Expertise: A tale of two meanings
June 19, 2020
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 …
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 …
A road called ‘gene drive’ and the road to ‘gene drive’: Trials and tribulations of media analysis
October 25, 2019
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 …
The microbe/gene drive communication confusion
September 27, 2019
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 …
Encounters between life and language
September 5, 2019
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 …
Inspecting Pandora’s box: Promises and perils of gene drives
July 20, 2019
This is a guest post by Aleksandra Stelmach, University of Nottingham, Institute for Science and Society. *** Some years ago the sociologist Alan Petersen noted that metaphors of new biotechnologies not only express hopes and fears about their use and misuse, but that they also set the agenda for debate and action. Thus, metaphors not …
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 …
Science and Metaphors
April 1, 2019
Today I gave a lecture on responsible innovation and responsible language use (via Skype) to biochem and synbio students at the University of Oxford. After the lecture, one student asked whether there was a good go-to book on science and metaphor. I hummed and hawed…. There is of course some stuff, but not a really …
Scientists call for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. What do they want?
March 29, 2019
This is a guest post by Jim Dratwa and Barbara Prainsack. Jim Dratwa, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., and Free University of Brussels’ Centre on Law, Science, Technology & Society. e: jim.dratwa@vub.ac.be Barbara Prainsack, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, AT and Department of Global Health & Social Medicine, King’s College London, UK. e: …
Talking organelles: A riot of metaphors
March 22, 2019
A few days ago, somebody tweeted an article on organelles and somebody else tweeted an article on how worms regenerate their bodies. I was just in a slump of Brexit malaise when I saw this and thought, “oh, there is life outside Brexit at least in worms and cells”. So, I started to read an …
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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