Science Policy
sheril | September 15, 2008
On August 30, Chris Mooney and I reported that Senator Barack Obama responded to ScienceDebate2008 and this morning we can announce Senator John McCain has as well.
The Senator from Arizona provided a glimpse into what the McCain-Palin administration would look like. Read his first answer below and all fourteen on our website. A side-by-side comparison of Obama and McCain is available here.
1. Innovation. Science and technology have been responsible for half of the growth of the American economy since WWII. But several recent reports question America's continued leadership in these vital…
sb admin | September 13, 2008 Candidate's promises and positions do not always match what is constitutionally or procedurally possible. It is possible to wrap oneself in the Constitution and hide behind it at the same time. Several years ago, a child died when a string attached to his 'hoodie' was caught in the frame of the playground slide down which he was hurdling. He was strangled. Over the course of any given year or two, a small number of children are run over by cars, killed or injured, as they run carelessly into the street in pursuit of the carillon-playing ice cream truck.
The former incident, in…
ddobbs | September 9, 2008The evidentiary landscape regarding antidepressant efficacy seems to grow ever more slippery. Now comes a study, drawn to my attention by the busy-eyed Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons, that finds that the beneficial effects of placebo treatment of depression last longer than generally thought.
As the study's authors note, "The assumption that the placebo response in depression does not endure is widely held and often stated in writing." In particular, many seem to assume that placebo effects fade while effects of actual medications persist -- another argument for antidepressants.
The point…
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…
revere | August 31, 2008The folks at ScienceDebate2008 pushed hard during the primaries to have the candidates address science policy. Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum from Scienceblogs The Intersection were among the leaders in this movement. They didn't succeed in getting a debate then, but now with the field down to the finalists, they have received a response from Barack Obama to 14 questions culled from over 3400 submitted by the 38,000 signers of the ScienceDebate initiative (we were proud to be among them; they include nearly every major American science organization, the presidents of nearly every major…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008When I called out a Scientific American post yesterday about a rise in measles cases because of unvaccinated children, I forgot to include a link to a longer story on the same issue that ran in the NY Times. It's short, but worth a look as well:
Measles Cases Grow in Number, and Officials Blame Parents’ Fear of Autism - NYTimes.com
More people had measles infections in the first seven months of this year than during any comparable period since 1996, and public health officials blamed growing numbers of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
Many of these parents say they believe…
revere | August 20, 2008Everyone seems to agree about one thing concerning Vice President Cheney's senior aide, F. Chase Hutto III. He never met an environmental regulation he didn't just hate and oppose on principle. According to the Washington Post he has been instrumental in keeping our air and water dirtier than it needs to be. Just another day at the office in the Bush administration. Now, in the waning days of the Bush Reich, they want to name him a high official in the Department of Energy where he will in charge of policies related to climate change. The foundation of the climate change debate is the science…
revere | August 1, 2008There's a mighty storm a brewin' in the occupational health world. It is always a marvel to us that no matter how jaded we think we are, there is always room for more indignation. It is the Bush administration's only form of renewable energy.
The issue first poked its head above water on July 8 when my colleague Celeste Monforton over at The Pump Handle noticed something suspicious on the website of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA, pronounced oh-EYE-ra):
I found the most curious item on OMB OIRA's webpage today, and my paranoia about…
scientificactivist | July 23, 2008The Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), which is responsible for higher education in the UK, is seeking feedback to help it develop its new science strategy. The DIUS has put together a website for this purpose: interactive.dius.gov.uk/scienceandsociety/. There, you can read its latest report, comment on various sections of the report, or provide general feedback. I think that it's great that the UK government is seeking this sort of feedback, so if you're interested and have some time, go participate in this worthy endeavor.
revere | June 16, 2008Our post on what is behind the Right Wing attack on science drew a lot of attention and numerous comments. I'd like to emphasize some key points that may have gotten lost in the details (for the details, please see the original post). We'll use climate change skepticism as an example, but the principles hold for other kinds of assaults, for example, on public health concerns regarding bis phenol A.
The cardinal point is that the attacks aren't about science. Refuting false statements about whether CO2 is or is not a driver of global warming may seem (and be) necessary, but it is not the…
revere | June 13, 2008If you want to see what difference environmental protection enforcement makes, just go to eastern Europe or the former Soviet Union. Or China. In the 1970s the US led the world in cleaning its environment and was consolidating its gains with well-staffed, motivated federal and state environment agencies. But that was then. Last weekend the US Senate couldn't even manage a paltry 60 votes to stop a filibuster of a bipartisan and none too strong global warming bill. This kind of failure isn't new. The US slow motion fall in environmental leadership has been going on for decades. In the Bush…
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…
evolgen | May 30, 2008Phylogeny Friday -- 30 May 2008
Research on animals in under attack throughout the world. Animal rights activists not only stage rallies against animal testing, but they also engage in criminal behavior. They vandalize property, sabotage experiments, and terrorize researchers. How can scientists fight back?
Michael Conn and James Parker have written book documenting the animal rights issue from the scientists' perspective (The Animal Research War). Conn and Parker have also briefly described their position in the FASEB Journal. Here is how they summarize their book:
This book is a personal…
evolgen | May 28, 2008Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), will be stepping down from that position in August. Collins has overseen the sequencing of the human genome, the HapMap project, the ENCODE project, and many other large advances in genomics. The NHGRI has had a major impact in the field of genetics while Collins was at its helm.
Collins also has a history of putting his foot in his mouth -- not that it's a bad thing to do so (lord knows my foot's spent more time lodged in my face than on the ground). He's been incorrect about morality and human evolution, to name…
ddobbs | May 26, 2008A couple weeks ago Slate ran a piece asking "Are doctors shilling for drug companies on public radio?", which I took brief note of in a previous post. Now I've written up a longer reaction (actually a reaction to the reaction to the Slate story) for Columbia Journalism Review's "Observatory" blog, which covers science journalism. The gist:
If journalists ... want the information they present to the public to be taken as credible, they need to err on the side of transparency, presenting not only the voices but also the relevant financial interests of the experts they feature. Failing to do so…
purepedantry | May 23, 2008Back in April, Kate and the other peeps at SCC hosted a panel discussion on science policy. It was co-sponsored by NYAS, and now NYAS has a podcast up of it. (The wonderful and elegant Kate hosts the whole bidness.) The topic was 'Mixing Science and Policy" and the panelists were Joanne Carney, David Goldston, Michael Stebbins.
It was a really good talk, and I have a couple comments:
-- I really like how Joanne plugged some of my dream fellowships doing science on the Hill such as the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship and the AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellowship. There are really a…
revere | May 23, 2008If you aren't in the business of figuring out if a chemical is a health hazard you might never have heard of the EPA's IRIS (Integrated Risk Information System) database but suffice it to say it is a wealth of valuable information on the topic. Considered authoritative by many states and countries, its judgements have become the basis for official standards. It's been around since the start of Reagan's second term (1985) so there is no claim it is some kind of fringe environmentalist fantasy. It's not the Last Word but it's a loud voice and taken seriously by anyone tasked with protecting the…
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…
ddobbs | May 9, 2008In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.
As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are…