Epigenetics and sociology: A critical note
June 8, 2018
I recently read an interesting article by Michel Dubois, Catherine Guaspare and Séverine Louvel entitled “De la génétique à l’épigénétique: une révolution ‘post-génomique’ à l’usage des sociologies”, which appeared in the Revue française de sociologie, 59(1), 71-98 (2018). Dubois et al.’s ‘critical note’ is intended to introduce French readers to English works that explore the boundaries between …
Bacteria, metaphors and responsible language use
June 1, 2018
A lot has been written about the war on bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance. Some articles reflect on the metaphor of war in medicine and in microbiology more generally, others deal with the metaphors of bacterial communication and communities. A few papers look more closely at the way bacteria are anthropomorphised in the …
The vertical rod in the center of the DNA molecule
May 16, 2018
A while ago I read this tweet by Kindra Crick: “Odile Crick, my grandmother, drew the first published diagram of #DNA It was 65 years ago #onthisday, as a diagram in the first of the three papers published in @nature on the structure of DNA. (Watson & Crick, Wilkins et al, Franklin & Gosling) #SciArt …
Brains, organoids and cultural narratives
May 4, 2018
For a while now I have been observing developments in neuroscience, stem cell research and tissue engineering, in a rather desultory fashion. Behind my back things began to happen and grow. Organoids In 1989 the journal Science reported on research into ‘organoids’ (or, as the OED defines them, the “growth of cells or tissue in culture …
Data harvesting: A metaphor ripe for scrutiny
April 27, 2018
At the end of March news of a data scandal broke – you all know which one. As Steven Poole in The Guardian wrote: “The political data firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of unauthorised ‘data harvesting’ from millions of Facebook accounts. This handily avoids allegations of ‘theft’ or even just ‘mining’”. Data harvesting is not only …
‘3D printing with atoms’ and ‘Open day’ – an update
April 23, 2018
This post is one in a series of posts about a graphic novel, ‘Open Day’, created as part of a project on 3D printing with atoms, funded by the EPSRC and led by Phil Moriarty. Previous posts by Phil and me can be found here. The novel was scripted by Shey Hargreaves and illustrated by …
Making Science Public: Six years on
April 20, 2018
It’s coming up to May 2018. In May 2012 we started our five-year Making Science Public Project, which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. I directed the programme between May 2012 and October 2016. I then retired and Sujatha Raman took over as director. The project had a non-cost extension for a year and now …
Antimicrobial resistance and climate change: Communication, governance and responsibility
April 13, 2018
Last week I was reading some tweets from an international science communication conference held at Dunedin, New Zealand. As I have blogged and written about hype, I was particularly interested in tweets about a fascinating Roundtable convened by Tara Roberson entitled: “Can hype be a force for good? – Debating the benefits and drawbacks of science …
Climate change politics and the role of China: a window of opportunity to gain soft power?
April 8, 2018
This is a guest post by Adrian Rauchfleisch (National Taiwan University) & Mike S. Schäfer (University of Zürich) In our new publication we analyse the nexus between climate change and soft power with specific emphasis on China. We discuss the role of soft power in the Chinese context and elucidate how international climate change politics is …
Fermenting hope; fermenting hype?
March 23, 2018
When I first became involved with the Synthetic Biology Research Centre here at the University of Nottingham in 2014, I wrote a blog post in which I pointed to fermentation as one of its historical and intellectual roots. I called it ‘Fermenting thought’. Now, four years later, I have come across an article in The …
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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