Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing
November 1, 2024
For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself. I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg …
Gene drive and grey squirrels: Science and media
January 17, 2020
At the beginning of January 2019 an article, entitled “Accelerating Evolution” appeared in The Biologist, a journal published by the Royal Society of Biology (The Biologist 66(6) p18-21). The authors, Bruce Whitelaw and Gus McFarlane, work at the Roslin Institute in Scotland which was involved with the creation of Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996, coincidentally the occasion of …
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 …
Reimaging AMR – beyond the military metaphor
February 1, 2019
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 …
GM food, war metaphors and the perils of political entrenchment
June 3, 2012
It’s the Jubilee weekend. It’s raining. So I am looking through some tweets. Some make me think I should cheer myself up by writing a blog about songs used to make science (especially quantum physics!) public, others make me think that I really should write something about war metaphors in the current GM debate. As …
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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