Tag: Science
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Making Science Public 2021: End of year round-up of blog posts
We are coming to the end of a another pandemic year, and time seems to expand endlessness towards an uncertain horizon. That means quite a few of my blog posts this year were still devoted to covid and the pandemic, but I also wrote about genetics, climate change and some other incidental topics. As usual,…
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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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Science, philosophy and metaphor (a post by Andrew Reynolds)
Soon a book will appear that will be of interest to life scientists and metaphor scientists alike. It is by Andrew Reynolds and entitled Understanding Metaphors in the Life Sciences (please click through for more information!). It is one of the many interesting books in Cambridge University’s Understanding Life series, including, for example, Understanding Genes,…
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Science, Technology & Culture: In memory of Christopher Johnson (1958-2017)
Almost 20 years ago, I was working at the Institute for Science and Society located in the Law and Social Sciences Building (then called the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society). I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I must have come across somebody telling me that people were establishing a…
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Expertise: A tale of two meanings
I have recently become confused by how people use the word ‘expertise’. I’ll first tell you a story about the meaning I am used to and then a story about the meaning I am not so used to and conclude by asking what to do about this concept. ‘Expertise’ in ordinary language use Staff at…
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Xenobots-Xenowhats? Living machines and zombie metaphors
The other day a colleague asked me what I was up to. I said, ‘I am starting to think about xenobots’. ‘Xeno-whats?’ he asked? I muttered something like ‘you know as in ‘xeno-transplantation’, when another colleague butted in and asked ‘like Xenogenesis?’. ‘Xeno-what?’ I asked. It turns out there is a sci-fi trilogy by Octavia E. Butler written in the…
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A road called ‘gene drive’ and the road to ‘gene drive’: Trials and tribulations of media analysis
As people might know, I enjoy doing media analysis of emerging biotechnologies, from cloning to gene editing and beyond. I have lately become fascinated with something called ‘gene drive’, a new genetic engineering technology that was brought to public attention around 2014/2015 at the confluence of two ‘events’: the outbreak of Zika and advances in CRISPR-Cas9…
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The microbe/gene drive communication confusion
Last week I wrote a post about how genetic modification and/or gene drive are used when managing disease transmitting insects. I want to come back to this topic today and talk about another difference, which, yet again, confused me. I hope that these efforts of disentangling stuff also help other people trying to understand and…
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Encounters between life and language
Philip Ball has just written a great article dissecting new research showing that there is no ‘gene for’ homosexuality. He notes the fallacies behind the facile way of pointing to individual genes and saying what they are ‘for’. This is dangerous, especially when talking about genes for behavioural traits. Single genes don’t determine such traits…
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