Tag: risk
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Lockdown, freedom and responsibility
Two years ago, we learned a new word: ‘lockdown’. This was in fact an old word which acquired a new meaning during the Covid-19 pandemic. That new meaning gradually changed over time. Now ‘lockdown’ has more or less lost its meaning and just stands for something to be avoided at all cost or something that…
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Coronavirus: Risk, rumour and resilience
I was just starting to write this post, when I saw a tweet from Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust, quoting Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesu, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, who said, as widely reported: “This is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumours. This is the time for solidarity,…
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Warnings, war metaphors and infectious diseases: A little lit review
We are living through another global outbreak of an infectious disease: this time it’s a new version of the coronavirus. This outbreak of disease is, as usual, accompanied by an outbreak of war metaphors…. (some of them now collected in a later blog post). This brings back memories of other outbreaks, both in animals and…
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The GM/gene drive communication confusion
The other day, I was at the airport waiting for a plane back to the UK, when I noticed on twitter that there was some kerfuffle going on about a field trial in Brazil intended to eliminate disease carrying mosquitoes, which had had, it seems, some unintended consequences (see study). Here is a short summary:…
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Making Science Public: End of year blog round-up, 2018
2018 is the year that the Leverhulme Trust funded programme ‘Making Science Public’ really ended (today our director Sujatha Raman is submitting the final report to the Leverhulme Trust). My last post on the programme, entitled ‘Making Science public: six years on’, mentioned one of the most important milestones of our work, namely the publication with Manchester…
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Social, cultural and ethical aspects of synthetic biology: A scientist’s perspective
When you go to the website of the Dymond Research Group at the University of Brighton, you see article titles like this “Lipid Spontaneous Curvatures Estimated from Temperature-Dependent Changes in Inverse Hexagonal Phase Lattice Parameters: Effects of Metal Cations”. That probably means something to experts in the field. It doesn’t mean a lot to me.…
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Ash dieback (Chalara), free trade, and the technocracy of biosecurity
This is a post by Judith Tsouvalis, one of the research fellows on the Making Science Public team. In March 2012, tree and plant health became a matter of national concern in Britain following the discovery of an East Asian fungus called Hymenoscyphus fraxineus at a nursery in Buckinghamshire, England. The ash saplings infected by…
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Risk assessment policy as regulatory science
This blog is a joint posting by Sarah Hartley and Warren Pearce Following the University of Nottingham’s Circling the Square conference an interesting debate emerged around some of the fundamentals of science: objectivity, the confounding of science with regulatory science and what counts as science. Much of this took place under a post by our colleague,…
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What on earth do you mean? An outsider’s view on Public Understanding of Science
This is a guest post by Hilary Sutcliffe provoked by a twitter exchange: Yesterday Patrick Sturgis tweeted a link to an article he has just published in the journal Public Understanding of Science. Hilary asked for a copy, as the articles are behind a paywall; I sent her the article and asked at the same…
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Competitive risk promotion: A historical assessment
This is a guest blog post by Adam Burgess, who specialises in the sociology of risk (University of Kent, School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research) I’d like to take up where Brigitte left off in her blog post about the antibiotic apocalypse and very schematically draw attention to what I would describe as…
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