Talking about gene drive
June 24, 2019
From June this year I am a co-investigator on a project led by Dr Sarah Hartley at the University of Exeter. The project is funded by The Wellcome Trust and it’s called: “Talking about gene drive: An exploration of language to enable understanding and deliberation in Africa, Europe, North America and Australasia”. What an exciting …
Epigenetics in popular culture: The case of turkey dinosaurs
May 16, 2019
This post has been written in collaboration with Aleksandra Stelmach *** On the 5th of May Charlotte Church asked a question in the Guardian that probably many parents ask themselves in these epigenetically informed times: “Will the turkey dinosaurs I ate as a kid affect my children’s health?” On twitter, experts answered that question with …
Science and poetry: Effing the ineffable
April 30, 2019
A couple of weeks ago, Phil Moriarty sent me a poem and a piece of music about (un)certainty ahead of an afternoon of science and poetry on 29 April here at the University of Nottingham. Travelling through cultures This made me think about science and literature, a topic of endless fascination about which countless people …
A Science Fiction Movie Guide to Responsible Innovation
November 15, 2018
This is a guest post by Andrew Maynard, Professor at Arizona State University, who is launching his new book today: Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies. I am really happy to publish this post on the Making Science Public blog, as it deals with topics like responsible innovation, synthetic biology, …
Genome editing in the news: Trying to keep up
August 3, 2018
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 …
Framing cloning: Dolly and the monkeys
January 29, 2018
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 …
Historical fiction: A forgotten corner of science communication?
January 26, 2018
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, …
Frankenstein is about us not STEM
January 19, 2018
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 …
Social, cultural and ethical aspects of synthetic biology: A scientist’s perspective
January 12, 2018
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. …
Do metaphors really matter?
June 16, 2017
I, like many others, from Leibniz to Lakoff, think that metaphors are important for human thinking and acting. They make us see the world in different ways – for good or evil. So, one should keep an eye on them. Recently I have read two articles which seem to imply that metaphors matter less than …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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