Chad broke the story, at least in the ScienceBlogs galaxy, but I wanted to add my own “Woo-hoo!” for John C. Mather and George F. Smoot, who have won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics.
I didn’t want this one to go unnoted, as my mom worked to analyze piles of COBE data and, during this period of her life, made the acquaintance of George Smoot, who (from what I can gather) is not only a really smart scientist but also a good and decent human being.
I’m hoping Mom will leave some good Smoot tidbits in the comments.
Category Archives: Current events
A matter of life and death: scientific judgment without borders.
In Tripoli, Libya, five nurses and a physician are in danger of being executed by firing squad if the international scientific community doesn’t raise its voice.
As reported by Nature:
The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh Hospital in Benghazi in 1998, so far causing the deaths of at least 40 of them. …
During the first trial [in 2004], the Libyan government did ask Luc Montagnier, whose group at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered HIV, and Vittorio Colizzi, an AIDS researcher at Rome’s Tor Vergata University, to examine the scientific evidence. The researchers carried out a genetic analysis of viruses from the infected children, and concluded that many of them were infected long before the medics set foot in Libya in March 1998. Many of the children were also infected with hepatitis B and C, suggesting that the infections were spread by poor hospital hygiene. The infections were caused by subtypes of A/G HIV-1 — a recombinant strain common in central and west Africa, known to be highly infectious.
But the court threw out the report, arguing that an investigation by Libyan doctors had reached the opposite conclusion. Montagnier believes the judgement was based at least partly on mistranslation from English to Arabic of the term ‘recombinant’ — instead of referring to natural recombination of wild viruses, as intended, it was interpreted to mean genetically modified, implying human manipulation.
(Bold emphasis added.)
The evidence suggests that the children were infected due to negligence in the hospital — but not by the six health care providers on trial for their lives. Conveniently, they are foreigners — a Palestinian physician and five Bulgarian nurses, so the Libyan court and hospital can exact “justice” without accepting anything like responsibility for the errors that infected the children.
But to cast scientific evidence aside so you can put your convenient scapegoats before the firing squad is absolutely intolerable.
Friday Sprog Blogging (excess content!): design issues.
This morning, the Free-Ride family heard the news that McDonald’s had finally capitulated to hedgehog campaigners and redesigned the container for its McFlurry ice cream so that it is no longer a hedgie death-trap.
Elder offspring: What was the problem?
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: The hedgehogs would find the containers and push their heads in to lick the sweet leftover ice cream, but then they would get stuck —
Younger offspring: I don’t think ice cream is good for hedgehogs.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: — and because they couldn’t get back out, they’d starve to death.
Elder offspring: Maybe they wouldn’t starve if there was enough leftover ice cream stil in the container.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: Anyway, to keep the hedgehogs from getting stuck, they made a new container with an opening that’s too narrow for the hedgehogs to get into.
Younger offspring: They could still get their tongues in.
Elder offspring: Not as far as an anteater could.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half: You know, if the leftover ice cream attracted ants, that would make a very tasty treat for the anteaters!
Dr. Free-Ride: Are there many anteaters roaming the British countryside?
Younger offspring: The opening is too small for the anteaters to get in and get stuck, right?
Elder offspring: Right.
Dr. Free-Ride: What gets me is how it’s easier to redesign a product container than it is to train McDonald’s customers to throw away their rubbish properly.
Looking for the appropriate rhyme for “twelve”.
So, in the Free-Ride house we’re pleased as punch that Pluto hasn’t lost its planetary status. (No, we don’t consider the “plutons” lesser planets. Eccentric in their orbits, perhaps, but there’s nothing wrong with that.)
As well, we are pleased that the “tenth planet”, whose local fans call it Xena, will be recognized as a plutonic planet. Indeed, we welcome the other two plutons to the fold.
The only problem is, we’ll be needing a new song.
“Nine planets, fine planets” is a nice little ditty, but now there are twelve. What would we even rhyme with “twelve” in the chorus to an update of the planets song? (“Elf planets” is a non-starter, so don’t even suggest it.) And, the update needs to incorporate information not only on relative distance of each of the twelve from the Sun, but also, one would hope, useful information about the distinguishing marks of plutons vs. classical planets.
The original lyrics are here. Your proposals for updates are welcome in the comments.
We’ll give you a deal on textbooks if you don’t mind some ads.
In light of my earlier post on academia and capitalism, occasional commenter Jake asks what I think about the newish move, described in this story from the Associated Press, to cut textbook prices by putting advertisements in them.
So, I’ll give you some key bits of the article with my thoughts interspersed.
What’s that smell?
Well, I can’t smell it from here on the Left Coast, but those of you in nose-shot of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden may soon get to partake of the wonder that is the Amorphophallus titanum, aka “corpse flower”.
Collaboration, competition, and turf wars.
Judging from some of the comments on my latest post about the Tonegawa/Karpova kerfuffle, it’s clear that there is not consensus about precisely what relationship a scientist should pursue (or avoid pursuing) with another scientist working on similar research. Part of the disagreement may come down to a difference of opinion about how important it is for scientists to share knowledge relative to protecting their own interests in the hyper-competitive world of academic science. Another part of the disagreement may come down to standards of similarity (i.e., when can we say that project X and project Y are essentially the same line of research?). Finally, there seems to be some disagreement about what motives we can impute to Tonegawa, especially in light of the recently revealed email exchange between them.
I’ll show you a hostile workplace! (MIT update)
Three Bulls is on top of this, but I want to add a few comments of my own (as is my habit).
The story about Susumu Tonegawa sinking MIT’s attempt to hire Alla Karpova is not over yet. Sure, the Boston Globe (and the MIT News Office) report that MIT has formed a committee to try to get its neuroscientists to collaborate with each other better. But it looks like they’ve got their work cut out for them, judging by the email exchange between Tonegawa and Karpova, obtained by the Globe.
How is your graduate education funded (or not)?
Bitch Ph.D. links an interesting op-ed piece in the Washington Post about the challenges of being a single parent and paying for grad school. Given the academia/parenting discussion we’ve been having here, I figured this was another relevant issue to consider.
I’ve mentioned before that the standard practice in science Ph.D. programs in the U.S. seems to be that students get tuition plus a stipend that, depending on the local cost of living, ranges from barely-adequate to almost-comfortable. There are also a good number of U.S. Ph.D. programs in the humanities and social sciences that offer the same deal to their students, although the stipends are frequently less than those offered by science programs and the number of students admitted to such Ph.D. programs is smaller. (At the same university, my Ph.D. program in chemistry enrolled 56 students the year I entered, while my Ph.D. program in philosophy enrolled 7 of us.)
But, some of the comments on the Bitch Ph.D. post make it look like there are a good number of students in Ph.D, programs who are not getting this kind of support — and thus, are either relying on parents or partners for financial assistance or are going into debt. Also, students in masters programs and professional degree programs (M.D., J.D., etc.) are usually presented with a bill rather than support.
How do these funding patterns (i.e., whether you have to come up with the money to go to school or whether the school covers the costs) affect the choices you’ve made (or are anticipating) about what kind of education and career path to pursue?
Career pressures (working for the feds edition).
I’m working against a deadline today in the three-dimensional world, but the Union of Concerned Scientists has just released the results of a new survey of scientists working for the Food and Drug Administration, and I thought it was worth passing along. I’m never sure what to make of the proportion of the people who get a survey that actually respond to it; UCS sent this survey to almost 6000 FDA scientists and only about 1/6 of them responded. Will the statistics mavens pipe up to tell us whether (and how) this should influence our interpretations of the results?
The UCS press release after the jump.