Posts

June 04, 2013

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9:59 PM | Being Media Savvy Shouldn’t Be Criteria to Receive a Donated Organ

Edited to add: in the time since I wrote this draft post, Kathleen Sebelius stated that she would not grant an exception for Sarah Murnaghan. While I take some issue with Sebelius stating that she prefers a process set by “medical science and by medical experts”, given her ruling regarding Plan B, in this case [...]

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6:03 PM | Know When to Ask, Know When to do More Research

I had a pretty strong idea of what I wanted to go to graduate school for – and it may surprise you to know that I didn’t think I was going to find what I wanted in a philosophy department.1 (Or maybe not; one presumes you know me if you’re reading this.) The thing is, [...]

May 31, 2013

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12:00 PM | Reluctance to act on suspicions about fellow scientists: inside the frauds of Diederik Stapel (part 4).

It’s time for another post in which I chew on some tidbits from Yudhijit Bhattacharjee’s incredibly thought-provoking New York Times Magazine article (published April 26, 2013) on social psychologist and scientific fraudster Diederik Stapel. (You can also look at the tidbits I chewed on in part 1, part 2, and part 3.) This time I [...]

May 28, 2013

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12:20 PM | Scientific training and the Kobayashi Maru: inside the frauds of Diederik Stapel (part 3).

This post continues my discussion of issues raised in the article by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in the New York Times Magazine (published April 26, 2013) on social psychologist and scientific fraudster Diederik Stapel. Part 1 looked at how expecting to find a particular kind of order in the universe may leave a scientific community more vulnerable [...]

May 16, 2013

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1:43 PM | ACMG guidelines on IFs – responding to the response…

The ongoing debate about whether, what, when and how to feedback incidental findings (IFs) from whole genome sequencing continues to rage on both sides of the Atlantic following the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics’ controversial recommendations on reporting IFs released last month. In an unexpected twist, the authors of the guidance have now [...]

May 15, 2013

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6:34 PM | Shame, Stigma and Angelina Jolie’s Breasts

As reactions continue to race around the internet about Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery – the actual discussions, not the Monday-morning quarterbacking of her decision or the utterly vile “but what about her boobies” reaction from that particular subgroup of men who manage to amaze me by their continued ability to manage basic [...]

May 13, 2013

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1:00 PM | Identification of genomic regions shared between distant relatives

This is a guest post by Graham Coop and Peter Ralph, cross-posted from the Coop Lab website. We’ve been addressing some of the FAQs on topics arising from our paper on the geography of recent genetic genealogy in Europe (PLOS Biology). We wanted to write one on shared genetic material in personal genomics data but [...]

May 07, 2013

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1:56 PM | My Behavioral Talk at Our Mother's Recent Funeral Reception

I have not spoken with our mother recently about her spiritual beliefs, but she used to go to St. Benedict’s in New Jersey under the guidance of Father Anderson, which had been a progressive church where the folk group sang and played acoustic guitars and altar girls participated in the Mass well back into the 1970s. She told me in our younger days that she only believed in heaven. She said God is a loving God who would never condemn anyone to an eternity of pain and suffering. Lately I’ve […]

May 05, 2013

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1:05 PM | Failing the scientists-in-training: inside the frauds of Diederik Stapel (part 2)

In this post, I’m continuing my discussion of the excellent article by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee in the New York Times Magazine (published April 26, 2013) on social psychologist and scientific fraudster Diederik Stapel. The last post considered how being disposed to expect order in the universe might have made other scientists in Stapel’s community less critical [...]

May 01, 2013

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6:48 PM | The quest for underlying order: inside the frauds of Diederik Stapel (part 1)

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee has an excellent article in the most recent New York Times Magazine (published April 26, 2013) on disgraced Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel. Why is Stapel disgraced? At the last count at Retraction Watch, 54 of his scientific publications have been retracted, owing to the fact that the results reported in those publications [...]

April 30, 2013

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6:27 PM | Leave the full-sized conditioner, take the ski poles: whose assessment of risks did the TSA consider in new rules for carry-ons?

At Error Statistics Philosophy, D. G. Mayo has an interesting discussion of changes that just went into effect to Transportation Security Administration rules about what air travelers can bring in their carry-on bags. Here’s how the TSA Blog describes the changes: TSA established a committee to review the prohibited items list based on an overall [...]

April 28, 2013

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4:35 PM | Are safe working conditions too expensive for knowledge-builders?

Last week’s deadly collapse of an eight-story garment factory building in Dakar, Bangladesh has prompted discussions about whether poor countries can afford safe working conditions for workers who make goods that consumers in countries like the U.S. prefer to buy for bargain prices. Maybe the risk of being crushed to death (or burned to death, [...]

April 26, 2013

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5:00 PM | When #chemophobia isn’t irrational: listening to the public’s real worries.

This week, the Grand CENtral blog features a guest post by Andrew Bissette defending the public’s anxiety about chemicals. In lots of places (including here), this anxiety is labeled “chemophobia”; Bissette spells it “chemphobia”, but he’s talking about the same thing. Bissette argues that the response those of us with chemistry backgrounds often take to [...]

April 25, 2013

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6:40 PM | Shame versus guilt in community responses to wrongdoing.

Yesterday, on the Hastings Center Bioethics Forum, Carl Elliott pondered the question of why a petition asking the governor of Minnesota to investigate ethically problematic research at the University of Minnesota has gathered hundreds of signatures from scholars in bioethics, clinical research, medical humanities, and related disciplines — but only a handful of signatures from [...]

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10:12 AM | Why predicting the phenotypic effect of mutations is hard

By now, we’re probably all familiar with Niels Bohr’s famous quote that “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Although Bohr’s experience was largely in quantum physics, the same problem is true in human genetics. Despite a plethora of genetic variants associated with disease – with frequencies ranging from ultra-rare to commonplace, and effects [...]

April 15, 2013

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7:44 PM | In Shocking News, People Can Care About More Than One Thing at a Time!

So, I was scolded this afternoon for daring to tweet about Rehtaeh Parsons’ father’s response to her suicide shortly after news broke about the Boston marathon bombing. Apparently the Internet can only care about one thing at a time, and the most important thing was the bombing and all other news, national as well as [...]

April 06, 2013

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7:01 PM | A Shift in Expectation of Self

I really like this post on body policing, and in particular, how people seem to feel qualified to tell someone with a chronic illness that if they just did X – largely either adopt some quack routine or exercise – that all their problems would go away. In particular, I really liked this: You’d never [...]

March 31, 2013

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9:23 PM | CD review: Baba Brinkman, “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised”

Baba Brinkman “The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised” Lit Fuse Records, 2011 This is an album that is, in its way, one long argument (in 14 tracks) that the theory of evolution is a useful lens through which to make sense of our world and our lives. In making this argument, Brinkman also plays with [...]

March 29, 2013

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9:36 PM | Buddhists: Still Not Thieves. (Mostly*)

So, although work decided we didn’t have a full day off for Good Friday, we did have early release. And thus, I was at Trader Joe’s for my weekly shopping trip a bit earlier than usual; the crowd, instead of the normal evening mix of diversity, was mostly older folks. One of these older women [...]

March 28, 2013

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11:23 AM | No choice for you

Guest Co-Author: Dr Anna Middleton is an Ethics Researcher and Registered Genetic Counsellor, based at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, UK. The American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) has recently published recommendations for reporting incidental findings (IFs) in clinical exome and genome sequencing. These advocate actively searching for a set of specific IFs unrelated to [...]

March 27, 2013

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3:04 PM | Is Skinner's Law of Effect a Tautology as Chomsky Claimed?

More than any other person, it seems, Noam Chomsky (1959), in his Review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, contributed to the re-emergence of introspective, subjective psychology after the predominant heyday of the more objective behavioral psychology in the mid-twentieth century university psychology departments. A small part of his argument against Skinner's behavioral interpretation of human language is his claim that Skinner's definition of operant conditioning (Skinner's version of […]

March 26, 2013

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12:39 PM | Henrietta Lacks’s genome sequence has been publicly available for years

Last week, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory reported that they had sequenced the genome of the Henrietta Lacks, or “HeLa”, cell line. This report was met with considerable consternation by those who (justifiably, in my opinion) wondered why scientists are still experimenting on a cell line obtained without consent in the 1950s [1]. [...]

March 23, 2013

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12:42 AM | The ethics of naming and shaming.

Lately I’ve been pondering the practice of responding to bad behavior by calling public attention to it. The most recent impetus for my thinking about it was this tech blogger’s response to behavior that felt unwelcoming at a conference (behavior that seems, in fact, to have run afoul of that conference’s official written policies)*, but [...]

March 11, 2013

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5:01 PM | Do we have an obligation to look?

One of the major bioethical debates in clinical genetics and genomics research is the issue of what to do with incidental or secondary findings (IFs) unrelated to the original clinical or research question. Every genome contains thousands of rare variants, including a surprising number of loss of function variants, as well as hundreds of variants [...]

March 08, 2013

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1:00 PM | Learning more from your 23andMe results with Imputation

This is a guest post by Peter Cheng and Eliana Hechter from the University of California, Berkley. Suppose that you’ve had your DNA genotyped by 23andMe or some other DTC genetic testing company. Then an article shows up in your morning newspaper or journal (like this one) and suddenly there’s an additional variant you want [...]

March 05, 2013

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5:37 PM | Building a scientific method around the ideal of objectivity.

While modern science seems committed to the idea that seeking verifiable facts that are accessible to anyone is a good strategy for building a reliable picture of the world as it really is, historically, these two ideas have not always gone together. Peter Machamer describes a historical moment when these two senses of objectivity were [...]

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3:14 PM | You Should Watch This SCOTUS Case, Just in Case Your Skin Sloughs Off

We’ve all been in the situation where we do something – crash a bike, step wrong on thawing ground, trip over a damnedbeloved pet – that leaves us with a painful injury that doesn’t go away. And when that happens, we go to the doctor to verify we’re not badly injured, and possibly pick up [...]

March 04, 2013

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8:03 PM | Blaming the Victim in Domestic Violence

I almost never use the very outdated and almost meaningless phrase “trigger warning” on posts. But in this case, I’m making an exception, because my own reaction to Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photography and accompanying narrative was nausea to the point I thought I was going to vomit. If discussions or depictions of domestic violence disturb [...]

March 01, 2013

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7:06 PM | The Decision to Neuter Pets Just Got More Complicated

While neutering reduces suffering in general, it may well put your individual pet at greater risk of a serious disease such as cancer. It's a classic conflict between what is best for the individual versus what is best for society. Is there an alternative to routine de-sexing of pets?

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2:04 PM | The challenges of objectivity: lessons from anatomy.

In the last post, we talked about objectivity as a scientific ideal aimed at building a reliable picture of what the world is actually like. We also noted that this goal travels closely with the notion of objectivity as what anyone applying the appropriate methodology could see. But, as we saw, it takes a great [...]