During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
Any time you get a majority of people together, there will always be some sensitivity and compassion and outreach for the minority. In science academia, it is obvious; small blips in representation get concern about fixing the problem of how to get more of demographic X.
Greenpeace was founded on a pretense of humanitarian action - between 1969 and 1971, they gathered together because they wanted to put an end to hydrogen bomb testing. Later they lost their way and it became about whales and, in the US, being a political action committee for an entire raft of anti-science issues, protesting everything from clean energy to food. Thanks for doing your part to cause global warming, Greenpeace.
Food, medicine and energy are three of the most crucial problems we face today - and they are all protested by a common demographic.Science tends to think on the supply side - how to feed more people, how to get energy to everyone, how to save lives - while anti-science activists promote mitigation and rationing and retreating into the past. They believe in 13th century energy that hasn't worked, like wind power, unproven herbal medicines and a food system where only the agricultural 1% will be able to eat.
In the wave of articles, blog posts and Tweets that are addressing the impact of the shutdown on science, no one has asked the obvious question: If the president care about science so much, why doesn't he care about science?I have argued that science should be considered a strategic resource, no different than food and oil - yet the President who declared he was going to "restore science to its rightful place" has done nothing of the kind.
As a kid, I drank raw milk. It didn't kill me. If I got sick from it, I have no idea, kids get sick from lots of things and just want to get back to playing baseball, we weren't thinking about how we got ill.
Jeremy Leggett, who runs the largest solar power installer in the UK, is celebrating the World Energy Congress in South Korea by selling you a book predicting the demise of his competitors in conventional energy companies.Well, he is going to be right eventually. Though we supposedly hit Peak Oil in 1992, yet still haven't, the math says they can't be wrong forever. To make his case that fossil fuels are doomed sooner rather than later, he invokes the popular standby of people who want to sound science-y: the brain.
In the early parts of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" he spends a great deal of time outlining how both art history (no, really) and his particular brand of religious revisionism are legitimate ... but repressed by Big Religion.In science, we see that all of the time; X says he can invent perpetual motion or has overturned some aspect of medicine or biology and "dogma" keeps it hidden. It's the myth of the oppressed underdog. Americans love it, it's good reading, David vs. Goliath stuff. It is the story of how America came to be.
NJIT math professor Bruce Bukiet wrote an article here on his Markov process predictions for the baseball playoffs. That wasn't something new, he is in his 13th season of doing just that, often to maddening success.How did he do this time? The Pirates didn't advance, the Cardinals are now facing the Dodgers, but otherwise he nailed it, with the Boston Red Sox and the Detroit Tigers getting ready to square off for the pennant. The math doesn't always work; last year his numbers said Detroit would win the World Series. Nope, Giants again, my gut beat reason and sanity.
If you live in America and hadn't heard, the government is in a shutdown. We've had a full plate of political theater, with armed stand-offs at veteran's memorials and the National Zoo's Panda Cam going dark, presumably to convince us that government is funded on a daily basis - except for all those exempt and 'essential' employees, which number in the millions.If you are asking, no, science is not considered essential to either party, that is why 97% of NASA is on vacation during this budget posturing.
In 1968, after CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite
formally came out against the Viet Nam war, President Lyndon B. Johnson was
apocryphally to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”
When you think about science leadership, you don't often think about United Arab Emirates. Dictatorships don't lend themselves to quality basic research but when they put their minds to applied research and development, and a lot of money, good things can happen.While environmental activists wish we were a little more dictatorship-oriented when it comes to banning cars, like the Chinese did before the Olympics (for everyone but elites, anyway), plenty of scientists might like to have a more dictatorial, mission-based approach to research in the US, like we had with the Manhattan Project and the NASA Moon landing.
If you visit the outside of a meeting regarding biology and policy today, you are sure to see protesters who all insist that they should be voting on the science. They have reached their own consensus and their consensus is that biologists are just tinkerers who are out to create a scientocracy not bound by morality or ethics or anything beyond the cold pursuit of violating nature.
