Category: Uncategorized
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Synthetic biology in the era of AI: From dominating nature to collaborating with it
Today’s post is a guest post by Christian Gude. He has a PhD in synthetic biology from the University of Nottingham (where we met when I was still doing synbio and RRI at the SBRC) and is now working at Phenotypeca Ltd as IP Analyst in a multidisciplinary role between science and intellectual property. In…
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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts
It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding…
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Digging Deep into Stories in Science Communication
This book review was first published in SciComm Book reviews for the Public Understanding of Science Blog. It is reposted here with permission. The official print version is also now available here. I reviewed two books: Bloomfield, E. F. (2024). Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. University of California Press. Seethaler, S. L. (2024). Beyond…
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Xenotransplantation
About 25 years ago, I first encountered something called Science and Technology Studies (STS) – a field that examines interactions between science and society (culture, policy etc.). One of the first articles I read, published in 1999, was by Nik Brown on xenotransplantation: “Xenotransplantation: Normalizing disgust”. Using ideas and concepts from STS stalwarts like Mary Douglas…
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Making epigenetics familiar: The visual construction of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in the news
Some time ago I wrote a blog post with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan Miguel Valdez about visuals used to make epigenetics public through the popular lens of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. I then promised some image analysis. Here is a summary of what we found. The full paper by Alan Valdez and myself is available here. Introduction Epigenetics…
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John Herschel: A snapshot of his adventures in photography
Sitting at home on a miserable day last week, I was reading a tweet, then a blog post by Stephen Case who wrote a book with my sort of title: Making Stars Physical: The Astronomy of Sir John Herschel. That post cheered me up, as I learned something new. I went to the kitchen to…
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Science and trust – the sequel
In 2018 a new ‘International Science Council’ (ICS) was established and I wrote a blog post in which I critically dissected the announcement of this launch. I tried to show that this announcement seemed to perpetuate a series of misconceptions relating to science and trust. At the end of October 2023, the ISC Centre for…
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Synthetic embryos: Science, communication, clarification
Earlier in the month (June, 2023) I saw some headlines saying things like “Scientists say first synthetic human ’embryo’ created” or “First reported synthetic human embryo sparks ethical concerns, creates questions” or “Synthetic human embryos created for first time using no eggs or sperm”. These headlines appeared soon after an exclusive article on the matter…
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The Gmelin family: From chemistry to phlogiston and permafrost
I had Covid. I was lying in bed. I saw a tweet by Mark Carnal saying: “Historians of Biology. How on earth is Gmelin pronounced? I’ve not had to say it out loud before.” I am not a historian of biology but, as a German speaker, I was intrigued. So, I looked up the name…
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Human genome editing summit, London, 2023
Ceci n’est pas un blog post. As I have no time to write anything proper for a few weeks, these are just some notes and pointers. This non-post is ‘about’ the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing which took place at The Francis Crick Institute in London from 6 to 8 March. I couldn’t…
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