Tag: Science Communication
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Gnomes, ichthyosaurs and 19th-century science communication
Last weekend I had an interaction on Twitter that got me away from doomscrolling and transported me back to my safe place, namely the 19th century. In my past life, when I was very young, I wrote a Staatsexamensarbeit, a sort of MA for people on the teacher training track (I never went to the…
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Endemic confusion
A few days ago, I saw this tweet by Bill Hanage and smiled: “For some reason there seems to be a lot of talk about endemicity again. For the avoidance of doubt, omicron is not endemic right now in much the same way that the moon is not a hamster”. I read many of the…
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AI and the (public) understanding of science
This week many people saw their Twitter timelines being swamped by AI generated artwork depicting thesis/dissertation titles. Most of the renditions related to science because that’s what my Twitter timeline is about. But there were also some pertaining to the arts, humanities and social sciences (there was, for example, one depicting the title “Tracking Technology…
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Francis Willughby and me
You have probably all heard of Newton or Halley or Hooke or Pepys … But have you heard of Willughby? I had, vaguely, but I did not look hard enough. They were all early members of the Royal Society (founded in 1660) and involved in a little scandal to which I’ll come later. But first…
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IPCC reports, climate change and language work
This blog post is not about climate change communication. It is about what I call the ‘language work’ carried out by scientists when writing the various IPCC reports. Introduction On 9 August 2021 the first part of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, namely the Contribution of Working Group 1…
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From RRI to RBM: How gene drive drives new efforts in engagement
The other day, I was listening to the very interesting history of genetic engineering, including gene editing and gene drive, as told by Matthew Cobb in his three-part radio series: Genetic dreams, genetic nightmares. This reminded me that I hadn’t thought or written about gene drive for a while, one of the most controversial genetic…
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Science Communication Research: Past Patterns and Future Perspectives
This post was first published by Alexander Gerber on the Public Understanding of Science Blog on 7 January 2021. It is cross-posted here with permission. This post provides an overview of a book Alex and his team recently published (open access) entitled Science Communication Research: An empirical field analysis. *** Just like other research fields…
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Genetics and genomics – when metaphors begin to matter
I remember in the not so distant past standing in the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge admiring the huge sequencing machines and chatting about public engagement with colleagues before giving a talk about genomics and metaphors. I also remember writing some things about gene editing and metaphor. In my mind all this related to basic…
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Protein folding and science communication: Between hype and humility
During the afternoon of the 30th of November, I looked at Twitter and saw that somebody had retweeted a tweet by Tom Whipple, the Times science editor, saying that in an hour he would announce a big science story. That retweet was an hour old. I got curious and hunted around a bit in the…
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Gene drives and societal narratives
Some days ago, I came across an interesting virtual conference (HT @Sarah_A_Hartley) about gene editing which includes a session on ‘societal narratives’. I have written quite a bit about societal narratives of gene editing, but more recently I became involved in the issue of ‘gene drive’, that is, “a system of biased inheritance in which…
Making Science Public 