I just got back from a 75 minute ethics seminar for summer researchers (mostly undergraduates) at a large local center of scientific research. While it was pretty hard to distill the important points on ethical research to just over an hour, I can’t tell you how happy I am that they’re even including ethics training in this program.
Anyway, one of the students asked a really good question, which I thought I’d share:
Let’s say you discover that a published result is irreproducible. Who do you tell?
My answer after the jump.
Biological knowledge and what humans value.
Following up from yesterday’s post about how knowledge about the biological basis for X doesn’t tell us whether X is to be valued or pathologized, I need to put a few more points (including some questions) on the table.
First, in the comments thread to the Feministing post that prompted my post, a common (and frustrating) misunderstanding of claims from evolutionary biology has reared its head:
I wouldn’t put the clitoris in the same catagory as the male nipple by any means. The clitoris is not a by-product, and by the way neither is sex. And “liking sex that does not result in reproduction” could be applied to heterosexuality as well. …
Why do most of you not assume that homosexuality is a product of evolution? A direct product (not a by-product) of being human? If it wasn’t a desirable trait in some way then it would have been eliminated through natural selection.
My ethical style (according to an internet quiz).
Chad thinks it’s a good point in the week for internet quizzes. So, since I saw it at Arbitrary Marks, I took a quiz to determine my ethical style. (No, “bossy” isn’t one of the possible results.)
What the quiz says about me after the jump.
Why I have no interest in any possible biological bases for homosexuality.
Jessica at Feministing notices the BBC reporting on a study that conditions in utero may play a causal role in men’s sexual orientation. But, as the title of this post suggests, I do not care what the biological bases for sexual orientation might be, nor indeed whether there are biological bases for sexual orientation. Jessica makes a comment that starts to capture my own non-interest here:
… naturally the larger question with all these why-are-you-gay studies is why do we have to know? I’m terrified that once someone targets a “reason” they’re just going to try and find a way to do away with it.
Reason, tradition, and scripture … in science?
Reader Paul Suliin points me at a post at Pharyngula about the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. Beyond the “Yay, Episcopalians!” it prompted from me (she was trained as an oceanographer!), the post has some interesting things going on in the comments, where commenters have been discussing whether the reason, tradition, and scripture that play a role in Protestant sects might have analogs in science. My answer?
Kind of.
Not another Sb/DonorsChoose attack ad!
This time they’re going after Tara. So sad that a fundraiser would inspire such an underhanded attack. Someone must be feeling very desperate!
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Reading Aetiology was fun — but suddenly I was washing my hands obsessively, sending back rare hamburgers at restaurants, and turning down rest-stop guitar-string tattoos. My friends want to know what happened to the happy-go-lucky guy I used to be.
That blog turned out to be a vector of buzz-kill.
I plan to protect my kids from the germ theory of disease.
Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.
I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World’s Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do.
My sense is that at least part of what’s going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it harder to get what those business types call “buy-in” from the scientists.
Sometimes my half-baked planning works out.
Because I was in Sweden for my younger offspring’s birthday, and because my older offspring’s birthday is nowhere near the school year, we gave them a joint un-birthday party today. Each was allowed to invite eight friends. Of these, a total of five attended (plus a younger sib), but there was some suspense about what the actual turnout would be due to low RSVP rates. Summer vacation can be like that.
Food is pretty straightforward for the age-range involved (4 to 7): raw veggies and dip, chips and salsa, Smart Dogs in blankets. Younger offspring and I squeezed a bunch of lemons from our tree and made a gallon of lemonade. For dessert, cupcakes, brownies, fruit, and ice cream.
The challenge, however, was figuring out activities that would entertain kids in two different age groups (which, for the purposes of playing, they are) for the entire three hours. We did not want these kids making their own unsupervised fun around the house or yard, but the standard party games didn’t really seem like what we were looking for. Pin the Tail on the Donkey can get awfully competitive, and a Piñata was out, because I think dizzy blindfolded kids waving bats around is asking for trouble.
Also, it’s been very hot here lately.
A smear against the braniacs.
Sad to report, the Sb/DonorsChoose anti-biology attack ad seems not to have been an isolated incident. My anonymous source discovered another such ad, this one targeted at the brain sciences crowd.
What has become of our sense of scientific unity? Can we pull together despite attacks like the one reproduced below the fold? Does this mean that Karl Rove is actually taking an interest in the sciences?
Philanthropy gets ugly, as the script for a Sb/DonorsChoose attack ad is discovered.
I should have known it would come to this.
A week into our ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for schools, the warm spirit of pan-science-harmony has started to erode.
An anonymous source has come into possession of the text of an attack ad targeting our biological brethren and sistern. I hate to even give a story like this oxygen, but in the interests of full disclosure, I reproduce the ad below the fold.