Making Science Public 2021: End of year round-up of blog posts
December 18, 2021
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, …
Post-Brexit gene editing regulation
October 8, 2021
Some of us are old enough to remember the controversies surrounding genetically modified or engineered foods and crops that raged in Europe (which included the UK) around the turn of the millennium. Some of us are even old enough to remember debates about recombinant DNA in the seventies (for those who don’t, I recommend Matthew …
Eyes and organoids
August 20, 2021
I have written in the past about eyes and about organoids (but if you really want to know more about organoids, you should read Philip Ball’s How to Grow a Human). These two topics, eyes and organoids, recently came together. A few days ago, I saw tweets like this: “Small blobs of human brain grown …
Maps, books and jigsaws: The human genome is back
June 11, 2021
I was recently messing about on the news database Nexis when I came across this pronouncement from 1982!! “Weissmann appealed directly to the delegates for an international basic-research fund to determine how genes function and their relationship to disease. With current technology, he declared, mapping the entire human genome would require some 50,000 man-years and …
Genetics and genomics – when metaphors begin to matter
December 28, 2020
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 …
Mutant words
December 19, 2020
I was listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on this sunny morning of the 19th of December when I heard the phrase ‘mutant strain’, used in reference to a new strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus which is apparently spreading in the South East. My ears twitched of course, as they did with ‘mutant …
Protein folding and science communication: Between hype and humility
December 4, 2020
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 …
Minimal genomes, maximal assumptions
October 23, 2020
This is another guest post by Massimiliano Simons who is a postdoctoral researcher at the department of philosophy and moral sciences at Ghent University. He is also a member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology (WGPT) at KU Leuven, Belgium. *** Ten years ago the J. Craig Venter Institute announced the birth of …
CRISPR, the Nobel, and women in science
October 9, 2020
I wrote my first blog post about CRISPR, gene editing or genome editing on 24 March 2015. It was entitled “From recombinant DNA to genome editing: A history of responsible innovation?” And I have written quite a few more blog posts about this new biotechnology since then. I knew that sometimes in the distant future …
Gene writing: Between art and nature
July 17, 2020
In the past, I have written a bit about genomics, synthetic biology and gene editing, from the perspective of language and culture. So, when Matthew Cobb alerted me to a new thing called ‘gene writing’ at the beginning of July, I pricked up my ears. I told myself that I should write a blog post …
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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