scientific ethics
esiegel | February 22, 2013"When I say, 'I love you,' it's not because I want you or because I can't have you. It has nothing to do with me. I love what you are, what you do, how you try. I've seen your kindness and your strength. I've seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are." -Joss Whedon
I bet you love science; practically all of us do, whether we realize it or not. As children, we all live as scientists, born with no knowledge or experience of this world, but with inherent ability to learn and adapt.
Image credit: ©2005-2013 ~cchhrriissttaa, of deviantART.…
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 | October 10, 2006A new study from the Research Defence Society (RDS) indicates that medical doctors in the UK overwhelmingly support the role of animal research in contributing to important medical advances. The RDS questioned four hundred general practitioners from across the UK about their feelings on the importance and necessity of medical research, and the results can be found here.
The study found that 96% of general practitioners agree that "animal experiments have made an important contribution to many advances in medicine" and that 88% agree that "safety tests should be carried out on animals before…
scientificactivist | June 14, 2006I see that Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science recently republished an interesting series of posts on animal rights and scientific ethics that originally came out around the same time I was writing about my experience at an animal rights protest. In light of that, we'll keep this discussion going with the following post, which I wrote back in January as a follow-up to some of the comments on my post about the animal rights protest.(16 January 2006) This post began as a response to a comment a friend left on my last post, "Caught in the Line of Fire", but once I started I got…