science & society
apalazzo | November 27, 2006
I mostly agree with Tyson ...
[Here's a different take on the whole culture-war phenomenon, what we scientists need to fight aggressively for is tolerance ... tolerance for ATHEISTS. On this front Dawkins is losing ground.]
[HT: Ed Brayton]
apalazzo | November 27, 2006I woke up from a nice restful weekend (the first in a while), to read this crap in today's NY Times. In reference to Dawkins', Dennet's and Harris' books, Richard A. Shweder writes:
...the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.
...
Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was…
apalazzo | November 21, 2006Autism seems to keep popping up everywhere.
In today's NYTimes there's an commentary on new Federal legislation whose aim is to boost Autism research. But that's not what I want to talk about.
So I've been perusing a couple of blogs by autism researchers to discover that there is a thriving pseudoscience of Autism. For more on this visit BC's blog (Bartholomew Cubbins on Autism). And I know you've probably heard of the heavy metals fanatics (i.e. mercury in vaccines causes autism), but it's worse than that.
Just follow this scary slippery slope of the ill-informed.
So lets say that you buy…
apalazzo | November 20, 2006So not only is McGill's radio station CKUT hosting a new show on global health, Health on Earth, but for their first edition they'll be talking about the Access to Essential Medicines campaign spearheaded by Doctors Without Borders. You may recall that I recently wrote about the student branch of this organization, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). The goal of UAEM is to get their local universities to sign Equitable Access Licenses (EAL) that would lift patent barriers on drugs developed by these institutions. EAL agreements would effectively increase the access of…
apalazzo | November 20, 2006For biologists, this is the magical sentence. N=3. What does it mean?
Well lets say you perform an experiment. You want to see whether protein A binds to protein B. So you run to the lab, pipette away until the wee hours of the morning, prepare a sample, separate your proteins on a gel, probe for the proteins in question ... and you demonstrate that when you isolate protein A, protein B comes along for the ride. As a control, you perform the same experiment without protein A ... and sure enough there is no protein B in the isolated product. Great! But is it true? Perhaps you spit in your…
apalazzo | November 19, 2006You've probably heard this, but earlier this week many individuals (Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Kurds) affiliated with Iraq's small academia were rounded up by gunmen. From the Boston Globe:
On Tuesday, gunmen dressed like Interior Ministry commandos abducted as many as 150 men from the central Baghdad office that handles academic grants and exchanges. The men were handcuffed and driven away in about 20 pickup trucks. About half were released in the next two days.
A Sunni who said he was among the hostages freed asserted the kidnappers broke his arm. He said he saw them kill at least…
apalazzo | November 15, 2006
Chapters of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) are pushing their local universities to sign Equitable Access Licenses (EAL) that would lift patent barriers on drugs developed by university labs. These agreements would effectively increase the access of medicines to poor countries.
An article in the the June edition of PLoS reports the latest on this movement ... more specifically how Yale recently signed such an agreement for to allow a generic version of Zerit, stavudine, to be used to treat HIV infections in South Africa.
Sol Shulman, a member of the Harvard Medical…
apalazzo | November 3, 2006How much is this botched war costing us?
From the National Priorities Project, who base their data on congressional appropriations, the up-to-the-minute total is $339 billion. As for 2006, the current estimate is $100.4 billion. From zfacts:
The US budget for Iraq in FY 2006 comes to $3,749/Iraqi. This is more than double their per person GDP. It's like spending $91,000 per person in the US. Why not just bribe the whole country?
Let's make some comparisons. All figures are in billions of dollars:War in Iraq FY2006: 100.4NSF budget 2006: 5.6NIH budget 2006: 28.7Department of Education FY2006:…
apalazzo | October 11, 2006Why stop now!
The latest stats for you: Top 10 cities in university research spending in the US.
[From Network Boston.]
City -- R&D expenditures by the city's universities and colleges in 2004 (dollars in thousands)1
1. Baltimore, MD--1,750,9042
2. Los Angeles, CA--1,527,602
3. Boston, MA--1,521,001
4. New York, NY--1,512,632
5. Philadelphia, PA--1,475,536
6. San Francisco, CA--1,388,2183
7. Chicago, IL--1,105,317
8. Houston, TX--1,099,652
9. Durham/Chapel Hill, NC--937,598
10. Atlanta, GA--784,330
1Includes universities and colleges within a 20-mile radius of each city center
2Includes…
apalazzo | October 4, 2006If you need to know ANYTHING about biology remember: DNA =(transcription)=> RNA =(translation)=> Protein.
Well today the Nobel Prize went to Roger Kornberg of Stanford for the structure of the first process.
The Nobel's press release (pdf).
It's official, RNA is the molecule of the year.
(PS It's funny we all speculated that the second process [translation] would win. Kudos to George Smiley who partially called this one.)
apalazzo | September 30, 2006A lesson of what not-to-do from Joseph Schlessinger (the "signaling guy" and head of Pharmacology at Yale) at the Yeda vs. ImClone Patent trial. Yeda provided detailed records of their development of Erbitux, ImClone provided no records, only Joseph Schlessinger's account of a twenty year old conversation. The court stated:
We find Schlessinger's account of this conversation not credible for several reasons. First, nearly twenty years have passed since the conversation occurred, such that we doubt Schlessinger remembers its details, especially considering the contorted testimony Schlessinger…
apalazzo | September 28, 2006Wow - a creationist was appointed to high level position in the Conservative government back home. On the other side of the line Richard Dawkins has set up a foundation to promote acceptance of atheists (Richard, you better open a franchise in Ottawa.)
Speaking of the RDF (Richard Dawkins Foundation) there are great videos available there, including one with Collin McGinn, professor of philosophy at Rutgers (I read his excellent book recently - see this post).
The video is from Jonathan Miller's BBC series, A Brief History of Atheism and you can watch it bellow the fold: Well, something is…
apalazzo | September 27, 2006Someone yesterday asked whether there were online odds for the upcoming Nobels? Well Thomson Scientific (producers of ISI and other citation indices) have their own predictions and a poll too (although they only give 3 choices???)
Medicine & Physiology predictions (by Thomson Sci):
For more speculation on the Nobels (including my pics and the pics of many others, click here).
apalazzo | September 25, 2006Just came back from New York. As usual we met up with the old crew and had a blast. On Saturday we stopped by Korea Town (32nd Street) for some kimchi. Sitting down, we saw this:
Kimchi from GMO bacteria!
Kimchi, for those of you who don't know, is produced by the fermentation of various vegetables (most commonly napa cabbage) by bacteria of the genera Lactobacillus. Hot chili powder and other spices are also thrown into the mix to produce this odorant yet delicious dish. Note that the placemat not only contained the patent number but the patent owner's CV plus a little label, "Great-tasting…
apalazzo | September 20, 2006In yesterday's NY Times, James Gorman laments that lingo from molecular biology and cell biology hasn't yet permeated society. As Gorman states:
Molecular biology is the science of this century. We should be able to build some great clichés on it.
This topic reminds me of a conversation that I once had with my academic advisor and a certain Caveman. Why is that when you open the paper, you never read about all the cool developments in Cell Biology?
Lets face it. The paper is full of headlines such as "New Planet Discovered" or "Extinct Species Makes a Reappearance" or "Probing the Realm of…
apalazzo | September 12, 2006A web based survey developed by Marc Hauser and coworkers Try it. Then read more about it at Gene Expression. Click here to read about Marc Hauser's book Moral Minds.
apalazzo | September 11, 2006This would be an appropriate summary of Matthew Scully's review of E.O. Wilson's latest book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth for the NY Times book review.
So here we have Professor Wilson, writing to his intended audience, a southern baptist minister. He asks the minister to join him in a quest ... to help preserve our environment, help protect endangered species ... help rescue "God's Creation" from the excesses of human activity ... and what does Matthew Scully (a former speech writer for Bush) write?
In his own defense, however, the pastor might reasonably wonder just how…
apalazzo | September 8, 2006The greatest myth within religious communities is that religion is the basis of all morality. Unfortunately for them, science is catching up. Just as Chomsky argued that humans have a language instinct, Marc Hauser from the main campus (Harvard) is arguing that humans have a morality instinct. This idea is mighty dangerous. It underpins the entire culture war in the US. Now Hauser's new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, is making the rounds.
Last week his book was reviewed in the NY Times.
Unfortunately the review was written by a philosopher (…
apalazzo | September 7, 2006Yesterday:- What happened to your blog?
- What do you mean?
- It was full of angst, I remember reading that Explorers and Crusaders entry. Venting about all the bullshit in science, where is that pissed off guy?
- Maybe because my work is just dominating my life, and I don't want to blog about my findings, this field is cut throat. At some point I promised that I would refocus my blog on real science.
- Yeah, but that entry was about science. It was about how we cope with the process. Finding, discovery, model building ... ego.
- OK I'll try something tomorrow.
OK explorers, crusaders,…
apalazzo | September 6, 2006and I don't mean Katherine Harris.
You probably read about the new Scripps Institute that is to be built in south Florida in the may edition of Science Mag. Now it looks like many other biomedical institutes are going to open branches there. The newest one? Torrey Pines. From the San Diego Union Tribune:
Torrey Pines is the third life-sciences lab from La Jolla to expand into the Sunshine State. Local and state officials there, eager to build a life-sciences industry essentially from scratch, have promised the institutes a total of nearly $1 billion in money, land and other incentives.
Two…