Search Content

Displaying results 79551 - 79600 of 87950

Bdelloid rotifers - the world's most radiation-resistant animals

Bdelloid rotifers are one of the strangest of all animals. Uniquely, these small, freshwater invertebrates reproduce entirely asexually and have avoided sex for some 80 million years. At any point of their life cycle, they can be completely dried out and live happily in a dormant state before being rehydrated again. This last ability has allowed them to colonise a number of treacherous habitats such as freshwater pools and the surfaces of mosses and lichens, where water is plentiful but can easily evaporate away. The bdelloids (pronounced with a silent 'b') have evolved a suite of…

Enough already! You're both right!

If there's one thing every environmentally minded American can agree on, it's the complete failure of the Bush administration to recognize the severity of the climate crisis. (Greenhouse-gas emissions stablilization by 2025? You've got to be kidding.) But sometimes it seems that's all we can agree on. Take the ongoing squabbling between Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress (with some help from Dave Roberts at Grist) and the Breakthrough gang (Ted Nordhaus, Michael Schellenberger and Roger Pielke Jr.) Their mutual sniping and name-calling was amusing for all of five minutes. Now it's…

Stem cells produce new tissues by recruiting executioners to damage their DNA

All of our cells are staffed by armies of executioners. They are usually restrained but when unleashed, they can set off a fatal chain reaction that kills the cell. This suicide squad does away with billions of cells every day. It helps to balance the production of new cells with the loss of old ones, to sculpt growing tissues and to destroy potential cancer cells. But a new study suggests that the executioners aren't always lethal. In fact, they're essential for life. Through the unorthodox method of damaging our DNA, they can actually activate important genes. This technique for switching…

Perimeter Distinguished Research Chairs

In addition to the distinguished Dr. Hawking, the Perimeter institute lands nine very impressive distinguished research chairs, including some familiar quantum names. The presser: Nine Leading Researchers Join Stephen Hawking as Distinguished Research Chairs at Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada WATERLOO, Ontario, Canada, February 9, 2009 - Dr. Neil Turok, Director of Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI), is pleased to announce the appointment of nine more outstanding international scientists to the positions of PI Distinguished Research Chairs. The new Chairs…

Wisely Using Your Advantage

When I was a little kid I used to take a pair of dice and throw these dice repeatedly. At each throw I'd fill in a box for the corresponding number on some graph paper and I would essentially "race" the numbers against each other. I suppose for that reason I've always been fascinated not just by probabilities, but in the convergence of repeated trials to the limiting "probabilities." Which explains not just why I'm an uber geekazoid, but also why I was quite shocked today when I Googled "gambler's ruin" and found that the intertubes only returned about 16000 hits ("card counting," by the…

Jeffrey Sachs on Framing the Environmental Challenge

In his appearance last week on NPR Science Friday (audio), Columbia University's Jeffrey Sachs framed the climate challenge not in terms of regulating pollution but rather as an energy and technology problem. Sachs brings an important moderating voice to the climate debate, offering a message that goes beyond the polarized rhetoric of conservatives and many environmentalists. Sachs appeared on the show to talk about his new book "Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet." Early in the interview, he was asked by host Ira Flatow about the common argument against taking action on climate…

Gender, Debunking, and Scienceblogging: Part III with Martha McCaughey

Pt. I | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 --- Part 3 with Martha McCaughey, discussing her book The Caveman Mystique, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here. WF: So how is the use of evolutionary psychology to explain masculine actions not just quackery? Evolutionary biologists, and many who read science blogs, rightly announce and discredit the quackery of creationists or, more broadly, those who "deny" scientific truths. But, for the sake of argumentative symmetry, can one put that lens back onto evolutionary psychology? Besides the caveman issue, does that field…

"Millions and Millions Dead"

I hadn't seen this Onion report before -- "Millions and Millions Dead" -- from a decade ago, although I have referred to this report -- "World Death Rate Holding Steady at 100 percent" -- before (in an old post). I am thus forced to repost the graphic about world death rates, but to pair it with the article about millions dead. They do make a good combo. "Millions and Millions Dead" June 2, 1999 | Issue 35â¢21 As the body count continues to rise, a shaken nation is struggling to cope in the wake of the mass deaths sweeping the world population. With no concrete figures available at…

Is this portrait too hot to be Jane Austen?

A controversial portrait -- possibly of the writer Jane Austen -- was put up for auction at Christie's yesterday. (Actually it failed to sell.) The controversy is over whether the picture is actually of her. (A photo of the portrait is to the right.) All of that is very interesting, but not nearly so interesting as the argument I heard on NPR on why it isn't her: the woman in the picture is too attractive. Some skeptics have argued that the short hair and empire-waist dress weren't stylish until Austen, who was born in 1775, was much older. They say that the young girl in the painting is…

Turnabout is fair play

Phil Senter has published the most deviously underhanded, sneaky, subtle undermining of the creationist position I've ever seen, and I applaud him for it. What he did was to take them seriously, something I could never do, and treat their various publications that ape the form of the scientific literature as if they actually were real science papers, and apply their methods consistently to an analysis of taxonomy. So on the one hand, it's bizarre and disturbing to see the like of Ken Ham, Jerry Bergman, and Henry Morris get actual scientific citations, but on the other hand, seeing their…

The Ethics of Diagnosing a Stranger

Nature Clinical Practice Neurology has a salient article on ethics and medicine. The article asks the question: is it ethical to confront an individual with whom you do not have an official doctor-patient relationship, if you think they have a medical problem? Should you or should you not tell them if you see a medical problem? Neurology is unique among the medical specialties in that much of the clinical examination can be appreciated visually and taught by use of video recordings.3, 4 Since 2003, we have conducted a 'neurological localization course', during which participants are…

What is Hashimoto's Thyroiditis? (And a comment on Soy)

I was sorry to read over at Megan McArdle's blog over at the Atlantic yesterday that she has Hashimoto's thyroiditis and as a consequence has to give up being a vegan. (Her diet was high in soy for protein, and there is some evidence that soy interferes with thyroid function. More on this in a bit.) Anyway, I noticed in the comments that there are lots of people that hadn't ever heard of Hashimoto's (and my Mom actually had it too), so I would say a couple of things to clarify. Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common kind of thyroid failure in areas of the world where people get enough…

Drug Trial Publication Bias and the FDA

Drug companies are not publishing all the trial data that they submit to the FDA, and those trials that are published are more likely to show positive results. Rising et al. compared all the New Drug Applications (NDAs) (the vehicle for initiating a new clinical trial) given to the FDA in 2001 and 2002 to subsequent published literature. They found that only about 3/4 of the trials were later published in journals, and those that were published were 5 times as likely to show favorable results for the drug being tested by the drug company as those that were not: The researchers identified…

Will Personal Conflict and the Industry/Labor Alliance Derail the Democrats' Climate Change Ambitions?

At the Washington Post today , Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald report on the diverging priorities of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic chairmen John Dingell and Henry Waxman, conflicts that might stall or even derail meaningful legislation on climate change. Last week, in a new column on Science & Policy at the journal Nature, David Goldston shared the news article's outlook, but added that similar personal rifts in the Senate might also delay a bill for a "couple Congresses." According to the Washington Post report, Dingell's ties to industry and labor unions means that…

Lightning, the Mind, and a World Before Scientists

Before 1833 there were no scientists. It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for someone who studied the natural world but who did not inhabit the lofty heights of philosophy (like Coleridge). There are plenty of people who lived before 1833 that most of us would call scientists--Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Edmund Halley, Carol Linnaeus to name just a few. But the word would have been meaningless to them. The closest…

Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part II

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4    English sociologist Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1852.As I pointed out in Deconstructing Social Darwinism, Part I scholars have begun to seriously challenge the usefulness of the term as a political theory. For example, Gregory Claeys calls the political framework of social Darwinism "a misnomer," Paul Crook states that the ground on which it rests is "decidedly shaky," Robert Bannister calls it a "myth," Donald C. Bellomy refers to it as "heavily polemical, reserved for ideas with which a writer disagreed," Thomas C.…

WTF is going on here?

There's been some pretty cryptic talk on ScienceBlogs over the last day or so, which brings up some topics that may seem obscure to some readers.* Worse, it gives an appearance that bloggers are engaged in some sort of self-indulgent flame war over minutiae. Let me help draw a guide for those of you who care (and I will try to make clear why all of you should care). First, I hate debates about "discourse". When we argue about how we argue, we often lose track of the meat of the issue. But discourse is not irrelevant. More on this in a bit. Medicine was traditionally a male-dominated…

Very Big and Very Small

Whilst they (as Homer's Iliad in a nut) A world of wonders in one closet shut -- Inscription on the Tradescant family tombstone, London There are two things which have deeply terrified me in recent science news. The first, as you may have heard, is that a bumper crop of some 32 "new" planets was discovered by a team of European researchers armed with a spectrograph called HARPS, or High Accuracy Radial velocity Planetary Searcher. The second is that Israeli scientists have made a robot small enough to crawl through human veins. The offending nanobots. Why do these things strike horror in…

Congratulations to Nicolle Domnik, Queen's University!

Congratulations to Nicolle Domnik, this year's winner of the new Dr. Dolittle Travel Award to present her research at the annual Experimental Biology conference in San Diego, CA in April. Nicolle is currently a graduate student in the Department of Biomedical and Molecular Sciences at Queen's University in Canada. The award criteria included the submission of a guest blog entry based on the research she will be presenting at the Experimental Biology conference (N Domnik, SG Vincent, E Cutz, JT Fisher. Murine airway slowly-adapting receptor responses to lung inflation: A role for serotonin?…

Is the whole "More Guns, Less Crime" debate a waste of time?

In a post on his blog Keith Burgess-Jackson wrote: First, studies by law professor John Lott and others show that private gun-ownership reduces crime rates. This may be counterintuitive, but it's true. There would be more crime than there is if guns were banned. In an attempt to set him straight, I emailed him and pointed out that Lott's studies had been refuted by better and more extensive work by Ayres and Donohue and gave him a link to my comments on Lott. Instead of responding to any of the points I made, he replied: You sound like a gun-hater. I wrote back…

IRs, "data," and incentive

Many of my readers will already have seen the Nature special issue on data, data curation, and data sharing. If you haven't, go now and read; it's impossible to overestimate the importance of this issue turning up in such a widely-read venue. I read the opening of "Data sharing: Empty archives" with a certain amount of bemusement, as one who has been running institutional repositories in libraries for four years. I think Bryn Nelson has confusingly conflated different notions of "data" in his discussion of the University of Rochester's IR. By the definition Nelson appears to be thinking about…

Flipping out over tenure

Recently b* (who is my tenure buddy, apparently! we're going up at the same time! w00t!) wrote a post that, I think, captures perfectly the angst, anxiety, stress, and mental craziness that the tenure process induces in otherwise sane people. In her case, it was a procedural change that sent her into somewhat of a tailspin, emotionally. This post struck such a chord with me, because not so long ago, I too found myself in an emotional tailspin over tenure, and I must admit that I was completely blindsided by it (which I don't think helped me get over it as quickly as I should have). So b…

How to Catch a Comet

By Dr. Mark Showalter Senior Research Scientist at the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe, SETI Institute Four and a half billion years ago, a fluffy "snowball" coalesced out of the cloud of ice, dust and debris still surrounding our Sun. Most of the snowballs like it later merged to become the planets we know. This one, however, had a chance flyby with a young planet, probably Jupiter. Jupiter's gravity propelled it out into the far reaches of the Solar System, where it remained in deep freeze, among many others like it, as a member of the so-called Oort cloud.…

Solving the Abortion Issue.... BP style

I was thinking about the difficulties that women have defending their reproductive rights, and the constant intrusion from a predominantly white-male-run government has slowly eroded women's ability to control what happens to their own bodies. Ok, ok, maybe birth control and abortion are all too radically new for a country that just allowed women to vote a mere 90 years ago, and men just aren't ready to let women have full control of their uteri (I mean come on, you've have had them for millions of years and you just let the damned things wander all over your body at the slightest…

Fodor vs. Dennett - Against Darwinism

There's an interesting debate happening at I believe, Cognitive Science, this year. Jerry Fodor has come out with a full force denial of evolutionary psychology and in the process has managed to piss off Daniel Dennett who has responded with a very nasty paper of his own. I'll give you a couple snippets of the exciting debate as well as the papers concerned. Fodor: This started out to be a paper about why I am so down on Evolutionary Psychology (EP), a topic I've addressed in print before. (see Fodor, 19xx; 19xx). But, as I went along, it began to seem that really the paper was about what…

This Week's Sci-Fi Worthy Parasite: Leishmania spp.

Ah, the joys of a tropical getaway. There's warm, clear waters, soft, sandy beaches, and of course, a whole ton of amazing parasites waiting to gorge on your delicious flesh. Anyone who has traveled out of the US has been told horror stories of the disgusting creatures that await them. Take a nice trip to Brazil for some sightseeing, for example, and you might find yourself at the mercy of a small, intracellular protozoan parasite of the genus Leishmania. There are many species of Leishmania living all over the world, from Saudi Arabia to Texas. No one's entirely sure how the parasites ended…

Reflections on Weinberg's "Lost Generation"

SciBlings Alex Palazzo (The Daily Transcript) and Mike the Mad Biologist have both held forth recently on Robert Weinberg's editorial in Cell. Weinberg, one of the big daddies of early oncogene research and mentor to some of the best cancer researchers of my generation, expressed his fears that the US investment in training biomedical researchers in the 1990s is going to waste as these trainees move through postdocs and toward faculty positions that simply do not exist. The problem: so-called "Big Biology" initiatives and failure to protect the basic mechanisms of investigator-initiated…

The Illinois Poison Control Center Shows Us Why Poison Control Centers are Important

Via GeekDad, I just discovered the blog of the Illinois Poison Control Center. More specifically, I discovered the "Day in the Life of a Poison Center" feature they did last month. As medical blogging goes, this was brilliant. They posted very brief descriptions of each of the calls that came into their center in a 24 hour period. The Tweetable little descriptions capture the stress, fear, and humor that is an integral part of providing emergency health care. Some of the calls were scary to read, even in two-sentence bursts. These were ones that contained the phrase "child got into" - or…

A few more measured thoughts on Dr. Tiller's life, career, and death.

As you might have guessed from my earlier post, I was angered and saddened when I learned of the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller earlier today. Dr. Tiller was gunned down while serving as an usher at his church while services were underway. As I mentioned earlier, the suspect arrested in the case - reportedly a 51 year old named Scott Roeder - was apparently an almost stereotypical far-right-wing extremist nutjob, with a long history of radical and potentially violent behavior. I'm a member of a large Catholic family, and I spent 13 years in Catholic schools. I know many people who…

Cause, Effect, and Cannabis.

You have to give Uncommon Descent poster DaveScot credit. He's not one of life's overly specialized intellects. He's a good, old fashioned generalist, able to talk about absolutely any area of science with exactly the same degree of spectacular incompetence. Today, he's turned his attention to the intersection of mental health and substance abuse. DaveScot's uninformed ire was sparked, in this particular case, by a news report discussing a paper that recently appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. According to the report, the researchers found a strong association between cannabis…

How To Get Published in Nature: Try Not To Be Female

If you find yourself in the condition of being unavoidably female, and you aren't willing to undergo a sex change operation, then your best publication strategy may be to hide the XX affiliation. The title of a recent publication on this issue is self-explanatory: "Double-blind review favours increased representation of female authors" by Budden, Tregenza, Aarssen, Koricheva, Leimu, and Lortie. Sadly, as the authors note, double-blind review is "rarely practised". If your name screams out "woman", you may be better off with an initial. Of course, this is nothing terribly new; just a…

Censorship

Well, I'll never work in academia again after those last two posts. I suppose if my migraines ever get under control I can always go back to industry. Pharma is always desperate for experienced medical writers and they pay better than academia anyway. Plus the hours are better. Let's just hope pharma doesn't give a crap about my blog. Which brings me to the topic of this post. Why do you think that I am able to rant so freely, express the truth so bluntly, expose morons to the blinding light of revelation with impunity, all under my real name? It's because I have no job. And I'm not…

American Pride and Groophar Stupidity

Here are a few numbers from the latest Reuters-Zogby poll. See if you can find the one that's not like the others: Rated President Bush's performance as excellent or good: 25% Rated Congress' performance as excellent or good: 11% Said the U.S. is heading in the right direction: 26% Rated the performance of U.S. foreign policy excellent or good: 18% Rated the performance of U.S. economic policy excellent or good: 26% Said they were very or fairly proud of the U.S.: 88% Those numbers remind me of a bit from Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment: "...you might not like everything about…

Let's Talk Junk (Again).

Back in the middle of last month, I had a few things to say about Casey Luskin (DI flak) and his understanding of so-called junk DNA. It's now the middle of the month again, and Casey is again talking a lot - and understanding very little - about "junk" DNA. Larry Moran has a post up where he tries to educate Casey about the fact that a hell of a lot of DNA is still, at least as far as we know, junk. I'm going to take a look at something a little bit different - one of the methods scientists use to identify areas of "junk" DNA that have important functions. It's a pretty cool way of doing…

NO RELATION!

Kevin Myers is some wackalooney Irish commentator who, as far as I know and as fervently as I hope, is no recent relation to this Myers — the only thing I can commend him on is that he manages to spell his last name correctly. Oh, we do have one other thing in common: we're both atheists. He's an idiot atheist, though, so I wash my hands of him. He recently made this admission while also acknowledging his flaming hypocrisy. Now what follows is quite hypocritical. For, on the one hand, I simply don't believe in God, because I am intellectually unable to; but on the other, I prefer a society…

Does faking amnesia permanently distort your memory?

A common defense in murder cases is "focal retrograde amnesia": the defendant claims to have simply forgotten what occurred around the time of the crime (perhaps due having consumed too much alcohol or other drugs). In fact, "amnesia" is claimed in as many as 45 percent of murders. Psychologists know that this sort of amnesia is actually quite rare, so it's very likely that most, if not all of these defendants are faking amnesia. We can confirm that many of these cases are faked: when defendants are given multiple-choice questions about the crime, they get the answers wrong too often. Think…

Sociobiology 2: Theoretical foundations

Wilson and Wilson begin by reviewing the reasons why sociobiology of the 1970s was rejected. They focus on the arguments against group selection. Levels of selection In the period in which sociobiology was first proposed under that label (from now on, the term sociobiology refers to this period, as outlined in Ullica Segerstråle's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond), there was an ongoing debate over whether gene-level selection was the sole form of selection, or whether some kind of group selection was also in play. W&W argue that,…

Why we'll never be downloaded

An interesting article is up at the New Atlantis by Ari Schulman, arguing that we will never be able to replicate the mind on a digital computer. Here I want briefly to argue there are other reasons for this. Transhumanists are fond of claiming that one day we will be able to download a state vector description of our brain states onto a suitably fast and sophisticated computer, and thereafter run as an immortal being in software. I want to give two reasons why this will not happen, and neither of them rely on anything like the Chinese Room, which is just a bad argument in my opinion. Reason…

The F-word

Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here. In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…

How babies build a picture of the world

[Originally posted on February 20, 2006] Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now, at age 12). However, as our knowledge of how infants begin to perceive the world around them has increased, we've learned that the world of a three-month-old literally looks different to them than the world we perceive as adults. That's because vision, which seems so obvious and instinctive, is actually an active process. When we perceive the world visually, we're not…

Why aren't there more women in science and math? Part 3

Yesterday, we discussed sex differences at the highest levels of achievement and found that there are some significant differences between males and females. But despite these observations, it's still unclear why the disparity exists, and what can or should be done about it. Sex differences in brain structure One possibility is that the physical structure of the brain is different for males and females. MRI imaging shows that males do have larger brains than females on average. But women have a higher proportion of "gray matter" -- the part of the brain where most cognitive activity is…

How NOT to write a science book

These days, it seems like everyone's got a science book. Not a small number of them end up on my desk -- apparently Cognitive Daily is "important" enough that publicists feel a review from us is worth the cost of printing and mailing me a book. But just because they send me the book doesn't mean I have to review it. Often I simply ignore these books, putting them on my shelf or throwing them away. The most recent book I've received, however, is so bad that I couldn't just ignore it: this book is actually instructive -- of how NOT to write a science book. Reading just a few chapters of this…

Responding to the DI

The Discovery Institute is apparently going to come out with a report tomorrow outlining 14 "false facts" in my book. I hope that the first I hear about the contents of this report is not on the air with Michael Medved. We'll see. Still, we can start with Discovery's press release announcing the so-far-unpublished report, and see what kinds of critiques they're promising. Let's take the first: Mooney writes: "Wherever uncertainty remains in the current evolutionary account--and as we have seen, uncertainty can never be fully dispelled in science--ID theorists swoop in and claim, "God must…

Acting like a professional (even when you aren't one)

In case you missed the last announcement, author Tom Levenson has been running a multi-part series on the genesis of his latest book, Newton and the Counterfeiter (Available now. Pick up a copy!). One of the most recent entries is about, to borrow from Tom's title, "writing the damn thing", to which Chad Orzel has replied. Given that I still have a helluva lot of writing to do I am in a different place than both Tom and Chad, but I think my experiences might be of interest to other neophytes who are thinking of making the blog-to-book transition. One of the greatest obstacles I had to…

On Religion and "Taking the Red Pill"

I've never really talked about religion on this blog before, at least not directly. But there's trouble a-brewin' at ScienceBlogs which has worked more than a few of our ranks into tizzies of knotted panties and carpal tunnel blogging. I figure this is as good a time as any to tackle the topic, since I've been pussy-footing around it, well, my whole blog-life (the immense span of 1.5 years!). The issue came up a few days ago when new SciBling Rob Knop wrote a post espousing his position that science and Christianity were not exclusive, what the purpose of religion was, and why he is…

Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor

Magnetic Movie Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt) Last fall I stopped by the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box theatre to watch a short film by Semiconductor (the artistic team of Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt). Magnetic Movie is a color-drenched, imaginative tour of Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. The film is below the fold, but before you watch it, take a moment to consider your expectations when you're watching a film about "lab science". Ultimately, does this film transcend or offend those expectations? And what are your expectations for scientific art in general?…

Cytoskeleton Gestalt

In this day, some biologist have to move beyond the simplistic view that the cell is a bag of M&Ms. What do I mean by that? It's the idea that enzymes and organelles are free floating entities within the cell. On the other hand, don't tell me that the cytoskeleton provides a static skeleton that fixes each cellular component. The cytoskeleton is a dynamic and sensitive cellular organizer that constantly reshapes itself in response to extra-cellular clues. And those M&Ms aren't nailed to some part of the cytoskeleton. No, in fact they are moved around and dynamically organized by…

The Supreme Court decision on patentable genomes

I'm shocked. Just totally surprised. And it was unanimous — the Supreme Court determined that human genes cannot be patented. This is excellent news. Why is it a good decision? Because medical DNA analysis was turning into a patchwork of competing landgrabs. Sequencing technology is coming along so nicely that more and more diagnostic tools are available, that can analyze big chunks of the genome for, for instance, known dangerous mutations. But at the same time, many stretches of DNA were 'owned', or patented by various companies. A company called Myriad had the patents on the genes BRCA1…

Against over-specialization.

In the 12 September, 2008 issue of Science, there is a brief article titled "Do We Need 'Synthetic Bioethics'?" [1]. The authors, Hastings Center ethicists Erik Parens, Josephine Johnston, and Jacob Moses, answer: no. Parens et al. note the proliferation of subdisciplines of bioethics: gen-ethics (focused on ethical issues around the Human Genome Project), neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, and soon, potentially, synthetic bioethics (to grapple with ethical issues raised by synthetic biology). Emerging areas of scientific research raise new technical and theoretical questions. To the extent that…

Autism and the search for simple, direct answers

I've gotten some email asking for a simplified executive summary of this paper, so here it is. A large study of almost a thousand autistic individuals for genetic variations that make them different from control individuals has found that Autism Spectrum Disorder has many different genetic causes: there isn't one single gene responsible for ASD, but a constellation of hundreds, each with the potential to affect the development of the brain and cause the symptoms of autism. They don't know exactly how each of these genes contributes to the disorder, but they have found that many of them are…