Showing posts with label Interesting Articles/Sites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interesting Articles/Sites. Show all posts
Thursday, March 5
Shapin: The Scientist in 2008 (Seed article)
There was an article by Steven Shapin (author of The Scientific Revolution and co-author of Leviathan and the Air Pump, discussed in Peter Godfrey-Smith's paper) in the December 2008 issue of Seed magazine. In his article The Scientist in 2008, Shapin addresses several issues that we've been grappling with in class--science and values, science and sociology, and integrity in scientific practice. It's definitely worth a read, and it might even be relevant to some of your class projects (particularly the progress and scientific industry groups). I'd be happy to carry on a discussion of the paper here if anyone is interested.
Monday, February 23
Additional Global Justice Readings
I've posted two more articles by Thomas Pogge in the Blackboard Readings area. There's lots more conveniently located on his website. Of note, the "World Povery and Human Rights" essay is really an introduction to a book symposium on his book World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms in Ethics & International Affairs (2005) Vol. 19, no. 1. I'd encourage you to check it out if you're at all interested in global justice (and I hope you are!).
Tuesday, February 10
Doctor who claimed MMR vaccine-Autism link may have falsified data
The Sunday Times reported this week that Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who published his findings of a possible link between the MMR vaccine (measles, mumps, and rubella) and Autism in children, appears to have essentially falsified his data by misinterpreting patient information. Although the study, published in The Lancet in 1998, only involved 12 children, the results of the study were sensationalized by the media, causing fear in many parents. This led to a 12% decrease in MMR vaccinations of children (dropped from 92% to below 80%, well below the 95% "herd immunity" requirement to protect the general population from measles). As a result, we've begun to see a rise in measles--the number of confirmed cases jumped from 56 cases in the UK in 1998 to 1,348 in 2008! Wakefield and his research partners have not confessed to any wrongdoing, but the investigation continues.
This is a perfect example of misconduct in reseach since we're talking about research ethics this week. See the article here. If you're interested, there's a ScienceBlogs thread discussing the issue here.
This is a perfect example of misconduct in reseach since we're talking about research ethics this week. See the article here. If you're interested, there's a ScienceBlogs thread discussing the issue here.
Thursday, February 5
ScienceBlogs...check it out!
For those of you who, like myself, are quickly becoming blog junkies (thanks a lot, Matthew), I recommend checking out ScienceBlogs, which boasts a plethora of science-related blogs in topics spanning all fields of science (life, physical, social, environmental, political, etc.).
And also (not to be a puppet for Seed or anything), the ScienceBlogs project is facilitated by the same people who put out Seed magazine (see my post from about a week ago).
One blog that has been started recently, and that I think is especially relevant to our class, is The Rightful Place Project: Reviving Science in America. This group started after President Obama announced that science would be restored to its "rightful place" during his administration. But what is that rightful place in society? Is this an invitation to integrate (or reintroduce) ethics and humanities into science and technology?
Wednesday, January 28
Seed magazine...heard of it?
I was wondering if anyone is familiar with Seed magazine (subheading: "Science is Culture"). It features articles and reviews on current topics in science from a social (and sometimes ethical) perspective. I guess it's kind of a layperson's version of Nature or Science, although I've only read a few issues at this point so I may be wrong in drawing this comparison. On the whole, the topics and viewpoints featured seem to be pretty substantive, and there's certainly a lot of material relevant to our class.
An interesting theme I've noticed in many of the articles I've read so far is this notion that science "must progress" or "must overcome some barriers"... obviously different scientists have different ideas of what these barriers are and whether we should overcome them at all. This does, however, seem to be a pervasive "ideology" (what a loaded term!) in the scientific realm and thus deserves some comment. It occurred to me that perhaps this barrier is what Rollin claims is the failure of science to consider ethics ("Ethics2", that is). Following from that, perhaps many scientists view the non-scientific community as a "barrier" because they feel like they're just not getting their message across. Evidently scientific progress is a two-way street. What are your thoughts on this?
On another note, and what triggered this late-night post in the first place: for those of you who took Matthew's Philosophy of Science class last semester, you'll remember Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Revolution. He wrote a short article for Seed's December 2008 issue entitled "The Scientist in 2008." He discusses historical and modern perspectives of how society views science/scientists and what the role of science/scientists is or ought to be, and (most importantly, I think) he also suggests that an "adjustment of the boundaries between the natural and social sciences" is imminent as we enter the 21st century with "new scientific agendas and new conceptions of what it is to be a scientist." I guess I'm bringing this up mainly because I'm happy to see that a consideration of ethics and social values (whatever the hell that means) is starting to make its way into the mainstream dialogue of science.
I guess one thing I find a little disturbing about the magazine is that Craig Venter's (credited with sequencing the first entire human genome; founder of Celera Genomics) name has appeared on the covers of all three magazines I've read so far (not as an author, but as a featured scientist). For those of you not familiar with Venter, his team used a method of "shotgun sequencing" to determine the sequence of the human genome years before the set goal, and he stepped on a lot of other people working on the Human Genome Project in doing so (sorry--that's a personal value judgment, but in my opinion he played a little dirty).
Anyway, that's my spiel for now. I hope it was coherent enough for you to garner something from it. I welcome your responses and comments.
An interesting theme I've noticed in many of the articles I've read so far is this notion that science "must progress" or "must overcome some barriers"... obviously different scientists have different ideas of what these barriers are and whether we should overcome them at all. This does, however, seem to be a pervasive "ideology" (what a loaded term!) in the scientific realm and thus deserves some comment. It occurred to me that perhaps this barrier is what Rollin claims is the failure of science to consider ethics ("Ethics2", that is). Following from that, perhaps many scientists view the non-scientific community as a "barrier" because they feel like they're just not getting their message across. Evidently scientific progress is a two-way street. What are your thoughts on this?
On another note, and what triggered this late-night post in the first place: for those of you who took Matthew's Philosophy of Science class last semester, you'll remember Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Revolution. He wrote a short article for Seed's December 2008 issue entitled "The Scientist in 2008." He discusses historical and modern perspectives of how society views science/scientists and what the role of science/scientists is or ought to be, and (most importantly, I think) he also suggests that an "adjustment of the boundaries between the natural and social sciences" is imminent as we enter the 21st century with "new scientific agendas and new conceptions of what it is to be a scientist." I guess I'm bringing this up mainly because I'm happy to see that a consideration of ethics and social values (whatever the hell that means) is starting to make its way into the mainstream dialogue of science.
I guess one thing I find a little disturbing about the magazine is that Craig Venter's (credited with sequencing the first entire human genome; founder of Celera Genomics) name has appeared on the covers of all three magazines I've read so far (not as an author, but as a featured scientist). For those of you not familiar with Venter, his team used a method of "shotgun sequencing" to determine the sequence of the human genome years before the set goal, and he stepped on a lot of other people working on the Human Genome Project in doing so (sorry--that's a personal value judgment, but in my opinion he played a little dirty).
Anyway, that's my spiel for now. I hope it was coherent enough for you to garner something from it. I welcome your responses and comments.
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