Search for "epigenetics"

Epigenetics, hype and woo

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a new twitter account: @EpigeneticsBs (short for ‘epigenetics bullshit’). Its mission is to make epigenetic ‘bullshit’ public, or as it says: “There’s a lot of #epigenetics pseudoscience & quackery out there. We RT some of it for your edification and entertainment.” These (re)tweets are produced by people working …

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When epigenetics gets under the skin

A few days ago, on 12 August, I saw the following conversation on twitter between Martyn Pickersgill and Muireann Quigley. It started with Martyn saying/sighing: “I’m probably going to start crying with frustration if I read the phrase ‘how the environment gets under the skin’ one more time today.” Whereupon Mauireann asked him what he …

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Epigenetics, hype and harm

I first became interested in epigenetics in around 2010/2011. I know this because I trawled my emails and found a link that I had sent myself on 11 February 2011 to an article in Mother Jones entitled “The illustrated guide to epigenetics”. The first paragraph of this guide is rather prophetic: “This month marks the …

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Making epigenetics public: A problem with metaphors

This article has been co-authored with Aleksandra Stelmach Two years ago, in May 2013, I wrote a blog post about epigenetics. This was at a time when social scientists started to be interested in this new field of genetics/genomics and began to critically scrutinize it. Now, two years later and after a flurry of social …

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Science, politics and epigenetics

This post by Shea Robison is reposted here with the permission of author. Shea originally posted it on his blog ‘The nexus of epigenetics‘ under the title “Epigenetics Minority Report Part I: Epigenetics, blame, precrime and politics“ *** If you picked up the movie reference in the title to this post, you are likely (hopefully) asking …

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Epigenetics: Switching the power (and responsibility) from genes to us?

We have always known that we are who we are because of our ancestors. We also know in ever more detail that we are who we are because of our genes.  Since 1953 we know the structure of the genes that are passed down from generation to generation and since 2003 we know the structure …

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Making Science Public 2024: End of year round-up of blog posts

It’s that time of year again when I write my round-up of all the blog posts that I have written over the year. There were more posts than I expected. I have tried to group them into topics, some of which you might be interested in, others not. This year, I mostly explored the ever-expanding …

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AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors

I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means …

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Genes, trains and eureka-moments

I was in the process of writing a blog post on metaphors in genetics and genomics which was getting longer and longer and I had some personal stuff to deal with. So, I stopped. I might come back to this another time. In the process of writing, I discovered that trains have been quite an …

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Knitting with hyperlinks: A decade of blogging

Ten years ago, I was walking down the corridor in the School of Sociology and Social Policy building, when I bumped into Adrian Mateo, who was then Faculty marketing manager. I knew him from various engagement events related to projects I was involved in at the time. We chatted a bit and he suddenly asked …

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