Every year the National Science Foundation releases its Science and Engineering Indicators. While full online access won't be available until February 15th, you can download PDFs for various chapters right now. Here are a few highlights from Chapter 7 on public attitudes and understanding that caught my eye:
Levels of factual knowledge of science in the United States are comparable to those in Europe and appear to be higher than those in Japan, China, or Russia.
In 2010, 69% of Americans said that the benefits of scientific research have strongly or slightly outweighed the harmful results; 9% said the harmful results outweighed the benefits.
In 2010, 69% of Americans said that the benefits of scientific research have strongly or slightly outweighed the harmful results; 9% said the harmful results outweighed the benefits.
In 2009, 73% of Americans said spending on basic scientific research "usually pays off in the long run"; fewer than two in ten said such spending was "not worth it." About the same percentage (74%) said spending on engineering and technology "usually pays off in the long run."
In 2010, roughly equal percentages of Americans expressed "a great deal" of confidence in medical leaders and scientific leaders; military leaders were the only group in whom more Americans expressed a great deal of confidence.
On science-related public policy issues (global climate change, stem cell research, nuclear power, and genetically modified foods), Americans regard science and engineering leaders as both knowledgeable and impartial--relative to other leaders--and believe they should be influential in decisions about these topics.
Americans also perceive a considerable lack of consensus among scientists on these issues.
It's interesting, given that last point, that survey respondents still would rather have environmental scientists than elected officials or business leaders have a great deal of influence on what to do about global warming. The same holds for medical researchers and decisions on whether to restrict sale of genetically modified foods or on government funding for stem cell research, even for nuclear engineers on deciding whether to expand the use of nuclear power. Only on taxes did respondents prefer elected leaders rather than economists to have a great deal of influence on deciding whether federal taxes should be reduced.
In yesterday's Nature, the editors identified ten people (scientists) who mattered this year. They include Dario Autiero, who headed the International Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) at CERN. If that doesn't ring a bell, maybe faster than light neutrinos will. OPERA is the experimental group with evidence that seems to indicate neutrinos can move faster than the speed of light.
I was delighted to see that Rosie Redfield (pictured to the left) was one of the other people featured. If you followed the #arseniclife saga at all, you'll recognize Rosie as the microbiologist and blogger whose blog post kicked off a firestorm of criticism about claims that a strain of bacteria had been identified that could substitute arsenic for phosphorous in biomolecules -- including DNA.
Nature uses Rosie and her role in the #arseniclife saga to talk about open science and the new role of social media in science.
To Redfield, the exercise has shown how social media tools are binding
science into a community closer than it has been since the early
twentieth century, when it was possible for scientists to personally
know everyone in their field. "Scientists are much more able to
communicate with people we don't know, and to learn from people we've
never met," she says.
I agree with Ford Doolittle.
Ford Doolittle, a biochemist who hired Redfield for her first faculty
job and is now at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, says that
Redfield's work has proved a point by showing how science is supposed to
work. "Science is way too uncritical of itself," says Doolittle. "We
need more Rosies out there."
Congratulations Rosie, and keep up the great work.
I am participating in a seminar involving undergraduate journalism students and graduate students from my department (Ecology & Evolutionary Biology) and the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment. Its purpose is to give journalism students a chance to practice their interviewing skills and to give science students practice at communicating their work to reporters. For our last meeting this year, we decided to talk about the #arseniclife episode. What I've collected below are links and resources we'll use in our discussion.
Participants: All of the resources linked to below are relatively short and easy to read (except for Rosie Redfield's posts -- just try to get a sense of her objections, don't worry about the details). Scientists will especially want to ponder the question of how peer review works in very public science, and journalists will want to think about Carl Zimmer's take on Tom Clynes' Popular Science piece about the controversy and Clynes' response. The Deepak Singh video gives a non-biologist, non-journalist take on the role of Twitter in the controversy (hence the hashtag in the title of this post).
Media advisory from NASA announcing an astrobiology discovery (29 November 2010)
WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on
Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact
the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the
study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the
universe.
NASA press release accompnaying news conference (2 December 2010)
Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."
Rosie Redfield's blog post criticizing the paper1 (4 December 2010)
Here's a detailed review of the new paper from NASA claiming to have isolated a bacterium that substitutes arsenic for phosphorus on its macromolecules and metabolites. (Wolfe-Simon et al. 2010, A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus.) NASA's shameful analysis of the alleged bacteria in the Mars meteorite made me very suspicious of their microbiology, an attitude that's only strengthened by my reading of this paper. Basically, it doesn't present ANY convincing evidence that arsenic has been incorporated into DNA (or any other biological molecule).
Some scientists are left wondering why NASA made such a big deal over a paper with so many flaws. "I suspect that NASA may be so desperate for a positive story that they didn't look for any serious advice from DNA or even microbiology people," says John Roth of UC-Davis. The experience reminded some of another press conference NASA held in 1996. Scientists unveiled a meteorite from Mars in which they said there were microscopic fossils. A number of critics condemned the report (also published in Science) for making claims it couldn't back up. And today many scientists think that all of the alleged signs of life in the rocks could have just as easily been made on a lifeless planet.
The controversy over the Martian meteorite still sputters on today because they contain only a few alleged fossils, rather than living bacteria. There are only a limited number of tests that scientists can run on the rocks, and their results remain murky. Fortunately, that's not the case for GFAJ-1. Critics say that a few straightforward tests on the bacteria would show whether they really do have arsenic-based DNA once and for all. And the NASA scientists say they're ready to hand out GFAJ-1 to researchers who want to study it. This controversy may be burning brightly at the moment, but it probably won't burn for long.
Last December, Felisa Wolfe-Simon announced the discovery of a microbe that could change the way we understand life in the universe. Soon she found herself plunged into a maelstrom of bitter backlash and intemperate criticism. A dispatch from the frontiers of the new peer review.
Carl Zimmer's blog post commenting on Clynes' article (20 October 2011)
It's a good article. I won't be forgetting the opening scene anytime soon, when Wolfe-Simon is ambivalently posing for a television crew, and she sinks into the mud of Mono Lake, where she first encountered GFAJ-1.
But I do share some of the reservations that science writer David Dobbs expresses over at his blog Neuron Culture. As a genre, the profile is one of the most addictive and enjoyable of all. It doesn't matter if the profile is of a hero or a scoundrel; the story is good as long as it's full of human nature in all its extremes. But profiles of scientists are tricky, because science transcends any single individual scientist. To do the science justice, you may need to pull the spotlight away and get into the less human stuff, like chemical reactions and pH levels.
To that end, I'd like to add a bit of context to a paragraph that you quote, regarding the storm of criticism and the paper's authors going "underground." You follow the excerpt with your comment that "Clynes has us believe that this barrage of extraordinary, brutal criticism (or perhaps questions from journalists) forced Wolf-Simon and her colleagues to go into witness protection."
Actually, I don't believe that, nor would I have my readers believe it. I think it would have been useful to your readers for you to have included my next paragraph, which makes it clear that I am in fact spotlighting both sides of a polarized dialogue regarding this particular point:
Microbiologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California at Davis called the lack of response "absurd" and told Carl Zimmer from Slate, "They carried out science by press release and press conference. They are now hypocritical if they say that the only response should be in the scientific literature."
Though I didn't state my opinion in the story (better for readers to decide for themselves), I will here: I think that Eisen is on the money here.
I'm not going to do any more work on this - not going to do experiments to find out why arsenate stimulates growth, unless the mass spec shows that there really is arsenic in the DNA of arsenate-grown cells. The growth stimulation I'm seeing isn't a replication of Wolfe-Simon et al's report that their cultures grew with arsenate but not without it, but it might reflect the same biological process.
Deepak Singh3 provides a video overview. Read the posts above before you watch the video. The video won't make much sense without that background.
If you really can't get enough of #arseniclife, here are some more links:
The version of the Wolfe-Simon paper as it originally appeared on ScienceExpress: (2 December 2010) The version of the Wolfe-Simon paper as it finally appeared in Science: (3 June 2011) Table of Contents for Science (scroll to the bottom for the technical comments): (3 June 2011) Links from The Guardian through the end of December 2010: (Story Tracker) Various blog posts I made in which I mentioned arsenic-based life (Uncommon Ground) Bora Zivkovic' comprehensive collection of #arseniclife links (A Blog Around the Clock) A one-year anniversary update (Cosmic Log)
In early September, Diederik Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands under suspicion of research fraud. Stapel is a social psychologist, and a preliminary report released a little over a week ago found that more than 30 papers in peer reviewed journals included fake data.
I take two lessons from this incident.
First, that a paper has passed peer review is not a guarantee that it's right. It's a guarantee that the authors have convinced an editor or two and a set of reviewers that the data and conclusions in the paper are sound and interesting, provided that the data on which those reports are based are sound. Peer reviewers can judge whether the experimental or observational design makes sense, whether appropriate protocols have been followed, whether known sources of error or bias have been accounted for, and whether the conclusions reached are consistent with the data. Rarely are they in a position to check that the data are reported truthfully.
Second, even the first tiny step makes a difference. From a commentary by Jennifer Crocker in Thursday's Nature:
To understand fraud in science, the useful lesson is the significance
of that first tiny step. Every minor transgression -- dropping an
inconvenient data point, or failing to give credit where it is due --
creates a threat to self-image. The perpetrators are forced to ask
themselves: am I really that sort of person? Then, to avoid the
discomfort of this threat, they rationalize and justify their way out,
until their behaviour feels comfortable and right. This makes the next
transgression seem not only easier, but even morally correct.
The well-being of science and our society requires that fraud be
punished severely. But a heavy focus on fraudsters may also conveniently
divert our attention from the fraudster within us all. Who cannot find
places where they took a first step, or perhaps several steps, down one
slippery slope or another? The road to fraud probably starts out with a
step taken because of some egotistical fear or anxiety -- fear of losing
someone's respect, for example, or of letting others down, the fear of
being seen as a loser, of being a failure, or of not getting the job,
the grant or the award that one covets.
Ouch! The fraudster within me. That's hard to admit, and while "fraudster" is harsh, I do have to confess that when writing papers, I often struggle with the paradox that I am looking for something "interesting" and "important" to say. For me and most other scientists, that means reporting strongly supported patterns and ignoring those that aren't. The worry comes that in examining my data thoroughly, I may look at it in hundreds of ways. This worry may not arise for those whose work involves simple, designed experiments.
My work, at least recently, involves detecting patterns in complex observational data sets. I feel pretty comfortable that the patterns my collaborators and I find are real. We don't make up data. But by looking so hard for a story that makes sense, am I imposing my preconceived notions of what's interesting or important on the data. I don't think so, but it's a worry that I always have in the back of my mind.
A new (old) approach to funding science -- crowdsourcing. New because since World War II, most funding for scientific research has come from government, industry, or private foundations (at least in the United States). Old because this is how scientific research used to be funded, by wealthy patrons and subscribers who agreed to subsidize the cost of expeditions and research.
In its current incarnation at Rocket Hub, you can contribute to projects designed to figure out how fungi cause diseases like athlete's foot and ringworm, study the mathematics of direct democracy, track migration of the Arctic puffin, or map the soundscape in Borneo. Contributions in any amount are welcome, and you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that your contribution helped a scientist get her/his work done. Head over and check it out.
Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, and an extraordinary communicator and teacher. In this 5-minute clip he conveys the wonder and beauty of the natural world and the magic that drew many of us to science. It's part of the Feynman Series "a companion project of The Sagan Series working in the hopes of
promoting scientific education and scientific literacy in the general
population." For more information visit https://www.facebook.com/thesaganseries.
Every year the Union of Concerned Scientists runs a scientific editorial cartoon contest. The cartoon above, by John Klossner, is this year's winner. Head over to http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/science_idol/ to see other finalists and to order your copy of this year's calendar.
[A]t least two leading candidates vying for the Republic nomination for President - Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann
- hold views that are profoundly anti-science, calling key scientific
theories into question and suggesting bad motives on the part of
scientists. There are touches of something medieval here. If someone
with such views were indeed to take over the US presidency, the results
could be profound, and could easily lead to the United States becoming a
backwater in geopolitical terms.
It is not, or at any rate should not be, the task of politicians to
second guess science, or to declare its theses right or wrong based on
ideology. That approach is total madness. No country can afford it, not
even America. (emphasis added)
Reasonable people can differ on what policies we should adopt in the face of human-caused climate change, but it is unreasonable to base public policy on denial of human-caused climate change. And we serve our children best when we teach them that the best scientific explanation for the diversity of life is evolution.
You may have heard of the Myers-Briggs personality test. I remember taking a self-administered version several years ago, but I don't remember what type I turned out to be.1 This isn't a test, but Virginia Hughes has taken some of the same ideas and identified four types of scientists.
The Data-Driven Nerd
The Theory-Driven Nerd
The Data-Driven Adventurer
The Theory-Driven Adventurer
I wish I could say that I was one of the data-driven types, but the way the types are defined they don't fit me at all. Data-driven scientists in this view of the world are those who generate a lot of data. I get a kick out of analyzing data and discovering patterns, but I'm pretty much a klutz when it comes to generating it.2 So that leaves me to pick between nerd and adventurer. Here are the descriptions:
Theory-driven nerd: These are big-thinking intellectuals who build systems and make
wide-sweeping hypotheses. They love giving long keynote lectures at
scientific conferences. They listen to classical music in their rich
mahogany offices while writing up their papers, in which they're likely
to quote philosophers or drop in bad poetry.
Theory-driven adventurer: They're problem-solvers, multi-taskers, broad thinkers. They love
showing off their skills and playing with big, impressive toys.
Journalists like labeling them as 'rebels' and, especially,
'mavericks'.
I don't listen to classical music when writing my papers,3 and I don't have a rich mahogany office,4 but I think it's pretty clear I'm more of a nerd than an adventurer.
