tribe of science
jstemwedel | June 25, 2006I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do.
My sense is that at least part of what's going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2006Sad to report, the Sb/DonorsChoose anti-biology attack ad seems not to have been an isolated incident. My anonymous source discovered another such ad, this one targeted at the brain sciences crowd.
What has become of our sense of scientific unity? Can we pull together despite attacks like the one reproduced below the fold? Does this mean that Karl Rove is actually taking an interest in the sciences?
"She looked at me like I was a rat waiting to be run through a maze. She grabbed her clipboard and started reading me the consent form. But ... I couldn't tell whether she was really…
jstemwedel | June 22, 2006There's a nice commentary in the most recent issue of Cell about scientists' apparent aversion to thinking about ethics, and the reasons they give for thinking about other things instead. You may not be able to get to the full article via the link (unless, say, you're hooked up to a library with an institutional subscription to Cell), but BrightSurf has a brief description of it.
And, of course, I'm going to say a bit about it here.
The author of the commentary, University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe, identifies seven main reasons scientists give for not thinking about ethics…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Ben at The World's Fair asks what kind of scientist Batman is. (Of course, he does this after producing something like reliable testimony that Batman is a scientist to begin with.)
Sandra Porter makes the case that he's a geneticist, but I'm not buying it. There'd be more fruit flies in the Bat Cave. I have a different hunch.
The crime fighting isn't really Batman's raison d'etre. If the villians were really villians, they wouldn't be so darned chatty and inefficient in their "attempts" to "kill" the caped crusader. Batman would have been food for the fish in the Gotham City harbor years…
jstemwedel | June 21, 2006Given that I've weighed in on "nerd culture" and some of the social pressures that influence women's relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It's pretty much the dreck you'd expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it's not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We're not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, "…
jstemwedel | June 13, 2006Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance has a great post with some of his thoughts about Yearly Kos. In it, he describes the convention's heartening attention to matters scientific:
The good news is: science! Thanks largely to DarkSyde's efforts, there was a substantial presence of science bloggers at YearlyKos. A "Science Bloggers Caucus" on Thursday night, which I expected to collect a dozen or so misplaced souls who weren't interested in the gatherings sponsored by some of the big political blogs, instead packed a room to overflowing with over fifty energetic participants from a wide cross-…
jstemwedel | June 12, 2006Occasionally I get email asking for advice in matters around responsible conduct of research. Some readers have related horror stories of research supervisors who grabbed their ideas, protocols, and plans for future experiments, either to give them to another student or postdoc in the lab, or to take for themselves -- with no acknowledgment whatever of the person who actually had the ideas, devised and refined the protocols, or developed the plans for future experiments.
Such behavior, dear reader, is not very ethical.
Sadly, however, much of this behavior seems to be happening in…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006It's time for another spin of the "Ask a ScienceBlogger" wheel! The question this time is:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
You may recall that I chose to leave chemistry for a career as a philosopher of science. Near the end of my time in chemistry, I was pretty anxious to leave the lab behind -- preparing solutions, calibrating (and repairing) pumps, washing glassware, etc. So I'm actually a little surprised at my own answers to the questions, since I find myself drawn…
jstemwedel | June 9, 2006Regular readers of this blog know that I periodically muse on the question of why there aren't more women in science. But since I'm not, say, an anthropologist, my musings have been rooted mostly in my own experience and the experiences of people I know.
Well, the Summer 2006 issue of Washington Square, San Jose State University's alumni magazine, has an article -- including interviews of an anthropologist and a sociologist -- entitled "A difficult crossing: Obstacles that keep women from science" (pdf). Some evocative anthropological insight from that article after the jump.
The notion of…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2006Near the end of the "Ethics in Science" course I teach, we read the novel Cantor's Dilemma by Carl Djerassi. It does a nice job of tying together a lot of different issues we talk about earlier in the term. Plus, it's a novel.
While it's more enjoyable reading than the slew of journal articles that precede it, Cantor's Dilemma is a little jarring for the students at first, because it contains whole passages that aren't directly relevant to the question of how to be a responsible scientist. As one of my students synopsized: "Science. Sex. Science. Sex. Science. Sex."
Upon reflection,…
jstemwedel | June 2, 2006There's a lot going on in our world that might make you want to gnash your teeth. Some of that stuff, which you've heard about here before, involves the government trying to exert an influence over science -- either in what research gets supported (and who makes that decision) or in how the results of research are reported (or not) -- that maybe the government ought not to exert.
Sometimes detailed analyses of these skirmishes are what is called for. Other times, satire is the best delivery method for a stinging condemnation. Cartoonists, the Union of Concerned Scientists is tagging you in…
jstemwedel | May 20, 2006Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM.
It was a good time.
My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on…
jstemwedel | May 15, 2006When non-scientists think about the big ethical issues in the practice of science (beyond questions of how much freedom scientists should have with the tax-payers' money, and whether scientists ought to be "playing God"), they usually think about the three mortal sins of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.
Thought the big three happen, for most scientists they don't really present ethical questions. Scientists know they are wrong. If you ask scientists about the ethical issues that need the most clarification, one that usually comes up is authorship. In working on scientific…
jstemwedel | May 3, 2006There's an article in yesterday's New York Times about doubts the public is having about the goodness of scientific publications as they learn more about what the peer-review system does, and does not, involve. It's worth a read, if only to illuminate what non-scientists seem to have assumed went on in peer review, and to contrast that with what actually happens. This raises the obvious question: Ought peer review to be what ordinary people assume it to be? My short answer, about which more below the fold:Not unless you're prepared to completely revamp the institutional structure in which…
jstemwedel | May 2, 2006Hey, it's May already! Could that explain why things are crazy-busy here?
There will be new content soon, once I've plowed through some more grading and exam-writing and curricular trouble-shooting. In the meantime, since I copped to enjoying reality TV more than I should (in that ABC meme, under "Not going to cop to"), I thought I'd share a May post from the earlier incarnation of this blog, a post in which I muse on what "The Apprentice" (a show, as of this season, I no longer watch ... we've grown apart) might teach us about how to improve the scientific community.
Yes, it's utterly daft…
jstemwedel | April 25, 2006My favorite T-shirt says "I [heart] irony. It's a great shirt, because no one can be absolutely sure that I love irony. Maybe I'm ambivalent about irony and I'm wearing the shirt ... ironically. Despite what the Ethan Hawke character in Reality Bites may have said, irony is not as straightforward as meaning the opposite of the literal meaning of the words you are uttering. Rather, it's meaning something that is some distance from what those words mean -- a distance that some in your audience may be able to decipher, but that others may miss altogether.
What, you may be asking yourself,…
jstemwedel | April 24, 2006Today at Inside Higher Education, an article identifies "The Real Science Ethics Issues". Which means, I suppose, you don't have to keep taking my word about what's an issue and what is not. The focus of the article is not on the flashier instances of fraud, but on more mundane stuff that may rot the scientific enterprise from the inside.
From the article:
Nicholas H. Steneck, a University of Michigan history professor and a consultant at the Office of Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that most research fabrication is "not very subtle or clever."…
jstemwedel | April 23, 2006Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin lays into climate scientist Richard Lindzen. His post begins with reasons one might be inclined to take Lindzen's views seriously:
Unlike nearly all "sceptics", he's a real climate scientist who has done significant research on climate change, and, also unlike most of them, there's no evidence that he has a partisan or financial axe to grind.
But then, we find the 2001 Newsweek interview that gives Quiggin reason for pause:
Lindzen clearly relishes the role of naysayer. He'll even expound on how weakly lung cancer is linked to cigarette smoking. He speaks…
jstemwedel | April 11, 2006In most cases, scientific disagreements are resolved in the labs, at conferences, or in exchanges in journals. Sometimes the disagreements are drawn out, sometimes feelings are hurt, but it hardly ever comes to a defamation suit.
Someone forgot to send John Lott the memo.
From the Chicago Tribune:
John Lott Jr. of Virginia, a former U[niversity] of C[hicago] visiting professor, alleges that [Steven] Levitt defamed him in the book ["Freakonomics"] by claiming that other scholars had tried and failed to confirm Lott's conclusion that allowing people to carry concealed weapons reduces crime.…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2006Stochastic, the Seed Blog has an interesting post this morning about Linus Pauling's "golden years" as a scientist. It's a good read, to which I only have a few thoughts to add.
First, to bring you up to speed on the story, here's an excerpt from the Stochastic post:
[Pauling] proposed that "megadoses" of vitamin C could effectively treat several illnesses, most notably cancer and the common cold, and published a few books to popularize these ideas. In 1973, he formed the Linus Pauling Institute of Medicine, where he performed multiple experiments to verify his claims.
The real trouble…