Policy
esiegel | September 23, 2012"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." -Eleanor Roosevelt
I've always been a big fan of personal freedom, which includes the freedom to speak your mind, say what you think, ask questions, be wrong, and learn. This is, after all, how we've all improved ourselves over our lives, as none of us were born knowing all that we've managed to acquire over our lifetimes.
And I've never had to have an official comment policy for all the years I've been blogging; the most I've ever…
tsmith | August 28, 2012Mahabouba*, age 14, was sold into a marriage as a second wife to a man 50 almost years her senior. Raped and beaten repeatedly, she ended up pregnant, finally succeeding in running away 7 months into her pregnancy. Fleeing to the nearby town, she found that the people there threatened to return her to her husband, so she ran back to her native village in Ethiopia. However, her immediate family no longer lived there. An uncle eventually took pity on her and provided her with housing. When Mahabouba went into labor, lacking resources, she tried to deliver her baby herself. Her pelvis was still…
kbonham | August 21, 2012A mini furor erupted this weekend, when republican Senate nominee Todd Akin defended his position of denying abortions even to victims of rape, because in the case of "legitimate rape," women have biological defenses that prevent pregnancy:
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
The liberal blogosphere went nuts, and the story was picked up by all the national media outlets, and even Mitt Romney decided…
tsmith | June 18, 2012This is the sixth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Anna Lyons-Nace.
Natural…unprocessed…raw. These terms are often used by consumers, nutritionists and health experts to denote the most healthful, high-quality food options available for consumption. However, when pertaining to the recent increasing trend in raw milk consumption, can consumers be confident that they are choosing the safest and most healthful option? Statistical data and health studies would suggest otherwise.
Before we delve into the discussion any further, we should first establish what is considered raw milk and…
kbonham | May 23, 2012Last week, I had the privilege of attending the launch of a new initiative from the Union of Concerned Scientists - The Center for Science and Democracy. The UCS itself was founded in the late 1960's in response to the Cold War nuclear arms race. Graduate students and faculty at MIT decided that someone needed to advocate for "greater emphasis on applying scientific research to pressing environmental and social problems rather than military programs." That goal seems even more important in today's political climate, though the issue today is not between environment/society vs military, but…
kbonham | February 21, 2012A little over 300 years ago, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a dry goods seller from Delft in Holland, learned to grind glass into lenses and fashion the best microscopes the world had ever seen. In those days, the idea of being a "scientist" as a profession was ludicrous. Natural philosophy was pastime for nobility or at least those with considerable disposable income. Leeuwenhoek was a successful business man, and in his spare time, he pointed his lenses at pond water (among other things). As Paul de Kruif recounted in his brilliant book Microbe Hunters:
[Leeuwenhoek] peeped into a fantastic sub-…
kbonham | February 15, 2012Back in December, Rees Kassen wrote an editorial for Nature arguing that if scientists want political decisions to reflect good science, they have to get involved.
scientists[...] think too highly of their own view of the world and fail to appreciate the complex, multifarious nature of decision making. Our mistake is to think that science will be given a privileged voice on an issue. This is almost always wrong. From a politician's point of view, science is an interest group like any other.
As if to confirm this point, a response was published in the most recent issue of Nature by Brett…
kbonham | November 16, 2011To do science, we need government funding. However you feel about the free market, there just isn't a way for the free market to work on basic research. It's too risky, with not enough profitability. The things I discover in lab next week will never make me rich, and I'm not aware of many Nobel winners that did their work in private industry. We need the government to pay for what we do.
And we don't cost that much. Take a look at this chart and see if you can find how much we spend on scientific discovery. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Still looking? Might want to try full screen.
There are a lot of…
tsmith | November 15, 2011I rarely write about climate change. As much as it's been hashed out amongst climate scientists, and even many of the former "climate skeptics" have now changed their tune, I readily accept that climate change is happening, and is happening largely due to human activities. More importantly for my field, climate change is also having effects on human health in a number of different ways, from the movement of insect vectors into new areas, to warming of the seas leading to more extreme weather conditions, to the loss of coral reefs and the freshwater that these reefs protect from the…
kbonham | September 27, 2011In other words, you're more likely to catch a cold from shaking their hand than to get an STI from Sitting on the same bench.
There isn't much reason to fear getting a sexually transmitted disease from naked sitters. These infections are most commonly the result of vigorous and prolonged exposure of a person's mucous membranes, the thinner and more permeable skin found in the mouth and on the genitals. If you happened to share a seat with an infected nudist, you'd be protected both by your clothes and by your epidermis, which serves as an effective barrier against pathogens all by itself.…
kbonham | September 22, 2011
I pledged to donate a bit every month for the next 6 months. I've been so cynical about politics recently, but I decided if I hear something I believe in, I should put my money where my mouth is.
I'll have to cut back on the coffee though...
Via Slog.
tsmith | August 23, 2011Our new Scienceblogs overlords sure have great timing with their new pseudonymous blogging rules. For those who haven't run across that yet, National Geographic has decided to eliminate pseudonyms and force everyone with a blog remaining here (which is already dwindling) to blog under their real names. Meanwhile, out here in the real world, there's a new unfortunate case study (short version: "EpiGate") showing how blogging under one's real name can lead to serious threats and potential loss of employment, among other things.
I blog under my own name (obviously), but if I were starting out…
tsmith | June 27, 2011Malaria is one of mankind's most ancient scourges. A century after the discovery of its cause, various species of the parasite Plasmodium, humanity still remains in its deadly grip in many areas of the world. Malaria is estimated to have caused 225 million illnesses and almost 800,000 deaths in 2009, making it one of the top infectious disease killers. Many of these deaths occurred in children under the age of five.
Shah traces the history of malaria from the introduction of the parasite into the human population to modern-day controversies about malaria treatment, research, and funding. It'…
tsmith | June 12, 2011Nick Kristof has an op/ed in today's NY Times noting some sober statistics about the food we eat: that it puts 350,00 people in the hospital and kills 5,000 in the U.S. every year. He also cites three of our papers examining MRSA and swine/swine facilities.
tsmith | May 30, 2011In the United States, we tend to take our clean drinking water for granted. Even though there are periodic concerns which bubble up about pharmaceuticals or other chemicals in our water supply, we typically believe--with good reason--that we have little to fear when it comes to contamination from microbes. Our drinking water, while far from perfect, is heads and shoulders above what it once was--something many of us forget or have never realized. There have been notable breakdowns, such as the 1993 outbreak of Cryptosporidium in Milwaukee that sickened over 400,000 individuals, but these days…
tsmith | April 10, 2011There has been a lot of commentary this week about the GOP-led proposal to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Commentators such as Ezra Klein note the irrationality of this stance, since Planned Parenthood itself estimates it prevents more than 620,000 unintended pregnancies each year, and 220,000 abortions. Why wouldn't the anti-abortion crowd support this increase in contraception, and subsequent prevention of abortions?
What's missing in this rationale is that many on the far right perceive most forms of contraception *as being equivalent to abortion.* So by their logic, Planned Parenthood isn't…
tsmith | March 28, 2011There has been a surge of interest recently in science denial, particularly revolving around the issue of vaccines. Last year saw the release of Michael Specter's Denialism; in the last few months, three others have been released: Seth Mnookin's Panic Virus, Robert Goldberg's Tabloid Medicine, and Paul Offit's "Deadly Choices." More about each of them after the jump.
"The Panic Virus" by Seth Mnookin focuses on the general topic of media-fueled science denial, using vaccines as the case study. Like Offit's recent "Autism's False Prophets, Mnookin details a bit of the history of the anti-…
kbonham | March 20, 2011I've been to Washington DC on a number of occasions, but this was a totally new experience. Starting at 10am, I had a meeting every hour on the hour with congressional staff, and I asked them all the same thing: Don't cut the budget of the NIH.
You may know that the government is struggling to keep itself funded. Last year, the Democrats punted the obligation of passing a budget for FY2011 to the next congress, and since the new Republican majority in the House has taken power, no one can agree on anything. The first bill out of the new House (HR1), was a spending bill that made huge cuts to…
kbonham | March 14, 2011Tomorrow, as part of the @ASBMB "Hill Day," I'm headed to capitol hill to meet with my congressman and my senators (or more likely their staff) in order to plead for science funding. If you pay any attention to politics, you know that congress has been locked in budget battles for months, and since government grants account for the vast majority of basic science research have a pretty large stake in this fight.
One Republican proposal out of the house (that was defeated in the senate) cut over $1 billion of NIH spending. I doubt this is out of malice, but when trying to reduce spending when…
pronald | December 7, 2010Click here to see the Dr. Oz show on GE crops with yours truly.
I tried to provide a science-based perspective to the audience.
It was a tough go, though, because one of the other panelists (Jeffery Smith, a former Iowa political candidate for the Natural Law Party with no discernible scientific or agricultural training) believes that eating GE crops causes infertility, organ damage and endocrine disruption. Of course, the scientific evidence for these statements is about as strong as saying that looking at carrots will give you brain tumors.
Can the audience glean that from the information…