funding of science
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…
scientificactivist | April 27, 2009Earlier today, President Barack Obama delivered a major speech on science policy to the National Academy of Sciences. Read more about it in my previous post. Now, though, Andy Revkin of Dot Earth is trying to annotate the speech with relevant background information. Go help him out by providing relevant information in the comments section of his blog post.
I already submitted a comment about Obama's reference to his March 9th memo on political interference in science:
President Obama refers to a March 9th memo, which can be found at http://tr.im/jOUz. The memo emphasized his…
scientificactivist | April 27, 2009Today, President Barack Obama addressed the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), making him only the fourth president in modern times to do so (the other three were John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush). He touched on a variety of areas, but the major theme was a renewed commitment to science.
Specifically, Obama pledged that under his leadership, the US will devote more than three percent of GDP to research and development. In his words, this will be the "largest commitment to scientific research and innovation in American History," even exceeding the…
scientificactivist | April 25, 2009About a week ago, the NIH announced its draft guidelines covering the funding of human embryonic stem cell research. You can read the draft guidelines here and my post on the topic here. As these are draft guidelines, they are open to a month-long period of public comment before the final guidelines are released, and an online system for accepting comments has just been opened up. Comments must be received by 11:00 pm EST on May 26, 2009, and you can enter your comments here.
Below, I have pasted the comments I submitted:
To Whom It May Concern:
These comments are in response to the Draft…
scientificactivist | April 17, 2009A month after the Obama Administration lifted Bush era restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research, the NIH has now announced its new draft guidelines for such research. The new guidelines will greatly expand the scope of federally-funded research by allowing funds to be used for work on stem cell lines derived from excess fertility clinic embryos.
However, federal funds will not be available for work on hESC lines derived from embryos that have been generated specifically for the purpose of stem cell work. This is a pretty severe limitation, actually, and…
scientificactivist | March 9, 2009Today was a great day for science in the Executive Branch. Firstly, President Barack Obama (finally!) lifted George W. Bush's August 2001 restrictions on federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research in an executive order entitled "Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells":
The purpose of this order is to remove these limitations on scientific inquiry, to expand NIH support for the exploration of human stem cell research, and in so doing to enhance the contribution of America's scientists to important new discoveries and new therapies for the…
scientificactivist | January 26, 2009Last Friday the British Minister of Science, Paul Drayson, visited the science area of Oxford University to give a short speech and take questions. The audience was a fairly random assortment of a couple of hundred academics and students, mostly from the sciences. I was invited to fill one of ten graduate student slots granted to the Department of Biochemistry. It was a nice gesture by Drayson, and I think he was legitimately interested in hearing from scientists. Based on what I witnessed, though, I hope that he took some of it in.
Drayson spoke and took questions about his role and the…
scientificactivist | October 1, 2008For the month of October--and for the third year in a row--ScienceBlogs will be teaming up with the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge to raise money for worthy classroom projects. This year, they've added a nifty blog widget, which I've posted at the top of my left sidebar. So, if you're in a generous mood, you can donate directly from my widget, or you can visit my challenge here. DonorsChoose is a website where potential donors can browse through project proposals written by teachers from all across the US, and this year I've personally picked out ten projects that I would like to see…
scientificactivist | September 24, 2008Earlier today, Elias Zerhouni--who has been the director of the NIH since 2002--announced that he will resign at the end of this October. According to the NIH press release, he is stepping down "to pursue writing projects and explore other professional opportunities." The Hill has more from Zerhouni about his resignation:
"I felt it would be in the best interests of the NIH for me to leave before the election," Zerhouni said. With a vacancy in the directorship, he explained, when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) or Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) wins the presidential election in November, he would be…
scientificactivist | September 1, 2008On Saturday, ScienceDebate 2008 and Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA) announced that Barack Obama answered a fourteen-part questionnaire that they put together along with several other scientifically oriented organizations. Major props to ScienceDebate, SEA, and these other organizations for making this happen and to Barack Obama for thoroughly answering these fourteen questions.
I'd encourage you to check out his answers for yourself, at either of the links above. My own analysis is that his answers overall are quite satisfactory. He says all of the right things for the most part…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2008Yesterday, I blogged about a recent article correlating a nation's research output related to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with its policies on hESC research. There was one particular source of uncertainty, though:
As Levine points out, he didn't actually count papers that published results on hESCs, but papers that cited the original hESC paper. Therefore--as he once again acknowledges--he's actually counting papers related to hESC research. Therefore, his results are much more open to interpretation than they would be otherwise. This could be quite interesting, because his results…
scientificactivist | June 4, 2008The conclusion stated in the title of this post may seem painfully obvious, but a new study published in Cell Stem Cell by Aaron Levine (assistant professor at Georgia Tech and author of Cloning: A Beginner's Guide) backs it up with some hard data.
To come to this conclusion, Levine compared a country's output of peer-reviewed publications from 1998 to 2006 related to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with it's overall biomedical science publication output during that period. As a control, he also compared these two values with the country's output of publications related to RNA…
scientificactivist | May 14, 2008On Monday, I attended an interesting lecture sponsored by the 21st Century School here in Oxford entitled "What Is Science For?". You can see a discussion on the event here and read a pdf summary of it here. The lecture was co-presented by scientist John Sulston and philosopher John Harris, and it was introduced by Richard Dawkins, who also moderated the Q&A afterward. As the summary focuses on, the event was partially a debate on the purpose of science, with Harris proposing a utilitarian view and Sulston defending a focus more on the intrinsic value of inquiry and discovery (and…
scientificactivist | January 28, 2008Dare I be so presumptuous to suggest that you've checked out the About page on my blog in the last couple of days, you may have noticed a few new photos. The first one was taken last summer in front of the Wellcome Trust building in London:
Yes, that's right: I'm standing in front of a giant neon protein structure. And, I don't think it's possible for me to convey just how much I want one of those!
The Wellcome Trust--a ubiquitous name in science in the UK--is the second largest medical charity in the world and the largest non-governmental funder of biomedical research in the UK. It…
scientificactivist | December 10, 2007Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection (along with Derek Araujo, Matthew Chapman, Austin Dacey, Lawrence Krauss, Shawn Lawrence Otto, and John Rennie) are spearheading a grassroots movement called Sciencedebate 2008 to try to convince the powers that be of the need for a presidential debate on science in 2008. For a comprehensive list of the reasons why this is a good idea, I would have to rehash almost everything I've written on this blog... and then some. The point is that science is playing a growing role in society and politics, affecting in some way almost every issue…
scientificactivist | November 21, 2007That could easily have been the shared title of a pair of articles in today's New York Times discussing the science and political implications of two very significant stem cell papers published online yesterday. The biggest offender was Sheryl Stolberg:
It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research.
Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did…
scientificactivist | November 3, 2007Thursday was the last day of the month-long DonorsChoose challenge, and ScienceBlogs did incredibly well. You can view the full leaderboard here, but Janet of Adventures in Ethics and Science offers these details:
20 Sb blogs mounted challenges; 12 of them met or exceeded their fundraising goals.
We raised:
$54,335 from Sb donors
$15,000 from Seed Media Group
(More than $69,000 total.)
155 classroom projects fully funded (although this will go up a lot when we spread the $15,000 from Seed Media Group around) and many partially funded.
That's fantastic, and, thanks to some very generous…
scientificactivist | October 27, 2007On November 6th (and now during early voting) Texans have the chance to vote on a variety of amendments to the Texas Constitution. One of these is Proposition 15:
The constitutional amendment requiring the creation of the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas and authorizing the issuance of up to $3 billion in bonds payable from the general revenues of the state for research in Texas to find the causes of and cures for cancer.
The full text of the resolution as passed in May by the Texas House and Senate can be read here and additional information is available here. Upon…
scientificactivist | October 8, 2007We're one week into the DonorsChoose Bloggers Challenge, and we're already off to a great start. Thanks to some generous donations, we've already (as of the publishing of this post) raised $295 here at The Scientific Activist (30% of our $1,000 goal). Even more impressively, the participants at ScienceBlogs have together raised over $12,500. And, we still have over three weeks to go!
So, let me thank you all for your generosity, and, if you haven't donated yet, please take a look at the projects that need funding. Even a little bit goes a long way. One project that I'd particularly like…
scientificactivist | September 12, 2007Via A Blog Around the Clock comes news that the Senate will be voting on mandatory public access to NIH research later this month (on September 28, apparently). Such a bill has already passed the House (in July 2007). The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is urging citizens to contact their Senators in support of this legislation. Check out the site for more information and for Senator contact information.
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access offers these talking points:
American taxpayers are entitled to open access on the Internet to the peer-reviewed scientific articles on research funded by…