Monthly Archives: January 2013

Beyond Replication: Misleading Reports of a Provocative Experiment

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Jonathan Ellis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has taught since 2002.  He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of California, Berkeley (2002).  Since 2005, he has been Co-Director of the Santa Cruz Linguistics and Philosophy Group at UC Santa Cruz.  Ellis’s primary areas of research are the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of mind and epistemology.  Recently he co-edited *Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Mind* (published by Oxford University Press in 2012).  He is currently writing a book on the philosophical implications of motivated reasoning and other forms of compromised cognition. You can see more on his website at https://frodo.ucsc.edu/~jellis/.

Anyone familiar with the exploding genre of books from the cognitive sciences—Predictably Irrational; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Stumbling on Happiness; Blink—will know of John Bargh’s striking experiment on priming. The study, published in 1996, has recently been the subject of heated discussion among cognitive scientists, and reflection on the experiment continues to generate novel lessons for the scientific community even today. In the middle of it all is Nobel Laureate, Daniel Kahneman. Continue reading →

Opportunity knocks with the “what is a germ?” challenge

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Geoff Hunt is the Public Outreach Coordinator for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He did his undergraduate work at Cornell University, and received his PhD from Princeton, where he studied regulation of embryonic stem cell behavior. In addition to (or as part of) his day job, Geoff is also an occasional science rapper (link). You can follow Geoff on Twitter at @GoodbyeShoe.

When I presented my grandparents with a copy of my undergraduate thesis, titled “Partitioning of Fluorescent Probes in Lipid Model Membranes Showing Fluid-Disordered/Fluid-Ordered Phase Coexistence,” they did what anyone in the 21st century would do: They searched every single word in the title on Google. Even then, they were at a loss to understand what I had spent three years researching. The problem was the culture of science, drawing a thick line between “us” in the lab and “them” outside of it. My thesis was meant for a scientific audience. If anyone else wanted to read it, good luck to them.

Numerous commentators (including several on this site) have observed that scientists need to become better communicators, and that they should do outreach to the lay public. Blame for deficiency in these areas is often assigned to pride, time constraints, a disdain for the non-scientific audience, or lack of communication skills. Such bemoaning is then followed by a litany of reasons why scientists should get more involved with extracurricular activities. Rather than rehashing that same debate, I would like to instead propose a different thesis: Scientists fail to interact with the general public because of a lack of awareness about these opportunities. Continue reading →

Nature’s man – remembering Sir John Maddox in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

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Dr Lawrence Goldman is Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—based at Oxford University, UK—and fellow and tutor in history at St Peter’s College, Oxford, where he teaches modern British and American history.

The latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published on 3 January 2013, includes the lives of 225 notable figures from British national life who died in 2009. Of these more than 30 are men and women principally remembered for their contribution to modern scientific and medical enquiry. They include Sir John Maddox who was twice editor of Nature between 1966 and 1975 and then again from 1980 to 1995. The outstanding science journalist of his generation, Maddox reversed the fortunes of the journal which, on his arrival, was in some disarray. Under his editorship Nature regained its reputation as one of the world’s most important scientific journals, as it had been when founded in 1869. Maddox’s biography for the Oxford DNB has been written by John Gribbin, one of his early employees and colleagues at Nature.

Sir John Maddox and Nature

Maddox was born in 1925 at Penllergaer, near Swansea, the son of a furnaceman in a tinplate mill. Attending Gowerton Boys’ County (Grammar) School, he won a scholarship to read chemistry at Christ Church, Oxford. He then studied physics at King’s College, London, and lectured in the subject at Manchester University before taking up a post as science correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in 1955. Continue reading →

Environmental chemicals in our bodies – we know they are in there, but what does it mean?

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Judy S. LaKind, Ph.D., President of LaKind Associates, LLC, Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Maryland School of Medicine and Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Milton S. Hershey Medical Center is a health and environmental scientist with expertise in strategic risk management, assessment of human exposure to environmental chemicals and associated risks, biomonitoring, and environmental regulatory review. You can find her webpage here.

Chemicals and disease in population surveys

In the US, the number of chemicals routinely measured in people’s bodies has grown rapidly – our powerful analytical capabilities now allow us to identify over 1,000 individual chemicals in a single blood sample. Unfortunately, however, our analytical capabilities have outpaced our ability to interpret these data.

The National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES), a national survey conducted every two years by the U.S. CDC to assess health status, monitors for the presence of over 200 different chemicals in blood and urine samples. Chemical data from NHANES surveys are useful for several important purposes, such as understanding whether exposure to a particular chemical is reduced following a ban on that chemical. Many scientists have also explored the NHANES data looking for links or associations between chemical exposure and various health conditions and diseases. However, it is important to recognize the limitations of such data: studies such as these are cross-sectional, meaning that people are examined only once, providing exposure data for only a snapshot in time rather than over the long-term. Continue reading →