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Air con and the apocalypse
July 3, 2018
I have recently spent a lot of time in official spaces, GP surgeries, hospitals etc. Where in the past one would sit with a window or door open, there is now air conditioning. In Eye Casualty the other day, I heard the head nurse tell a junior: “Didn’t you read the memo? We are not …
Brains, organoids and cultural narratives
May 4, 2018
For a while now I have been observing developments in neuroscience, stem cell research and tissue engineering, in a rather desultory fashion. Behind my back things began to happen and grow. Organoids In 1989 the journal Science reported on research into ‘organoids’ (or, as the OED defines them, the “growth of cells or tissue in culture …
Climate change politics and the role of China: a window of opportunity to gain soft power?
April 8, 2018
This is a guest post by Adrian Rauchfleisch (National Taiwan University) & Mike S. Schäfer (University of Zürich) In our new publication we analyse the nexus between climate change and soft power with specific emphasis on China. We discuss the role of soft power in the Chinese context and elucidate how international climate change politics is …
Designer babies? Not again!
August 2, 2017
Preface: I had just put the finishing touches to this post and I was doing the washing up, when I heard on the six o’clock news that the paper I’ll talk about below has now been published in Nature. I’ll still publish this post though. It would be great to compare the pre-paper news coverage with the …
CRISPR – and the race is on (again)
July 25, 2016
At the weekend I was reading an article in the Guardian about a team of Chinese scientists trying to use CRISPR/gene editing for the treatment of cancer; and I sighed. The article contained some of the standard and, I believe, quite worn-out tropes that pepper coverage of advances in biotechnology: playing God, designer babies…, as …
Science and politics in an uncertain world
June 19, 2016
Our end of award conference is taking place on Wednesday 22 June and I know that I should be writing something cheerful and upbeat about our programme, what we have done and are still doing. However, the conference is happening at a difficult time, and somehow I have lost my blogging enthusiasm. The conference is …
The ghost in the machine: Of automation, algorithms and AI
May 15, 2016
Despite working at the fringes of a field called Science and Technology Studies, I am a bit of a technophobe. I was introduced to computers in the early 1980s and I am still not totally in tune with some of the things they do. To misquote Arthur C. Clarke, most technology, and in particular advanced …
Climate, science and politics: The certainty and consensus confusion
April 24, 2016
In this, my probably final, blog post on climate change, I’ll return to a topic that has troubled me for many years, namely religious rhetoric used in debates about climate change science and climate change politics. The terrain between climate change science and climate change politics has become a bit of a swamp and the …
Improving climate change communications: moving beyond scientific certainty
June 8, 2015
This is a co-authored post with Gregory Hollin. It is based upon our new paper in Nature Climate Change, which is the first piece of original research from science and technology studies (STS) published in the journal. In the last 25 years scientists have become increasingly certain that humans are responsible for changes to the …
A cut too far? The ritual slaughter debate in Britain
February 13, 2015
The World Food Summit, in 1996, agreed a definition of food security that included the requirement that food met the food preferences of communities. Indeed, it is evident that food preferences reflect aspects of culture including religious identity. Where food preferences include the consumption of animals, debates about animal welfare also arise which can come …