Making Science Public

Category: Uncategorized

  • Making science by publicity stunt: The case of the CRISPR babies

    Making science by publicity stunt: The case of the CRISPR babies

    Science is supposed to be a public, systematic, consensible, evidence-based and collaborative enterprise. It’s also supposed to be carried out responsibly, not recklessly. Making science in public and making science public are complex processes. Making public science normally doesn’t consist in presenting fellow-scientists and members of the public with a ‘fait accompli’. This is however…

  • Blueprint, a broken metaphor?

    Blueprint, a broken metaphor?

    Three things came together that made me write this post: observing an increased discussion of the blueprint metaphor in genetics and genomics around the publication of a book called Blueprint, reading an old article by George Gamow, and reading a footnote in a forthcoming book by Philip Ball entitled How to Build a Human. The…

  • Investigating the public’s role in AMR – as represented in the UK news media

    Investigating the public’s role in AMR – as represented in the UK news media

    Today, 8 November 2018, I read the following headline in The Guardian: “Rise of antibiotic resistant bugs ‘could lead to 90,000 death’” (Online version: “Antibiotic resistant superbugs ‘will kill 90,000 Britons by 2050’“). Not: “Adopting simple measures can help to prevent 90,000 deaths from antibiotic resistant infections”…. Why does this matter? Here are some thoughts/findings.…

  • Minimal biology

    Minimal biology

    This morning (3rd November) I saw a tweet by @BrisSynBio announcing “Max Planck-Bristol Centre for Minimal Biology announced @BristolUni & @maxplanckpress partner to pursue game-changing research in the emerging field of #minimalbiology to address some of the most complex challenges in fundamental science”. I became curious and read the whole announcement, balking a bit at the pressreleasish…

  • The social construction of science: What does it mean?

    The social construction of science: What does it mean?

    40 years ago science was still carried out in an ivory tower, scientists were highly respected bearers of truth and certainty and labs were mysterious and closed spaces.* Then came along some young and enterprising social scientists and showed that scientists are human, labs are places of messy human practices and science is fallible. Science…

  • Open Day: Planning, talking and inking

    Open Day: Planning, talking and inking

    This is a re-post from Charli Vince’s blog. It continues the story of ‘Open Day’, a graphic novel about 3D printing with atoms and university life. You can read about how Open Day came to be and how it has been developing here. *** Open Day has been chugging along since the project began many,…

  • How has Science Communication Research Developed? Results from a Citation Analysis

    How has Science Communication Research Developed? Results from a Citation Analysis

    This is a guest post by Mike S. Schäfer (University of Zürich) & Adrian Rauchfleisch (National Taiwan University). The article summarised in this post first appeared in the Journal of Science Communication. This post contributes to the ‘science communication‘ strand of this blog. It can be read together with an older (2012) post which reports on how Rick Borchelt…

  • Phage and fiction

    Phage and fiction

    We have known about bacteriophages for over a century. I myself became vaguely aware of them around 2004 when I started to be interested in bacteria and antimicrobial resistance and later on when my mother had Clostridium difficile, a health-care associated infection related to antibiotic use. However, I never actually looked more closely at phages until Carmen…