Science Policy
evolgen | May 18, 2006President Bush's FY2007 budget included no increase in funding for the NIH. Scientists have been lobbying Congress to amend the budget to at least increase the NIH budget to keep even with inflation. You can follow the story in these posts:
Lobbying the Senate
Amendment passes in the Senate
Lobbying the House of Representatives
Amendment fails to pass in the House Budget Committee
I just got word that the House of Representatives passed the FY2007 Budget Resolution which includes an amendment that ensures that all programs within the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education…
evolgen | April 18, 2006Read this article. It deals with scientific literacy, politics, and religion in the United States, focusing on stem cells and evolution. Here's a taste:
To measure public acceptance of the concept of evolution, Miller has been asking adults if "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals" since 1985. He and his colleagues purposefully avoid using the now politically charged word "evolution" in order to determine whether people accept the basics of evolutionary theory.
To find out what I think about rephrasing the question and substituting "develop" for "evolve…
evolgen | April 8, 2006I'm sure most of my readers are familiar with the Canadian funding agency that rejected Brian Alters proposal to study the effects of intelligent design on the teaching of evolution. I don't have anything to say that hasn't been said already, but I will point you to EvolDir which has posted the summary of the grant proposal. In case you were wondering, here is the purpose of the study from the horse's mouth:
The purpose of this study is to measure the extent to which the recent large-scale popularization of Intelligent Design is detrimentally affecting Canadians' teaching and learning of…
evolgen | March 31, 2006Our plan to have the House Budget Committee approve an amendment to increase the NIH budget failed. Our next chance to ensure the NIH budget is increased will occur on the House floor. If you have yet to contact your US Representative about supporting life-sciences research, please do so by visiting this site. The following comes from an email from the Genetics Society of America.
Your Voice Still Needs to Be Heard
The House Budget Committee voted down the amendment offered by Rep. Rosa DeLauro that would have increased health and education funding in the House Budget Resolution by $7…
evolgen | March 30, 2006
The Coalition Against Biopiracy has announced their winners for the 2006 Captain Hook Awards for Biopiracy, and they're a hoot. We already knew that Darwin was a pirate, but now we learn that so are Craig Venter and Google. What are their crimes? Venter is accused of being the "Greediest Biopirate", and Google is accused of being the "Biggest Threat to Genetic Privacy". I have some more details on these charges below the fold, in addition to showing why the Coalition Against Biopiracy needs to walk the plank.
Venter is accused of:
"undertaking, with flagrant disregard for national…
evolgen | March 29, 2006As I mentioned previously, the Senate passed the Specter-Harkin Amendment. The House of Representatives is our next target to ensure the Bush's anti-science budget is improved upon. The Genetics Society of America has done an excellent job keeping its members up to date on these political goings on. I have included the most recent request to contact your US Representative below the fold. Follow the instructions to send an email, letter, or to get your representative's office phone number to request he or she support the budget amendment.
ACTION: Call or E-Mail Your US Representative! Ask…
evolgen | March 21, 2006The Specter-Harkin Amendment passed the Senate, but this does not guarantee an increase to the NIH budged. The House must still vote on it and it must be reflected in House and Senate Appropriations Committees' allocation for the Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee. (Don't worry, I don't understand the jargon either; I'm reproducing it from an email I received from the Genetics Society of America.)
That said, an important step has been taken towards ensuring important biomedical research gets funded. The amendment passed by a vote of 73 to 27. I have reproduced a list…
evolgen | March 15, 2006The Genetics Society of America is requesting that its members contact their Senators to ask them to support an amendment to increase the 2007 NIH budget proposed by President Bush. As it current stands, the proposed 2007 budget is equal to the 2006 budget (without even a correction for inflation). If you would like contact your Senator, you can look up his or her address, phone number, email, and fax number here. I have reproduced the letter from the GSA below the fold.From the Genetics Society of America:
Read below and contact your Senators using the CapWiz connection (see URL below)…
evolgen | February 26, 2006My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the animals to replicate the experiments (and I was planning on doing some similar experiments) so my advisor had me perform the crosses. I ended up with a negative result -- I did not see the same trends that Dobzhanksy and colleagues observed. I guess you could say my negative result was a positive…
evolgen | February 10, 2006A few weeks ago Cell published a commentary by Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University, on US biomedical research under siege from people with political motivations. Nurse's intentions were noble, but his language was sloppy. The issue of Cell published today has a commentary by Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. Scott's article provides an excellent review of American policy, education, and the anti-evolution movement -- if you're lucky enough to have access to Cell, go read the entire thing. If you don't have access, I have a few…
evolgen | February 8, 2006The Scientist has a good review of genome sequencing (coming from a more biomedical perspective). I tend to present genomics from an evolutionary angle (rather than functional). This is a good read if you're not too familiar with the field, and all you know about genomics is what I've told you.
evolgen | February 4, 2006It has always bothered me when certain scientific publications get a lot of popular press despite the fact that the results are not that revolutionary. But the general public probably does not care to learn about a discovery in some esoteric discipline, so I understand that bias. What irks me more is the bias in high impact journals to publish sexy publications even if the science is limited. A correspondence to Nature addresses this issue:
"The broad audience of Nature forces its editors to pre-screen papers according to how appealing they will be for its readers, even if appeal and…
evolgen | February 3, 2006Now that George W. Bush has proclaimed himself the Oil President War President Building Secular Democracies President Anti-Oil Pro-Science President we can all look forward to an increase in funding. Whether or not any of this money will go toward basic research (pretty please) is unclear. If you can find any way to link your research to bioterrorism, cancer, or biomedicine there's quite a bit of money out there to be obtained. If you're just out to increase the knowledge base, you're a dog begging for scraps from the table.
Apparently this increase in funding will come with a few strings…
evolgen | January 24, 2006If you have not read it, go check out Nicholas Wade's article on doctored images in scientific publications. This is especially pertinent given the recent Hwang Woo Suk stem cell debacle. There is nothing all that revolutionary, but Wade gives a nice review and introduces us to some of the editors who are trying to catch the cheaters. In commenting on the article, John Hawks brings up a good point regarding Photoshop:
"I don't worry too much about Photoshopping illustrations of fossils. Instead I worry about two things.
"One is picture selection. It is easy to choose pictures that…