David Rothery is a geologist and planetary scientist at the Open University. He chairs the Open University’s level 2 module on planetary science and is a leading member of the science team for BepiColombo, Europe’s forthcoming orbital mission to Mercury. His books include Planets: A Very Short Introduction, Geology: the Key Ideas, and Teach Yourself Volcanoes, Earthquakes and Tsunamis. Cross posted with permission from OUPblog. … Read more
Janet Radcliffe Richards is Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. Earlier, she was Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University, and then Director of the Centre for Bioethics in the medical school at University College London. She is a philosopher who originally specialized in metaphysics and philosophy of science, but has now for many years concentrated on the practical applications of philosophy, and is the author of The Sceptical Feminist (1980) and Human Nature after Darwin (2000). She was drawn into transplant ethics some time ago when a short newspaper article of hers was picked up by transplant surgeons, and she has since been a frequent speaker at transplant conferences around the world. “The Ethics of Transplants: why careless thought costs lives” was published in the UK in March 2012. Read more
Misha Angrist is the author of Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches at Duke University and blogs at blogs.plos.org/genomeboy.
Us…and Them
And after all we’re only ordinary men.
Roger Waters
As a graduate student, I studied the genetics of Hirschsprung disease, a congenital disorder of the nervous system in the gut (and, as I describe in my book, a disease that would affect my own family many years later). Among the things I found to be most gratifying (and yes, occasionally frustrating) in my doctoral studies were the interactions with Hirschsprung patients and families. We students had pledged our fealty to Science writ large, yes, but we weren’t studying roundworms or fruit flies. Our “subjects” (a descriptor of research participants that, in my opinion, is condescending and should be retired ASAP) were thinking feeling human beings. If we found a highly penetrant mutation in their DNA, it had the potential to alter their reproductive decisions and their lives. It meant something to them.
But even if it didn’t, shouldn’t life scientists-in-training, especially those whose model organism is Homo sapiens, have some sort of mandatory exposure to, you know, life? Should there not be some inevitable, meaningful exchange between researcher and researchee?
Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently The New York Times best seller, The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York,. She also writes for publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to Lapham’s Quarterly and blogs about chemistry, culture (and the occasional murder) for the Public Library of Science at Speakeasy Science, blogs.plos.org/speakeasyscience. She is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Read more
This week’s guest blogger is David Orrell, an author, founder of Systems Forecasting, and an Honorary Visiting Research Scholar at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford. The UK Kindle edition of Economyths is available for a limited time at the highly economical price of 99p. Read more
Denis Alexander is this week’s guest blogger. He has spent 40 years in the biological research community in various parts of the world, latterly as Head of the Laboratory of Lymphocyte Signalling and Development at The Babraham Institute, Cambridge which he left in 2008. Since then he has been heading up the new Faraday Institute for Science and Religion at St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where he is a fellow. Read more
Dr David Barlow is Consultant in Genitourinary Medicine at St Thomas’ and Guy’s Hospitals, London. He has been the lead author for the chapter on gonorrhoea in the last three editions of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine. Between 1986 and 1993, at St Thomas’, he ran the largest linked HIV sero-survey in the United Kingdom. The third edition of his book Sexually Transmitted Infections- The Facts, Oxford University Press, with original cartoons by the late Geoffrey Dickinson, was published in March 2011. There is something slightly uncomfortable about authoring a book whose cover proclaims: “XXX – The Facts”, with a … Read more
Dr Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee is a behavioural economist in the Department of Economic at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and is the author of The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset. He obtained his PhD the economics of happiness from the University of Warwick. Discussions of his work have appeared in over 50 major international newspapers in the past five years, including the New York Times and the Guardian, as well as in the Freakonomics and Undercover Economist blogs. It’s not often in our lifetime that we could almost hear the intellectual tide turning. The year was … Read more
Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology, University of Warwick. His next book, Humanity 2.0: What It Means to Be Human Past Present and Future is out with Palgrave Macmillan in September 2011. You can tell a lot about the sort of creature we think we are, by the value we place on the things we make. In October 2010, the Economist staged an on-line debate on the most important technological innovation of the 20th century. The challengers: the digital computer and the artificial fertiliser. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the computer won by a margin … Read more