Search for "science communication"

New genetics and society: A retrospective

I am in a collecting mood at the moment [I have updated this collection/blog post on 17 January 2022]. When I heard that an article (with Carmen McLeod and Rusi Jaspal) on faecal microbial transplants had finally been accepted by New Genetics and Society, I began to count back and realised I had published quite …

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Reimaging AMR – beyond the military metaphor

Last week the UK government launched yet another ‘action plan‘ on dealing with the rise of antimicrobial resistance or better ‘drug resistant infections‘, that is infection that no longer respond to antibiotics because the bacteria that cause the infections have developed resistance to the drugs used to eliminate them……. This is a guest post by …

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Blueprint, a broken metaphor?

Three things came together that made me write this post: observing an increased discussion of the blueprint metaphor in genetics and genomics around the publication of a book called Blueprint, reading an old article by George Gamow, and reading a footnote in a forthcoming book by Philip Ball entitled How to Build a Human. The …

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Cars and cancer: Metaphorical musings on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Metaphors are weird. They are crucial for the expansion of human knowledge. However, they don’t really impart knowledge. They only tell a story. And that story can only be understood by people who already have some knowledge. When I say ‘life is a journey’, I expect people to understand that metaphor, as people generally know …

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If not evidence-based, then what?

In my last post on science communication, I quoted from an article by David Dickson in which he said that “evidence-based decision-making is an ideal that we should aspire to at every level of society, from local communities to the top levels of government”. Evidence – a twitter discussion There was a bit of back-lash …

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Making lasers public: The European X-ray Free Electron Laser

Last weekend, my mum phoned me from Germany to tell me about the new x-ray laser inaugurated in Hamburg (as I later learned this is the European X-ray Free Electron Laser or XFEL) and asked me whether I had heard about it and whether I could explain what it did. I hadn’t and I couldn’t. …

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Metaphors for many goals: Discussing research in interactional settings

This is a guest post by Rony Armon, a Research Assistant at the School of Education, Communication and Society King’s College London, specialising in Communication and Media, Qualitative Social Research, and History of Science. *** In a recent post Brigitte Nerlich reviewed some studies that seemed to suggest that even though metaphors are rampant in scientific discourse …

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CRISPR, unicorns and responsible language use

I was looking through my twitter timeline on 12 June, when I came cross a tweet by Dietram Scheufele which said “’bend nature to our will.’ #CRISPR frame in new #Doudna book might resonate differently across audiences […] #scicomm”. The tweet made reference to an article by Sharon Begley in STAT News about Jennifer Doudna’s new book, co-authored with Samuel Sternberg, A …

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