Sydney, our one and a half year old Boston terrier, has had a rough week. On Sunday she cut her leg open in a freak accident and had to get stitches. Since then, it has been tons antibiotic, anti-inflammatory, and pain meds–most of which she has been coaxed into taking thanks to a hell of a lot of cheddar cheese.
But by far the worst indignity is having to wear the “Elizabethan collar,” not exactly fun for a rambunctious dog. Still, can you see the resemblance?
My Slate exchange with Michael Specter has drawn some additional attention; Curtis Brainard of Columbia Journalism Review glosses as follows:
Specter and Mooney don’t agree about everything, and that’s what makes their ongoing conversation at Slate’s Book Club so interesting. The discussion, focusing on Denialism, began Thursday with a review from Mooney that was mostly laudatory, but raised a few good questions. Specter responded, and Mooney weighed in again on Friday morning; we’re now awaiting a fourth installment from Specter.
That fourth installment is now up and it is here. Some highlights: 1) Specter things I’m too pessimistic in questioning whether President Obama would lead a national dialogue on synthetic biology; 2) Specter is much harder than I am the NIH’s office to study complementary and alternative medicine; 3) Specter is less sold than I on the importance of scientists filling the “communication gap,” though he agrees that approach has its merits; 4) Specter is more optimistic than I am about the ongoing possibility of journalism to elevate and enlighten us with respect to science.
To that end, he closes with a great quotation from Milton’s Areopagitica, one I’d forgotten until this jogged my memory:
Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play on the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?
Well, sadly, I did, that’s who–or at least, I question whether the encounters are “free and open” these days.
After Republican War on Science, Storm World, and Unscientific America, I think a growing thesis of mine is that truth really does not win in open encounters, a lot of the time. In fact, truth loses big time, and we need to understand how and why. But that’s a much, much longer post…
My latest contribution to the Slate book club on Denialism is here. Most of the discussion concerns how to prompt a broader national debate on the subject of synthetic biology, a branch of science with revolutionary possibility that most Americans have never even heard of. Alas, I’m not optimistic this will change any time soon:
In today’s media world, you really need a national leader to broach such a conversation—e.g., President Obama, as you suggest in your book. While I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though, I doubt he has the time to bring up such a dark-horse topic, especially in light of all the other policy fires that must be put out. Without a presidential initiative, we lack an adequate national forum for discussing the complex and crucial problems that science lays before us. (Don’t expect synthetic biology to come up on Oprah; as you point out, she is too busy providing a platform for vaccine skeptics like Jenny McCarthy.)
As a result, synthetic biology may be fully upon us before people start thinking about it. And it will likely come to broader attention only as a result of some kind of political controversy—just as occurred with embryonic stem cell research or genetically modified foods. At that point, I fear, we’ll simply become polarized over the issue.
You can read my full reply here.
Motorola’s Anroid 2.0 phone debuts today with its slide-out keyboard, 5-megapixel camera, and DVD-quality video recording. The NYTimes calls the Droid 2.0 incredibly fast with superb audio quality, but adds:
..the Droid’s design screams “Star Wars,” if not “Darth Vader.” It’s jet black, all sharp angles and industrial-looking edges. Verizon asked Motorola to soften the design for better female appeal, but it’s hopeless: Droid is all masculine, all the time. When you slide the screen up to reveal the thumb keyboard, there’s no spring-assisted snap; it drags like a plow through soil. It’s all part of the manly man design concept.
Wait I sec… I love Star Wars! Still, it’s a shiny new phone with lots of buzz and anticipation surrounding the release. The Wall Street Journal predicts it may be a big win for Verizon, Motorola and Google, while naming several drawbacks.
I have the original iPhone and am planning to purchase a new one soon. My contract’s been up for a long time and the screen finally cracked last week after an unfortunate collision with hardwood flooring. It’s past time to join a 3G network. However, next year I’m headed to Austin, TX and service sounds unreliable in the region.
So I’m curious to hear from our tech savvy readers about early impressions of the Droid 2.0. Further, what do think is the best smart phone on the market right now?
I’m quoted in USA Today this morning talking about Gore’s solutions book–Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, currently at # 21 on Amazon. As I note, it is very good that Gore is focusing on fixes, given that An Inconvenient Truth was faulted for not having enough focus in this area. However, there is always the problem of partisanship: Who listens to Al Gore? Democrats, that’s who. Republicans pretty much dismiss him out of hand–unfortunate, but it’s true. I am very glad Gore is out there raising as much consciousness as possible about the climate crisis; he’s a unique asset. But I am also sure we need very different emissaries to reach the denialists (if that’s even possible).
It is now up on Slate and you can read it here. There are many good points but I’ll just quote the end; Specter responds to my remark about the Internet and misinformation spreading as follows:
There will always be irresponsible blogs and Web sites. But there is also the New York Post. What we need to defeat denialism are independent and thoughtful publications (like this one, for example) that serve up information that is at least as reliable as newspapers have been. We will get there, but it is going to take a while, and the journey has and will be painful. In the mean time, the American public, and particularly those of us who write about science, need to start talking more vigorously about our scientific opportunities and their potential risks. If we don’t start soon, we are going to let some very promising solutions to our worst problems slip away. Do you agree with me that a national discussion on the future of synthetic life is necessary? More importantly, do you think it’s possible?
I think it’s crucially important to have a national discussion on synthetic life…and I’m now writing my next response to Specter. Meanwhile, read his here.
See here. We’re discussing Denialism, which I recommended earlier. I start of the dialogue with Michael Specter like this:
Hi Michael,
First, let me say it has been a pleasure to read Denialism, a book I’ve wanted to dig into ever since you came to speak about it to our Knight Science Journalism Fellows seminar at MIT. It’s heartening to see another author beating the drum about America’s dysfunctional relationship with science, and making the point so vividly and memorably. Your narrative about vaccine skeptics’ attacks on an unassuming and rigorous scientist like Harvard’s Marie McCormick—whom I have also interviewed—made me so angry I wanted to hurl the book across the room (and that’s a good thing!).
What’s more, your book looks past some of the more obvious cases of “denialism”—of climate change, HIV/AIDS, evolution, and so forth—to lesser known realms like personalized medicine and synthetic biology, where our qualms about where science is taking us are likely to manifest next. You don’t deny the older and more famous instances of anti-science sentiment, but you smartly move along to the ones we’re going to be dealing with for years to come.
That’s not to say I agree with everything in Denialism; I think there are some aspects of the big picture that you haven’t painted quite right. Take, for instance, the baffling fact that despite all of our irrationality on topics like vaccination, Americans aren’t actually “anti-science” in any meaningful sense of the term…..
You can read my full entry here. Michael Specter will be replying sometime this afternoon and we’ll take it from there…
The SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition) voyage to the island of garbage in the North Pacific Gyre continues… Watch marine mammal specialist Josh Jones deploy his acoustic array to study dolphins and whales:
More videos from the expedition are available at Dive Into Your Imagination.
There is a middle-of-the-road report on the “new atheist”/”accommodationist” argument in The New Statesman, which, it seems to me, gives a pretty fair account of the dispute. Frankly, I am surprised that there has not been more objective media coverage of this very significant rift; if Lingua Franca magazine were still around, that would be an appropriate place for it, but where are other appropriate outlets, like the Chronicle of Higher Education?
Anyways, I didn’t speak with the New Statesman author, but it seems Barbara Forrest did:
Forrest argues that new atheists should respect the personal nature of faith, and nurture a sense of humility by recognising that scientific evidence does not rule out existence of the divine. They should accept that there is a wide range of views, she says, and stop insisting that everyone follow the “one true way” of atheism. Failing to do so only turns people off in droves.
Yet it seems unlikely that the new atheists have been this damaging. They have been an identifiable group and social force for five years only – starting with Harris’s The End of Faith in 2004, which was followed by Dawkins’s The God Delusion in 2006. More significantly, polls indicate that the proportion of the US public that subscribes to a creationist account of human origins has remained relatively constant for the past 25 years, hovering around 45 per cent. The previous era, which advocated greater respect for religion, does not seem to have won over hearts or minds. So who is to say that taking the opposite approach will drive anyone away?
I want to comment on this, because I think it contains some pretty big misconceptions about the nature of public opinion, and how we might detect changes therein. Read the rest of this entry »
The faces of addiction come in every color and gender. The disease creeps into the lives of those from a wide spectrum of socio-economic levels, backgrounds, and experiences. It crosses continents, latitudes, and longitudes. That’s the thing about addiction–it doesn’t discriminate. Neither should politicians. Particularly when it comes to funding the research to help those who need treatment most.
Jessica’s got a thoughtful post up over at Bioephemera on double standards, politics, and drug treatment research. Having spent two years as a AAAS fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she understands the gravity of the issue. Jess writes:
..research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, [while] increasingly, I’m seeing politicians complain that research to help other drug addicts quit is a waste of money.
Maybe it’s because these other addicts are meth addicts, or potheads, or heroin addicts – probably not people you relate to or approve of. That makes it pretty easy for the media to take cheap shots at crack, etc. addicts, and question whether we should waste money trying to help them. But we should get angry about these cheap shots…Tobacco is still a significant public health problem, and I want to do all we can to help smokers (like my mom) quit, but crack, meth, etc. utterly destroys families and communities. We should be leveraging scientific research every way we can to help these people – not throwing them away or taking shots at them because they’re “bad,” or because we can’t relate to them. They’re real people. They have families.
Nevertheless, people routinely and cynically use drug treatment research as a political football.
Of course it’s not news that politicians bash science research to score points with the voting public: Sarah Palin notoriously mocked fruit fly studies along the campaign trail while John McCain took issue with grizzly bear research and the Adler Planetarium. And the truth is that this tactic probably continues to win votes since science remains such a partisan issue. But when it comes to people–and finding the means to treat those most in need–a political agenda is unquestionably not acceptable.
Lots of us like to imagine there are justifiable reasons we’re the most deserving of the best care when sick. The truth is that better treatment and attention should not come as a result of wealth, location, or the social acceptability of a disease. Like Jess, I agree we must let doctors and scientists continue to study drug abuse and test treatments in the real world. That’s the way research progresses and results are achieved.
I’ll leave you with this illuminating video Jess posted that demonstrates the problem:
