This week, the Grand CENtral blog features a guest post by Andrew Bissette defending the public’s anxiety about chemicals. In lots of places (including here), this anxiety is labeled “chemophobia”; Bissette spells it “chemphobia”, but he’s talking about the same thing. Bissette argues that the response those of us with chemistry backgrounds often take to [...]

Yesterday, on the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott pondered the question of why a petition asking the governor of Minnesota to investigate ethically problematic research at the University of Minnesota has gathered hundreds of signatures from scholars in bioethics, clinical research, medical humanities, and related disciplines — but only a handful of signatures from [...]

Late last month, I pondered the implications of a piece of research that was mentioned but not described in detail in a perspective piece in the January 4, 2013 issue of Science. [1] In its broad details, the research suggests that the comments that follow an online article about science — and particularly the perceived [...]

Later this week at ScienceOnline 2013, Emily Willingham and I are co-moderating a session called Dialogue or fight? (Un)moderated science communication online. Here’s the description: Cultivating a space where commentators can vigorously disagree with a writer–whether on a blog, Twitter, G+, or Facebook, *and* remain committed to being in a real dialogue is pretty challenging. [...]

This post was inspired by the session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2013 entitled Chemophobia & Chemistry in The Modern World, to be moderated by Dr. Rubidium and Carmen Drahl For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on [...]

I suspect at least some of you who are regular Twitter users have been following the #overlyhonestmethods hashtag, with which scientists have been sharing details of their methodology that are maybe not explicitly spelled out in their published “Materials and Methods” sections. And, as with many other hashtag genres, the tweets in #overlyhonestmethods are frequently [...]

In the United States, a significant amount of scientific research is funded through governmental agencies, using public money. Presumably, this is not primarily aimed at keeping scientists employed and off the streets*, but rather is driven by a recognition that reliable knowledge about how various bits of our world work can be helpful to us [...]

Here’s a thought experiment. While it was prompted by intertubes discussions of evolutionary psychology and some of its practitioners, I take it the ethical issues are not limited to that field. Say there’s an area of scientific research that is at a relatively early stage of its development. People working in this area of research [...]

For scientists, doing science is often about trying to satisfy deep curiosity about how various bits of our world work. For society at large, it often seems like science ought to exist primarily to solve particular pressing problems — or at least, that this is what science ought to be doing, given that our tax [...]

The other day I was looking for a movie I could watch with instant streaming that featured Josh Kornbluth* and I came upon Strange Culture. Strange Culture is a documentary about the arrest of artist and SUNY-Buffalo professor of art history Steve Kurtz on charges of bioterrorism, mail fraud, and wire fraud in 2004 after [...]