Battle lines are drawn at the RI, it appears. Join up now! It’s only £30, and you know you want to.
Although as our resident pedant, SCurry Imperial points out, it helps to know what day you’re supposed to have a war:
Typo? 12th April is next Monday – not Tuesday.
Did you hear about the homeopathy patient who died of an overdose?
He forgot to take his medicine.
M’friend Charles pointed out (on Facebook) that ‘World Homeopathy Awareness Week’ is coming up. He wants to raise awareness by saying that homeopathy doesn’t work. I’m not sure that’s exactly true: homeopathy does work.
No, sit down and listen. Homeopathy helps people who have a self-limiting condition (such as a cold) feel like they’re doing something to get better, and hey! they get better. So in that sense yes; homeopathy helps hypochondriacs get better. And there’s a placebo effect too; people believe they’re getting better because they’ve taken something for their headache (although why homeopathy preparations for headaches say ‘for severe headaches take two’ is beyond me). The beneficial effect of a good ‘bedside’ manner is not in dispute, and homeopathic charlatans practitioners have got that down pat. I wish our real physicians would learn from that.
Homeopathy of course is utterly useless when it comes to things like, oh I don’t know, setting a broken leg, breast cancer or preventing malaria. Or eczema. In other words where there is actual physical trauma or a causative agent. Where homeopathy is dangerous is when people use homeopathy instead of proven and effective remedies–medicine, in other words.
Homeopathy kills. That’s an interesting google search, by the way. And if you type ‘homeopathy kills breast cancer’ you get hits saying that homeopathy kills cancer cells, which hurts my brain so much I think I might have to go and lie down. (The big secret is that just about everything kills cancer cells sooner or later, especially in culture.)
Homeopathy kills because people will go to a homeopath instead of a real doctor, and get water instead of something that actually works:
Isabella was prescribed medications for her epilepsy. Instead of using them, her parents consulted an iridologist, an applied kinesiologist, a psychic and an osteopath. She was being treated purely with homeopathic medication when she died.
Isabella was 13 months old.
World Homeopathy Awareness Week: April 10th-16th 2010. Beware the danger.
One of these things does not mean what you think it does.
The homeobox protein Prox1 is a negative modulator of ERRα/PGC-1α bioenergetic functions
No broadband at home, a new career, and a blog platform that makes kittens cry.
And then there’s
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Stupid technorati.
I responded to Duncan’s comment somewhat incoherently:
Blah.
UK must invest heavily in scientific research … economic competitive advantage
Blah
I’m not cross at Duncan, not by any means. No, my ire is directed at those public servants, those ‘leading members of both major parties’ who have, apparently, ‘agreed that the UK must invest heavily in scientific research if it is to maintain its economic competitive advantage’.
And this is the whole damnable point, isn’t it? By justifying science–research, what most of my friends do every single day of their undervalued lives–in terms of financial or economic gain we reduce the pursuit of science (ennobled by every lab rat from Aristotle through Newton, Jenner and Heatley right up to and including Hawking) to the level of a whore hawking her tatty wares in Camden telephone boxes to the highest bidder.
Do we really want to make every piece of scientific research done in this country measurable in terms of its impact in pounds and pence–contingent on that impact? Is that what we all–everyone here who says ‘oh, science brings in more than we spend’–want? To have a field on each grant application form that says ‘Enumerate the pecuniary benefit of your proposed research’? To take away money from basic research, the research of Einstein and Rutherford and–why not?–Curry and Rohn, to feed the capacious maw of the Treasury?
I feel my favourite cartoon coming on.
M’learned Australian colleague, Steve ‘The Pogmeister’ Pogonowski, writes about a press release we, eh, released today. It features a fantastic F1000 reviewer, one Robert Sapolsky, who in addition to being able to turn out phrases such as irresistible human neuroethology study and testosterone makes you act nicer without breaking a sweat, sports what can only be described as a magnificent ZZ Top-style facial accoutrement.
Steve says that the first journalist enquiries we’re getting are not about the science, but about the beard:
So I have this theory, see. Brian reckons that the private sector works harder than academics (whispers: that might be true in his case). Benoit says that to be top of the pile in academia one has to work really quite hard. Now, I could blog about anecdote not being the plural of data, and whether Brian’s right or Benoit’s right or I could even ask everyone at Nature Network what is their experience–but on the whole I think that would be a useless exercise and would inflame tempers unnecessarily. After all, this is Nature Network, ‘the friendliest place on the interwebs’; not somewhere else that begins with ‘S’ and ends in ‘cienceblogs’.
Instead, I wonder if there is an association between hirsuteness and working hard/success, in academia and the private sector. Now’s your chance: disprove this hypothesis.
It’s come to my attention that there’s a General Election looming in the Untied Kingdom. This is the moment when the people of the country decide to change (or not) the people who are governing them (or not). It’s a defining moment in a democracy. This Election comes not a moment too soon–we’ve been under the iron rule of an unelected Prime Minister who he hasn’t, until now, given us the chance to vote him out. And as with all elections, the candidates–or the Parties, it amounts to the same thing–set out their wares to the good voters of the country, a bit like the ladies of negotiable affection do along the Old Kent Road. In fact, a lot like the ladies of &c., &c.
In the UK there are two major political parties. The Conservatives are blue in colour and represent farmers, people with a savings account and/or who earn between about £25k and £60k a year, and anybody who likes to shoot foxes. The Labour Party (red) were traditionally left wing socialists but in recent years have drifted somewhat to the right of the Conservatives. They are funded by trades unions but now find most of their support in the lowest and highest income brackets and manufacturers of closed-circuit television equipment. They’ve also stolen my English rose and I’d like it back, please. Some might call the Liberal Democrats (centre socialists, yellow) a ‘major’ party; but essentially they’re very nice people who haven’t a hope of getting into power, so they can promise anything they like in their manifesto so everybody knows not to listen. (They tend to do quite well in local elections however, where they can’t do much damage to the country as a whole.) In terms of US politics, in the past the Conservatives were more or less equivalent to the GOP; the Liberal Democrats to the Democrat party; and Labour to Fidel Castro. Things have changed somewhat, however.
So the Parties try to tempt us by promising lower taxes, higher taxes, more defence spending, less defence spending, better healthcare, a new way of screwing up education and so on and so forth. Because scientists are, to be blunt, a bit of a niche electorate, we don’t get much attention except when political mileage is to be made. ‘Science is important,’ they tell us; ‘as long as there’s votes and money in it,’ they don’t. (Yes, I’m cynical; no, I don’t think I’m cynical enough. You should catch Henry Gee on a bad day and then call me cynical.) There has been a bit of a fuss recently because the current Minister for Science and Innovation, Lord Drayson, has been active on Twitter and apparently ‘engaging’ with real scientists and finding out what they want. And then telling them they’re not going to get it, as far as I can see: ministers, even if they do like fast cars and try to be one of the people often have this nasty habit of toeing the party line and claiming they can’t do anything about it. (I’m also naturally suspicious of anyone in the Cabinet who has a peerage, but anyway.) Be that as it may, People & Science–the quarterly mag of the British Association for the Advancement of British Associations of Science in Britain, asked the Science spokesmen (and they are all men, rather sadly) for each of the two (or three) major parties how they see public engagement in science, and what are promising us. Actually, the quote is what would they ‘hope to achieve in this area if they were to form a government’ but I prefer honesty in my reporting. (The full article is available as a PDF.)
Dr Evan Harris, MP (Nice but Useless Party; Yellow) starts off by claiming there is a perception that science is different from sport or music, that it’s harder for anyone to ‘have a go’. I am sure those of us who spent years at University studying for two or more degrees will be pleased to hear that. He wants to bridge the ‘them and us’ divide, eliminating some sense of elitism. I’m not sure if he means he wants to dumb down science so that anyone can do it, or at least understand it, but he does say he wants the ‘brightest’ from every socio-economic ‘and other social’ group to be able to make careers in science. He promises to cut student debt to achieve this (see, this is what’s brilliant about the LibDems: they can promise the Moon because they know they won’t have to deliver). Now, coming from a pretty poor, working class background myself, the only person in my entire extended family to get more than 2 “A” Levels let alone a clutch of degrees from Oxford, I do wonder what extra he’s offering.
Then he talks some rubbish about making engagement ‘more natural’ (I can hear the groans already) and extending PhDs to 4 years with ‘some’ of the extra time being used for ‘funded and credited work in teaching and public engagement’. News for you, bucko: grad students already teach, and the MRC at least run public engagement courses any of their scientists can sign up to. There are other good reasons for extending PhDs, but the extra two days a public engagement course will take isn’t one of them. After laying into the two major parties, Harris says he wants to make engagement easier for non-scientists, by giving all students the opportunity to study GCSE (our age 16 exam) Physics, Chemistry and Biology as separate subjects. Um, just like I had the ‘opportunity’ in 1985, then. Oh, this is good: all such students will be ‘taught by someone with appropriate science training so that the public becomes more science literate.’ Yeah, in my day they were called science teachers.
Evidently, the LibDems have also ‘made the case’ for open access publishing. This is important, apparently, because access ‘by more of the public and the general media to what real science looks like can help them distinguish it from pseudoscience.’ Right. I follow that. I think he’s saying that peer-reviewed OA papers have ‘This is not pseudoscience’ stamped across the masthead. Gets my vote.
Next up, we have the aforementioned Lord Drayson, Paul to his friends (Socialist Banker Party; Red). Drayson also wants to challenge elitism, and all of a sudden I’m wondering if that word means what they think it means. The unelected Prime Mangler’s ‘Science: So What?’ campaign was supposed to challenge ‘elitist’ images of science and engineering, and to show how they connect to sport and cooking. Excuse me, I need to step outside for a gasper. Oh, wait, that’s illegal in public places now; perhaps I’ll take photos of a CCTV camera instead.
The rest of Drayson, and the Tories, in the next installment.
If, for the sake of argument (and I’m not looking at Grrlscientist over there), I was to come up with a new blog, or a new name for an existing one, what would you recommend?
The blog in question will be about science, and it’ll be my voice in a slightly US-centric setting, so plays on geography are valid.
I suspect that most scientists, at some point in their professional career, have been asked asked by their family or friends what is it they actually do. I guess that only a small proportion have been able to convey the answer intelligibly, to the questioner’s satisfaction. But I further suspect, in the biological sciences at least, the proportion who are able to answer the question ‘why?’ is much, much smaller.
This is because the vast majority of biological scientists are not, despite what they put in their grant applications, directly involved in trying to cure anything. I worked for six years at the Medical Research Council, funded by the National Institutes of Health; yet my projects (generally) had nothing to do with preventing or curing disease. In fact, nuclear trafficking is such an integral part of cellular function that any defect at all usually results in instant death, which is generally incurable and likely to remain so. (It never stopped us from trying to get money from those places, though.) Yet our families and friends will often say to us ‘oh, and will that cure cancer?’ or something similar, when we’ve told them we’re working on a particular protein or gene or process. How many Cancer Research UK scientists are actually working on cancer?(My own mother had great hopes I’d cure cancer. For the longest time I didn’t know where to even start to answer her.)
So it was a great relief when I finally realized that I didn’t have to justify my existence, or my professional activities at least, in those terms. I can’t say there was a heavenly messenger or a blinding flash—I simply realized one day that I was doing science because, dammit, I like to find out how things work. Why did we want to find out how cells create the force required for amoeboid motility? Because we didn’t know, yet. You’re looking at the guy who at the age of 17 took apart a non-functioning washing machine to see how it worked—but who then put it back together as an intellectual exercise, and fixed it. The fixing was a by-product of the discovery process.
After this realization I would cheerfully tell friends and family that I wasn’t trying to cure cancer, or anything else: like a philosopher in the pure pursuit of knowledge I just wanted to see how things—in this case the ‘things’ happened to be people—worked. I believe that is the calling of scientists; to push back the borders of ignorance and to discover what else we don’t know (yet). Not, primarily, to give us penicillin and iPods and Apollo 11.
Yes, of course, the application of science through medicine and technology makes our lives longer, but not necessarily wider. That’s why we have art and poetry and literature and music: ‘useless’ subjects in purely economic or utilitarian terms, but absolutely, 100%, necessary. Science for the sake of science is just as important and useless as those other things.
Physics is like sex: sometimes something useful comes out, but that's not the reason we are doing it. — Richard P. Feynman
In fact, I maintain that science as it is practised today, costs us more than we get out of it. When we do get something out it’s because we’ve been working on it for years and years, without ever expecting a return. It’s actually very rare that industry funding of research yields a significant, positive ROI. Just look at the biotech boom and bust of a few years ago. Look at the failure of the Australian government to make money out of science. Science, monetarily, is a losing game: you have to put in so very much to science to get anything ‘usable’ out of it; and even then what you get is most often serendipitous. I do not believe in the trickle-down effect; that more money to science will stimulate the economy. Surely it’s the other way round? And yet, even if the material, the economic benefit of science is small, we should continue to do it. Because it makes us better human beings. Finding out how things work is almost a definition of humanity.
All of which means, that when the going gets tough, science needs to go. Science isn’t essential to our survival: rather it’s the mark of a civilization or society that has got its act together, and creates wonderful poetry and beautiful music and arresting literature. Science won’t save us–it’ll help us live longer, and it’ll give us an edge when we’re fighting for our lives against Nazi Germany, but it’s wonderfully and beautifully wasteful.
So when the country is in debt up to its nostrils, and hospitals and schools are suffering, we need cuts in the (publicly-funded) science budget. I don’t believe doing science is a total luxury, but we do have to face up to reality: it can not be funded unless we have a strong financial base. Which we don’t. And other things are more important, at least in the short term. The Labour Government is promising science budget cuts, and the Conservatives are saying the same. Get the country back on its pecuniary feet, and then (and only then) throw money at research. The unpalatable message is that we can’t afford a government that will fund science at the expense of the balance of payments.
Buy me a coffee: 
