Tag: Science Communication
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Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
Gene/genome editing has been much in the news recently and it is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of new developments. The last two weeks alone have seen major announcements, which I shall briefly list in this blog post. This leads me to a question that has been troubling me: How does one do…
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Science communication: What was it, what is it, and what should it be?
Science communication still puzzles people it seems, and that includes me. To get to the bottom of that puzzlement I looked at a blog post entitled “What’s this science communication and public engagement stuff all about?” This post provides a really useful overview of science communication and public engagement and people who want or have…
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Framing cloning: Dolly and the monkeys
In 1999, three years after Dolly the sheep was born, we published an article on the way that cloning was then framed in the public sphere (see also Holliman, 2004). The cloning of two macaque monkeys by Chinese researchers (Cell, 2018), more than two decades after the cloning of Dolly might be a good opportunity…
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Historical fiction: A forgotten corner of science communication?
I recently read a wonderful tale about a 10th-century Arab philosopher, theologian and mathematician, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen). This wasn’t a biography (although I read that as well, afterwards); it was historical fiction – a historical novel. The tale was told by Bradley Steffens and entitled The Prisoner of Al-Hakim (2017). Immersed in the novel, I learned,…
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Frankenstein is about US not STEM
I was reading my tweets the other day and came across this one: “I am reading the octopus book. My main hobby now is looking up from the octopus book in order to share octofacts.” This is popular science (communication) at its best.* It also made me think. If readers of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) had…
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Collision, collaboration and communication
The other day I read an article on why academics are losing relevance in society. I noticed that it contained a picture of a celebratory cake with the inscription “Here’s to the first direct detection of gravitational waves” (after two black holes collided). This event happened in 2016 and was widely celebrated around the world,…
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Science and metaphor: Some historical perspectives
Over the last thirty years or so I have written about metaphor and its importance to language, thought and social interaction. In the last fifteen years, I have focused in on the relation between metaphor and science, especially science communication. However, only recently has it dawned on me how little I actually understand about metaphor…
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Base editing, biological complexity and the limits of metaphorical explanation
Gene editing has been in the news since around 2013. Here I want to focus on one of the most recent advances which made me question my own understanding of gene editing. In 2015 a team of scientists led by Junjiu Huang at Sun Yet-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, used gene editing techniques, in this…
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Science/climate communication: A view from reception theory
There has been some controversy recently surrounding a paper published in Nature Geoscience on global warming or, if I understand things correctly, about whether there might be a slightly better chance of avoiding it. This paper appears to have been misunderstood, misrepresented and misreported. One Mail Online headline read: “Fear of global warming is exaggerated,…
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Making lasers public: The European X-ray Free Electron Laser
Last weekend, my mum phoned me from Germany to tell me about the new x-ray laser inaugurated in Hamburg (as I later learned this is the European X-ray Free Electron Laser or XFEL) and asked me whether I had heard about it and whether I could explain what it did. I hadn’t and I couldn’t.…
Making Science Public 