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 …
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 …
Gene drives and societal narratives
August 21, 2020
Some days ago, I came across an interesting virtual conference (HT @Sarah_A_Hartley) about gene editing which includes a session on ‘societal narratives’. I have written quite a bit about societal narratives of gene editing, but more recently I became involved in the issue of ‘gene drive’, that is, “a system of biased inheritance in which …
Alchemarium
June 12, 2020
This is a guest/cross-post by Peter Broks on a new engagement tool he has developed, which looks fascinating. *** Much of what we all do can be seen as a form of alchemy. We start with something; we process it; and, if all goes well, we turn it into something we value more highly. Certainly, …
Covidcomm
May 22, 2020
We have all heard about the epidemic of misinformation, even the epidemiology of misinformation, that is emerging and spreading alongside the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Staring this tsunami in the face, I began to wonder: is there anything good out there as well, something we can be proud of in terms of information and communication? I …
What R we talking about? Pandemics and numbers
May 15, 2020
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought us many new words and phrases, words and phrases that are reshaping our lives, such as ‘social distancing’, furlough, WFH (working from home), which I always read as WTF, zoom meetings, PPE and so on. It has also brought with it lots of numbers and graphs and other mathematical and/or …
Chanting to the choir: The dialogical failure of antithetical climate change blogs
April 20, 2020
This is a guest post by Jennifer Metcalfe on a paper she just published. The article explored the potential for people commenting underneath two very different, even antithetical, blogs dealing with climate science, to chat about and engage with climate science. *** My paper, Chanting to the choir: the dialogical failure of antithetical climate change …
Gene drives and Trojan horses: A tale of two metaphor uses
February 28, 2020
I was reading a recent article on gene drive entitled “Engineering bugs, resurrecting species: The wild world of synthetic biology for conservation” and came across this sentence about a so-called ‘Medea drive’: “This genetic Trojan Horse could then be used to spread elements that confer susceptibility to certain environmental factors, such as triggering the death …
Moral Dilemmas in Science Journalism about Genetics Research: The case of gene drives
January 31, 2020
Guest post by Rebecca Hardesty, Ph.D. Rebecca Hardesty is a postdoctoral scholar in science education and communication at UC San Diego in its Division of Biological Sciences and the Teaching + Learning Commons. *** The New York Times Magazine rang in the New Year with a featured piece by Jennifer Kahn recounting the promises and …
Xenobots-Xenowhats? Living machines and zombie metaphors
January 24, 2020
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 …
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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