Tag Archives: reader participation

What do we owe you, and who’s “we” anyway? Obligations of scientists (part 1)

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Near the beginning of the month, I asked my readers — those who are scientists and those who are non-scientists alike — to share their impressions about whether scientists have any special duties or obligations to society that non-scientists don’t have. I also asked whether non-scientists have any special duties or obligations to scientists.

If you click through to those linked posts and read the comments (and check out the thoughtful responses at MetaCookBook and Antijenic Drift), you’ll see a wide range of opinions on both of these questions, each with persuasive reasons offered to back them up.

In this post and a few more that will follow (I’m estimating three more, but we’ll see how it goes), I want to take a closer look at some of these responses. I’m also going to develop some of the standard arguments that have been put forward by professional philosophers and others of that ilk that scientists do, in fact, have special duties. Working through these arguments will include getting into specifics about what precisely scientists owe the non-scientists with whom they’re sharing a world, and about the sources of these putative obligations. If we’re going to take these arguments seriously, though, I think we need to think carefully about the corresponding questions: what do individual non-scientists and society as a whole owe to scientists, and what are the sources of these obligations?

First, let’s lay some groundwork for the discussion.

Right off the bat, I must acknowledge the problem of drawing clear lines around who counts as a scientist and who counts as a non-scientist. For the purposes of getting answers to my questions, I used a fairly arbitrary definition:

Who counts as a scientist here? I’m including anyone who has been trained (past the B.A. or B.S. level) in a science, including people who may be currently involved in that training and anyone working in a scientific field (even in the absences of schooling past the B.A. or B.S. level).

There are plenty of people who would count as “scientist” under this definition who would not describe themselves as scientists — or at least as professional scientists. (I am one of those people.) On the other hand, there are some professional scientists who would say lots of the people who meet my criteria, even those who would describe themselves as professional scientists, don’t really count as members of the tribe of science.

There’s not one obvious way to draw the lines here. The world is frequently messy that way.

That said, at least some of the arguments that claim scientists have special duties make particular assumptions about scientific training. These assumptions point to a source of the putative special duties.

But maybe that just means we should be examining claims about people-whose-training-puts-them-into-a-particular-relationship-with-society having special duties, whether or not those people are all scientists, and whether or not all scientists have had training that falls into that category.

Another issue here is getting to the bottom of what it means to have an obligation.

Some obligations we have may be spelled out in writing, explicitly agreed to, with the force of law behind them, but many of our obligations are not. Many flow not from written contracts but from relationships — whether our relationships with individuals, or with professional communities, or with other sorts of communities of various sizes.

Because they flow from relationships, it’s not unreasonable to expect that when we have obligations, the persons, communities, or other entities to whom we have obligations will have some corresponding obligations to us. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the obligations on each side will be perfectly symmetrical in strength or in kind. When my kids were little, my obligations to them were significantly larger than their obligations to me. Further, as our relationships change, so will our obligations. I owe my kids different things now than I did when they were toddlers. I owe my parents different things now than I did when I was a minor living under their roof.

It’s also important to notice that obligations are not like physical laws: having an obligation is no guarantee that one will live up to it and accordingly display a certain kind of behavior. Among other things, this means that how people act is not a perfectly reliable guide to how they ought to act. It also means that someone else’s failure to live up to her obligations to me does not automatically switch off my obligations to her. In some cases it might, but there are other cases where the nature of the relationship means my obligations are still in force. (For example, if my teenage kid falls down on her obligation to treat me with minimal respect, I still have a duty to feed and shelter her.)

That obligations are not like physical laws means there’s likely to be more disagreement around what we’re actually obliged to do. Indeed, some are likely to reject putative obligations out of hand because they are socially constructed. Here, I don’t think we need to appeal to a moral realist to locate objective moral facts that could ground our obligations. I’m happy to bite the bullet. Socially constructed obligations aren’t a problem because they emerge from the social processes that are an inescapable part of sharing a world — including with people who are not exactly like ourselves. These obligations flow from our understandings of the relationships we bear to one another, and they are no less “real” for being socially constructed than are bridges.

One more bit of background to ponder: The questions I posed asked whether scientists and non-scientists have any special duties or obligations to each other. A number of respondents (mostly on the scientist side of the line, as I defined it) suggested that scientists’ duties are not special, but simply duties of the same sort everyone in society has (with perhaps some differences in the fine details).

The main arguments for scientists having special duties tend to turn on scientists being in possession of special powers. This is the scientist as Spider-Man: with great power comes great responsibility. But whether the scientist has special powers may be the kind of thing that looks very different on opposite sides of the scientist-non-scientist divide; the scientists responding to my questions don’t seem to see themselves as very different from other members of society. Moreover, nearly every superhero canon provides ample evidence that power, and the responsibility that accompanies it, can feel like a burden. (One need look no further than seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to wonder if taking a break from her duty to slay vamps would have made Buffy a more pleasant person with whom to share a world.)

Arguably, scientists can do some things the rest of us can’t. How does that affect the relationship between scientists and non-scientists? What kind of duties could flow from that relationship? These powers, and the corresponding responsibilities, will be the focus of the next post.

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Posts in this series:

Questions for the non-scientists in the audience.

Questions for the scientists in the audience.

What do we owe you, and who’s “we” anyway? Obligations of scientists (part 1)

Scientists’ powers and ways they shouldn’t use them: Obligations of scientists (part 2)

Don’t be evil: Obligations of scientists (part 3)

How plagiarism hurts knowledge-building: Obligations of scientists (part 4)

What scientists ought to do for non-scientists, and why: Obligations of scientists (part 5)

What do I owe society for my scientific training? Obligations of scientists (part 6)

Are you saying I can’t go home until we cure cancer? Obligations of scientists (part 7)

Questions for the non-scientists in the audience.

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Today in my “Ethics in Science” class, we took up a question that reliably gets my students (a mix of science majors and non-science major) going: Do scientists have special obligations to society that non-scientists don’t have?

Naturally, there are some follow-up questions if you lean towards an affirmative answer to that first question. For example:

  • What specifically are those special obligations?
  • Why do scientists have these particular obligations when non-scientists in their society don’t?
  • How strong are those obligations? (In other words, under what conditions would it be ethically permissible for scientists to fall short of doing what the obligations say they should do?)

I think these are important — and complex — questions, some of which go to the heart of what’s involved in scientists and non-scientists successfully sharing a world. But, it always helps me to hear the voices (and intuitions) of some of the folks besides me who are involved in this sharing-a-world project.

So, for the non-scientists in the audience, I have some questions I hope you will answer in the comments on this post.*

1. Are there special duties or obligations you think scientists have to the non-scientists with whom they’re sharing a world? If yes, what are they?

2. If you think scientists have special duties or obligations to the rest of society, why do they have them? Where did they come from? (If you don’t think scientists have special duties or obligations to the rest of society, why not?

3. What special duties or obligations (if any) do you think non-scientists have to the scientists with whom they’re sharing a world?

Who counts as a non-scientist here? I’m including anyone who has not received scientific training past the B.A. or B.S. level and who is not currently working in a scientific field (even in the absences of schooling past the B.A. or B.S. level).

That means I count as a scientist here (even though I’m not currently employed as a scientist or otherwise involved in scientific knowledge-building).

If you want to say something about these questions but you’re a scientist according to this definition, never fear! You are cordially invited to answer a corresponding set of questions, posed to the scientists with whom non-scientists are sharing a world, on my other blog.
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* If you prefer to answer the questions on your own blog, or in some other online space, please drop a link in the comments here, or point me to it via Twitter (@docfreeride) or email (dr.freeride@gmail.com).

Blogging and recycling: thoughts on the ethics of reuse.

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Owing to summer-session teaching and a sprained ankle, I have been less attentive to the churn of online happenings than I usually am, but an email from SciCurious brought to my attention a recent controversy about a blogger’s “self-plagiarism” of his own earlier writing in his blog posts (and in one of his books).

SciCurious asked for my thoughts on the matter, and what follows is very close to what I emailed her in reply this morning. I should note that these thoughts were composed before I took to the Googles to look for links or to read up on the details of the particular controversy playing out. This means that I’ve spoken to what I understand as the general lay of the ethical land here, but I have probably not addressed some of the specific details that people elsewhere are discussing.

Here’s the broad question: Is it unethical for a blogger to reuse in blog posts material she has published before (including in earlier blog posts)?

A lot of people who write blogs are using them with the clear intention (clear at least to themselves) of developing ideas for “more serious” writing projects — books, or magazine articles or what have you. I myself am leaning heavily on stuff I’ve blogged over the past seven-plus years in writing the textbook I’m trying to finish, and plan similarly to draw on old blog posts for at least two other books that are in my head (if I can ever get them out of my head and into book form).

That this is an intended outcome is part of why many blog authors who are lucky enough get paying blogging gigs, especially those of us from academia, fight hard for ownership of what they post and for the explicit right to reuse what they’ve written.

So, I wouldn’t generally judge reuse of what one has written in blog posts as self-plagiarism, nor as unethical. Of course, my book(s) will explicitly acknowledge my blogs as the site-of-first-publication for earlier versions of the arguments I put forward. (My book(s) will also acknowledge the debt I owe to commenters on my posts who have pushed me to think much more carefully about the issues I’ve posted on.)

That said, if one is writing in a context where one has agreed to a rule that says, in effect, “Everything you write for us must be shiny and brand-new and never published by you before elsewhere in any form,” then one is obligated not to recycle what one has written elsewhere. That’s what it means to agree to a rule. If you think it’s a bad rule, you shouldn’t agree to it — and indeed, perhaps you should mount a reasoned argument as to why it’s a bad rule. Agreeing to follow the rule and then not following the rule, however, is unethical.

There are venues (including the Scientific American Blog Network) that are OK with bloggers of long standing brushing off posts from the archives. I’ve exercised this option more than once, though I usually make an effort to significantly update, expand, or otherwise revise those posts I recycle (if for no other reason than I don’t always fully agree with what that earlier time-slice of myself wrote).

This kind of reuse is OK with my corporate master. Does that necessarily make it ethical?

Potentially it would be unethical if it imposed a harm on my readers — that is, if they (you) were harmed by my reposting those posts of yore. But, I think that would require either that I had some sort of contract (express or implied) with my readers that I only post thoughts I have never posted before, or that my reposts mislead them about what I actually believe at the moment I hit the “publish” button. I don’t have such a contract with my readers (at least, I don’t think I do), and my revision of the posts I recycle is intended to make sure that they don’t mislead readers about what I believe.

Back-linking to the original post is probably good practice (from the point of view of making reuse transparent) … but I don’t always do this.

One reason is that the substantial revisions make the new posts substantially different — making different claims, coming to different conclusions, offering different reasons. The old post is an ancestor, but it’s not the same creature anymore.

Another reason is that some of the original posts I’m recycling are from my ancient Blogspot blog, from whose backend I am locked out after a recent Google update/migration — and I fear that the blog itself may disappear, which would leave my updated posts with back-links to nowhere. Bloggers tend to view back-links to nowhere as a very bad thing.

The whole question of “self-plagiarism” as an ethical problem is an interesting one, since I think there’s a relevant difference between self-plagiarism and ethical reuse.

Plagiarism, after all, is use of someone else’s words or ideas (or data, or source-code, etc.) without proper attribution. If you’re reusing your own words or ideas (or whatnot), it’s not like you’re misrepresenting them as your own when they’re really someone else’s.

There are instances, however, where self-reuse presents gets people rightly exercised. For example, some scientists reuse their own stuff to create the appearance in the scientific literature that they’ve conducted more experimental studies than they actually have, or that there are more published results supporting their hypotheses than there really are. This kind of artificial multiplication of scientific studies is ethically problematic because it is intended to mislead (and indeed, may succeed in misleading), not because the scientists involved haven’t given fair credit to the earlier time-slices of themselves. (A recent editorial for ACS Nano gives a nice discussion of other problematic aspects of “self-plagiarism” within the context of scientific publishing.)

The right ethical diagnosis of the controversy du jour may depend in part on whether journalistic ethics forbid reuse (explicitly or implicitly) — and if so, on whether (or in what conditions) bloggers count as journalists. At some level, this goes beyond what is spelled out in one’s blogging contract and turns also on the relationship between the blogger and the reader. What kind of expectations can the reader have of the blogger? What kind of expectations ought the reader to have of the blogger? To the extent that blogging is a conversation of a sort (especially when commenting is enabled), is it appropriate for that conversation to loop back to territory visited before, or is the blogger obligated always to break new ground?

And, if the readers are harmed when the blogger recycles her own back-catalogue, what exactly is the nature of that harm?

Who matters (or should) when scientists engage in ethical decision-making?

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One of the courses I teach regularly at my university is “Ethics in Science,” a course that explores (among other things) what’s involved in being a good scientist in one’s interactions with the phenomena about which one is building knowledge, in one’s interactions with other scientists, and in one’s interactions with the rest of the world.

Some bits of this are pretty straightforward (e.g., don’t make up data out of whole cloth, don’t smash your competitor’s lab apparatus, don’t use your mad science skillz to engage in a campaign of super-villainy that brings Gotham City to its knees). But, there are other instances where what a scientist should or should not do is less straightforward. This is why we spend significant time and effort talking about — and practicing — ethical decision-making (working with a strategy drawn from Muriel J. Bebeau, “Developing a Well-Reasoned Response to a Moral Problem in Scientific Research”). Here’s how I described the basic approach in a post of yore:

Ethical decision-making involves more than having the right gut-feeling and acting on it. Rather, when done right, it involves moving past your gut-feeling to see who else has a stake in what you do (or don’t do); what consequences, good or bad, might flow from the various courses of action available to you; to whom you have obligations that will be satisfied or ignored by your action; and how the relevant obligations and interests pull you in different directions as you try to make the best decision. Sometimes it’s helpful to think of the competing obligations and interests as vectors, since they come with both directions and magnitudes — which is to say, in some cases where they may be pulling you in opposite directions, it’s still obvious which way you should go because the magnitude of one of the obligations is so much bigger than of the others.

We practice this basic strategy by using it to look at a lot of case studies. Basically, the cases describe a situation where the protagonist is trying to figure out what to do, giving you a bunch of details that seem salient to the protagonist and leaving some interesting gaps where the protagonist maybe doesn’t have some crucial information, or hasn’t looked for it, or hasn’t thought to look for it. Then we look at the interested parties, the potential consequences, the protagonist’s obligations, and the big conflicts between obligations and interests to try to work out what we think the protagonist should do.

Recently, one of my students objected to how we approach these cases.

Specifically, the student argued that we should radically restrict our consideration of interested parties — probably to no more than the actual people identified by name in the case study. Considering the interests of a university department, or of a federal funder, or of the scientific community, the student asserted, made the protagonist responsible to so many entities that the explicit information in the case study was not sufficient to identify the correct course of action.*

And, the student argued, one interested party that it was utterly inappropriate for a scientist to include in thinking through an ethical decision is the public.

Of course, I reminded the student of some reasons you might think the public would have an interest in what scientists decide to do. Members of the public share a world with scientists, and scientific discoveries and scientific activities can have impacts on things like our environment, the safety of our buildings, what our health care providers know and what treatments they are able to offer us, and so forth. Moreover, at least in the U.S., public funds play an essential role in supporting both scientific research and the training of new scientists (even at private universities) — which means that it’s hard to find an ethical decision-making situation in a scientific training environment that is completely isolated from something the public paid for.

My student was not moved by the suggestion that financial involvement should buy the public any special consideration as a scientist was trying to decide the right thing to do.

Indeed, central to the student’s argument was the idea that the interests of the public, whether with respect to science or anything else, are just too heterogeneous. Members of the public want lots of different things. Taking these interests into account could only be a distraction.

As well, the student asserted, too small a proportion of the public actually cares about what scientists are up to that the public, even if it were more homogeneous, ought to be taken into account by the scientists grappling with their own ethical quandaries. Even worse, the student ventured, those that do care what scientists are up to are not necessarily well-informed.

I’m not unsympathetic to the objection to the extreme case here: if a scientist felt required to somehow take into account the actual particular interests of each individual member of the public, that would make it well nigh impossible to actually make an ethical decision without the use of modeling methods and supercomputers (and even then, maybe not). However, it strikes me that it shouldn’t be totally impossible to anticipate some reasonable range of interests non-scientists have that might be impacted by the consequences of a scientist’s decision in various ways. Which is to say, the lack of total fine-grained information about the public, or of complete predictability of the public’s reactions, would surely make it more challenging to make optimal ethical decisions, but these challenges don’t seem to warrant ignoring the public altogether just so the problem you’re trying to solve becomes more tractable.

In any case, I figure that there’s a good chance some members of the public** may be reading this post. To you, I pose the following questions:

  1. Do you feel like you have an interest in what science and scientists are up to? If so, how would you describe that interest? If not, why not?
  2. Do you think scientists should treat “the public” as an interested party when they try to make ethical decisions? Why or why not?
  3. If you think scientists should treat “the public” as an interested party when they try to make ethical decisions, what should scientists be doing to get an accurate read on the public’s interests?
  4. And, for the sake of symmetry, do you think members of the public ought to take account of the interests of science or scientists when they try to make ethical decisions? Why or why not?

If, for some reason, you feel like chiming in on these questions in the comments would expose you to unwanted blowback, you can also email me your responses (dr dot freeride at gmail dot com) for me to anonymize and post on your behalf.

Thanks in advance for sharing your view on this!

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*Here I should note that I view the ambiguities within the case studies as a feature, not a bug. In real life, we have to make good ethical decisions despite uncertainties about what consequences will actually follow our actions, for example. Those are the breaks.

**Officially, scientists are also members of the public — even if you’re stuck in the lab most of the time!

Help high school “nerds” visit the Large Hadron Collider.

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Last week, I got a really nice email, and a request, from a reader. She wrote:

I am a high school senior and an avid follower of your blog. I am almost definitely going to pursue science in college – either chemistry, physics, or engineering; I haven’t quite decided yet! I am the editor of my school’s newspaper, and I frequently write about science topics; I find science journalism interesting and possibly will pursue it as a career. 

I’m writing because this spring, 32 physics students from my high school will hopefully be taking a trip to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. We are extremely excited to make the trip, as it will allow us to glimpse some of the most groundbreaking physics research in the world. Twenty-two of the 32 students going are girls, and we are all involved with the physics department at our school. Women are overwhelmingly outnumbered in the science classes at my school, especially the tougher Advanced Placement classes; thus, taking this trip with a majority of women feels like a triumph.

My correspondent is, this year, the president of her high school’s science club, which is affectionately called “BACON: the best All-around Club of Nerds”. If you look at the BACON website, you will see that they do some pretty neat stuff. They field a bunch of teams for competitions like the Science Olympiad, Zero Robotics, and the Spirit of Innovation Challenge. And, they launch weather balloons to capture video and still photographs in a near space environment, have a day of launching model rockets and flying model airplanes, and have created a giant tank of ooblek to run across.

Basically, the kind of science-y stuff that might make high school not just tolerable but fun, which I think is a pretty big deal.

Here’s where we get to the request.

The planned high school trip bringing the 32 students from Virginia to CERN will be exciting, but expensive. So, as students have come to do for pretty much every field trip, the BACON members are doing some fundraising. Here’s their fundraising page, from which we learn:

As we speak, scientists at CERN are conducting groundbreaking research and rewriting the science textbooks for future generations. It is imperative that our students gain an interest and understanding in such endeavors. A two-day tour of CERN will surely aid in our students’ comprehension of particle physics, the study of the mechanisms and interactions that underlie all chemical, biological, and cosmological processes. But more importantly, through exposure to the leading edge of physics research, this trip is intended to excite students about scientific progress and demonstrate the power of experimentation and collaboration outside of the classroom. …

We need money to cover the cost of travel, lodging, food, and tours. Specifically, the cost breakdown per student is as follows: $1000 for travel; $300 for meals; $300 for lodging; $100 for tours and exhibits. Thirty-two students are scheduled to attend, and without fundraising the total cost is $1700 per student. Unfortunately, not all students can afford this. Any donations are welcome to lower the per-student cost and facilitate this trip for all who want to go!

For donations of various sizes, they are offering perks ranging from thank you cards and pictures of the trip, to signed T-shirts, to something special from the CERN gift shop, to a video to thank you posted on YouTube.

If you want to help but can spare the cash for a monetary donation, you may still be able to help these plucky science students make their CERN trip a reality:

Tell your friends! Share this link with others: indiegogo.com/baconatcern. There are also other ways to help us besides monetary donations. Do you have any objects, gift certificates, coupons, or other items you could donate for a raffle? Do you have an idea for a fundraising event we could host? If you want to get involved, please email us: chsbacon@gmail.com. We are really looking forward to this amazing opportunity, and we appreciate any help you can provide. Thank you!

I know I’m looking forward to living vicariously through this group (since no doubt I’ll be grading mountains of papers when they’re scheduled to tour the LHC). If you want to pay some science enthusiasm forward to the next generation, here’s one way to do it.

Meanwhile, I will inquire about whether the BACONite can share some highlights of their trip (and their preparations for it) here.

Suit against UCLA in fatal lab fire raises question of who is responsible for safety.

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Right before 2011 ended (and, as it happened, right before the statute of limitations ran out), the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office filed felony charges against the University of California regents and UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran in connection with a December 2008 fire in Harran’s lab that resulted in the death of a 23-year-old staff research assistant, Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji.

As reported by The Los Angeles Times:

Harran and the UC regents are charged with three counts each of willfully violating occupational health and safety standards. They are accused of failing to correct unsafe work conditions in a timely manner, to require clothing appropriate for the work being done and to provide proper chemical safety training.

Harran, 42, faces up to 4½ years in state prison, Robison said. He is out of town and will surrender to authorities when he returns, said his lawyer, Thomas O’Brien, who declined to comment further.

UCLA could be fined up to $1.5 million for each of the three counts.

[UCLA vice chancellor for legal affairs Kevin] Reed described the incident as “an unfathomable tragedy,” but not a crime.

The article notes that Sangji was working as a staff research assistant in Harran’s lab while she was applying to law schools. It mentions that she was a 2008 graduate of Pomona College but doesn’t mention whether she had any particular background in chemistry.

As it happens, the work she was doing in the Harran lab presented particular hazards:

Sangji was transferring up to two ounces of t-butyl lithium from one sealed container to another when a plastic syringe came apart in her hands, spewing a chemical compound that ignites when exposed to air. The synthetic sweater she wore caught fire and melted onto her skin, causing second- and third-degree burns.

In May 2009, Cal/OSHA fined UCLA a total of $31,875 after finding that Sangji had not been trained properly and was not wearing protective clothing.

Two months before the fatal fire, UCLA safety inspectors found more than a dozen deficiencies in the same lab, according to internal investigative and inspection reports reviewed by The Times. Inspectors found that employees were not wearing requisite protective lab coats and that flammable liquids and volatile chemicals were stored improperly.

Corrective actions were not taken before the fire, the records showed.

Actions to address the safety deficiencies were taken after the fire, but these were, obviously, too late to save Sangji.

I’m not a lawyer, and I’m not interested in talking about legalities here — whether for the particular case the Los Angeles DA’s office will be pursuing against UCLA or for academic research labs more generally.

Rather, I want to talk about ethics.

Knowledge-building can be a risky business. In some situations, it involves materials that pose direct dangers to the people handling them, to the people in the vicinity, and even to people some distance away who are just trying to get on with their lives (e.g., if the hazardous materials get out into our shared environment).

Generally, scientists doing research that involves hazardous materials do what they can to find out how to mitigate the hazards. They learn appropriate ways of handling the materials, of disposing of them, of protecting themselves and others in case of accidents.

But, knowing the right ways to deal with hazardous materials is not sufficient to mitigate the risks. Proper procedures need to be implemented. Otherwise, your knowledge about the risks of hazardous materials is mostly useful in explaining bad outcomes after they happen.

So, who is ethically responsible for keeping an academic chemistry lab safe? And what exactly is the shape this responsibility takes — that is, what should he or she be doing to fulfill that obligation?

What’s the responsibility of the principal investigator, the scientist leading the research project and, in most cases, heading the lab?

What’s the responsibility of the staff research assistant or technician, doing necessary labor in the lab for a paycheck?

What’s the responsibility of the graduate student in the research group, trying to learn how to do original research and to master the various skills he or she will need to become a PI someday? (It’s worth noting here that there’s a pretty big power differential between grad students and PIs, which may matter as far as how we apportion responsibility. Still, this doesn’t mean that those with less power have no ethical obligations pulling on them.)

What’s the responsibility of the institution under whose auspices the lab is operating? When a safety inspection turns up problems and issues a list of issues that must be corrected, has that responsibility been discharged? When faculty members hire new staff research assistants, or technicians, or graduate students, does the institution have any specific obligations to them (as far as providing safety training, or a place to bring their safety concerns, or protective gear), or does this all fall to the PI?

And, what kind of obligations do these parties have in the case that one of the other players falls down on some of his or her obligations?

If I were still working in a chemistry lab, thinking through ethical dimensions like these before anything bad happened would not strike me as a purely academic exercise. Rather, it would be essential to ensuring that everyone stays as safe as possible.

So, let’s talk about what that would look like.

Why does Thanksgiving dinner make you sleepy?

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Thanksgiving DessertsFor years, you’ve heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey — or more precisely, blamed upon the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who want to get sleepy.

Let me note, before we go on, that for all its association with tryptophan, turkey doesn’t even crack the top 50 in this list of tryptophan-rich foods. (Number one: stellar sea lion kidney.)

In any case, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times, that appeared in time for Thanksgiving 2008, the real story may be more complicated than that:

Continue reading→

#scibloggers4students: DonorsChoose Board of Directors rewards your procrastination

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… but only if you manage to actually make a donation before the end of the drive!

The DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors is excited about the success of the ongoing Science Bloggers for Students challenge. But, between now and the end of the drive Saturday, the Board of Directors thinks we can do more to connect public school classrooms with the resources they need to make education come alive. So, to encourage you to give — especially of you’ve been putting it off or letting someone else do it — the Board of Directors is matching all donations to Science Bloggers for Students placed between the first moment of Thursday October 20th and the last moment of Saturday, October 22nd (midnight to midnight, Eastern time).
 
Here’s how the match works:

  • At the end of the three day period, all dollars donated will be totaled, and the Board of Directors will match those dollars. If the donors put up $100, the Board of Directors puts up $100. If the donors put up $10,000, the Board of Directors puts up $10,000. For every dollar you give, you are soaking the DonorsChoose.org Board of Directors for a dollar! Maybe that kind of power to double your impact will help you find a few spare dollars to give.
  • The number of dollars given by the Board of Directors will be divided by the number of people who donated, and gift codes will be issued to every donor (via e-mail) for an equal share of the matching dollars. So, if 100 people donate a total of $10,000, each donor will receive a $100 DonorsChoose.org gift code.
  • Individuals will, in turn, have the chance to apply the funds to whatever classroom project they choose.

This is a great opportunity to spend someone else’s money to help kids learn about electricity, or to help a biology classroom get microscopes, or to fund a field trip to a science museum (all projects you can support through my giving page) — or to choose some other classroom project that is dear to your heart and that needs funding.
This is also a good time to show the world that Scientific American blog readers love science so much that they want to help public school classrooms get the materials and experiences in place so students can find their love of science, too. The Scientific American Blogs leaderboard could use your help creeping up the challenge motherboard. With the match now in place, donations in any amount, even $10, or $5, or $1, will make a difference.

(And remember, if you make a donation in any amount to my challenge giving page, you get to assign me a topic for a blog post. You know you want to …)

DonorsChoose #scibloggers4students: donate and set my blogging agenda.

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You already know that the science-inclined precincts of the blogosphere are in the midst of Science Bloggers for Students 2011, in which we and DonorsChoose ask you to contribute funds to public school classroom projects which provide books, science kits, safety equipment and reagents, field trips, and other essentials to make learning come alive for students.

You may also recall that the drive this year runs through October 22nd. And, seeing as how that’s more than a week away, you maybe have making a donation on the second (or third) page of your to-do list. Or, you figure someone else will do it.

A bunch of other folks (including me!) have donated funds to get the challenge rolling — the overall total for the drive as I compose this is $13,768 — but there are so many more classroom projects waiting to be funded. Inertia may be a comfortable default, especially in the face of need so great that its enormity is paralyzing, but if you can spare a few bucks you will be doing something tangible to be a force for good.

And, it’s easy. Visit my giving page, check out the projects described there, enter the amount of money you want to give, and check out. It’s as quick and painless as buying a book or a T-shirt online.

Plus, I’m prepared to make it worth your while.

Set my blogging agenda!

“Doing Good Science” is a relatively new blog on a relatively new blog network. In my first post here, I said a little about the sorts of topics I plan to take up on the blog, but if you’re willing to step up to help DonorsChoose, I’m willing to give you more control of what I blog about — at least for the length of a post.

Until the end of the drive (October 22nd), if you make a donation of any size to my giving page, you get to assign me a blog post topic.

Is there a particular misconduct scandal you want me to examine? A matter of scientific methodology you want me to explore? An issue where the tribe of science and the larger public see the ethical landscape differently that you want me to write about? Make a donation, forward me a copy of the email DonorsChoose sends you to confirm your donation to my giving page, tell me what you want me to write about, and I’ll make it happen.

OK, you know the facts. You know what to do.

DonorsChoose #scibloggers4students: now occupying your social media.

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A video communiqué from Science Bloggers for Students 2011:

#scibloggers4students occupy your social media

The drive runs through October 22, and a number of Scientific American blogs (Anthropology in Practice, The Artful Amoeba, Doing Good Science, EvoEcoLab, PsiVid, Science Sushi, The Thoughtful Animal, and The Urban Scientist … so far) are participating.

Here’s the Scientific American leaderboard.

Here’s my giving page.

If you can spare a few bucks, you can help bring school kids the books, equipment, field trips, or other goodies that will make their science education come alive.