scientific leadership
pronald | April 25, 2011Merry Mou won first place in the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science and Technology Championship. 700 to 900 students participate with their research projects in a variety of categories, including physics, biology, and computer science. Winners are chosen to go on to state and national competitions.
Merry Mou won 1st place in Botany in the 2010 Championship for her project, Phenotypic and Genotypic Analyses of Oryza Sativa T-DNA Lines, which was completed in the summer of 2010 as part of the Young Scholars Program under the guidance of postdoctoral fellow Manoj Sharma. She will be participating…
pronald | April 20, 2010For a short 5 minute tour of Bill Gates tackling the controversy of GE crops, please see the blog ERV. Thanks for the plug ERV
If you have 45 minutes, watch the entire video here. Bill is serious, sincere and a good speaker with important concepts to convey:
The video starts about 11 minutes in.
pronald | March 24, 2010A few years ago, next to a small barn converted into a winery, I noticed a flyer asking voters to support Measure M, an initiative in Sonoma county that sought to " prohibit the raising, growing, propagation, cultivation, sale, or distribution of most genetically engineered organisms."
It pictured the destruction in New Orleans wrought by Hurricane Katrina and the bewildered gaze of George W. Bush. The flyer proclaimed "Who do you trust with your family's health and safety? When FEMA failed, more than a million Americans suffered."
That flyer was typical of the misinformation about GE crops,…
pronald | March 3, 2010John Broder writes today in the New York Times that the uproar over the unauthorized release of hundreds of emails and recent revelations about a mistake in the IPCC report threatens to undermine decades of work and has badly damaged public trust in the scientific enterprise.
Broder's interviews with scientists reveal two thoughtful but seemingly opposing viewpoints:
'Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious scientific body in the United States, said that there was a danger that the distrust of climate science could mushroom into doubts about…
pronald | February 6, 2010Hunkered down in an elegant hotel in Washington DC, watching the epic storm continue unabated, I cannot help but think of award winning author Kim Stanley Robinson's "Fifty Degrees Below", the second novel in his three-part trilogy.
In this book, Washingtonians experience the most intense winter on record. As rigid temperatures shut down the city, the main character, Frank, is living in a treehouse in Rock Creek Park and heroic women scientists (I especially like that part) are trying to force the self-absorbed politicians to put in place effective policies to avert a global catastrophe. It…
pronald | January 19, 2010"Whether it's the science to slow global warming; the technology to protect our troops and confront bioterror and weapons of mass destruction; the research to find life-saving cures; or the innovations to remake our industries and create twenty-first century jobs--today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation." - President Barack Obama
At a time when our nation and our planet face unprecedented challenges, the sciences have a more important role to play in society than ever before. Yet today surprisingly few working…