have a tendency to misrepresent science?
This is a long-standing concern -- that, in…
jstemwedel | June 4, 2007Via a press release from Consumers Union, the July 2007 issue of Consumer Reports will include a call for more testing and regulation of nanotechnology:
[T]he risks of nanotechnology have been largely unexplored, and government and industry monitoring has been minimal. Moreover, consumers have been left in the dark, since manufacturers are not required to disclose the presence of nanomaterials in their labeling.
Your first question may be, what the heck is nanotechnology? From the press release,
Nanotechnology involves creating new materials or reducing the particles in standard materials…