Monthly Archive for October, 2010

U.S. Says Genes Should Not Be Eligible for Patents

Published on October 30, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

patent2From Andrew Pollack in The New York Times:

Reversing a longstanding policy, the federal government said on Friday that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. The new position could have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The new position was declared in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the Department of Justice late Friday in a case involving two human genes linked to breast and ovarian cancer.

“We acknowledge that this conclusion is contrary to the longstanding practice of the Patent and Trademark Office, as well as the practice of the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies that have in the past sought and obtained patents for isolated genomic DNA,” the brief said.

It is not clear if the position in the legal brief, which appears to have been the result of discussions among various government agencies, will be put into effect by the Patent Office.

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Government Scientists Go Public: Website will Speak Up for Science

Published on October 27, 2010 in News. 0 Comments

ca-flag2From a Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada press release:

Ottawa, October 18, 2010 – Today, the union that represents federal government scientists launches a campaign to put the spotlight on science for the public good.

“Federal government scientists work hard to protect Canadians, preserve their environment and ensure our country’s prosperity but they face dwindling resources and confusing policy decisions,” says Gary Corbett, president of the Institute.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada is a national union. Among its 59,000 federal and provincial members are 23,000 professionals who deliver, among other knowledge products, scientific research, testing and advice for sound policy-making.

The recent decision to end the mandatory long form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making. Restrictive rules are curtailing media and public access to scientists, while cutbacks to research and monitoring limit Canada’s ability to deal with serious threats and potential opportunities.

A new online information and action centre launched today – PUBLICSCIENCE.ca – (http://publicscience.ca) features interviews with the professionals who do science for the public good, experts who understand the critical importance of this work, and Canadians whose lives have been touched by public science.

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Ahead of the Curve

Published on October 26, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Zoe Corbyn, Times Higher Education

It is a dreamily beautiful day in early August, and the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, devoid of students for the summer break, could hardly be a more pleasant place. But in an empty hall of residence is a group of about 50 academics who are not here for the weather. They have travelled from across the country and from abroad – Mexico, the UK, Sweden – to participate in the only regular conference dedicated to their subject: the psychology of science. They arrange themselves for a group photo, and the camera preserves for posterity the smiling faces of the delegates to the third conference of the International Society for the Psychology of Science and Technology (ISPST).

The discipline is the newest kid on the block in the world of “science studies”. The history, philosophy and sociology of science are all well established. But now the fledgling field of the psychology of science is vying for a piece of the action. It seeks to put science on the couch and apply the methods and theories of psychology to scientific thought and behaviour (see box below).

Already the field is attracting interest from funding bodies – perhaps unsurprising given its potential applications in identifying and fostering creative scientists and improving science and science education. The National Science Foundation, one of the largest funders of basic research in the US, is not only sponsoring a training workshop the day after the conference (with the renowned British sociologist Harry Collins of Cardiff University being brought in to broaden delegates’ minds), but it is also specifically encouraging this new breed to apply for funding from its flagship science, technology and society programme.

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Conference Dinner at the Second Annual Science in Society Conference – Now Available

Published on October 22, 2010 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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The 2010 Science in Society Conference delegates and plenary speakers will gather together for the conference dinner on Friday 12 November, 2010 at the Hotel Tryp Leganes.

The Hotel Tryp Leganes offers a traditional Spanish menu minutes from the conference venue.

For reserve your place at the dinner, please visit the Activities and Extras Web-Page.

Scrunched-up Dimensions Untangled

Published on October 12, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Alan Boyle, MSNBC.com

British physicist Stephen Hawking may claim that extra dimensions provide the key to understanding the “grand design” of the universe, but it’s Chinese-American mathematician Shing-Tung Yau who actually figured out how those extra dimensions work.

In his new book, “The Shape of Inner Space,” Yau and his co-author, Steve Nadis, touch upon the work that led to the discovery of theoretical “Calabi-Yau spaces” â?? and the cosmic implications of multidimensional geometry.

The typical representation of a Calabi-Yau space looks like twisted web of a crumpled-up piece of paper. There’s something elegant about its look â?? in fact, Calabi-Yau paperweights were voted the most popular gewgaw for holiday giving in last year’s Cosmic Log Geek Gift Guide contest. But these shapes aren’t just abstract art: String theorists believe that every single point in our universe is actually a compactified Calabi-Yau space in six dimensions.

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How Cheaper Genomes Fuel Science

Published on October 10, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Alan Boyle, MSNBC.com

The cost of whole-genome sequencing is dropping like a rock, and that’s fueling a “renaissance of activity” for scientific sleuths tracking down the genetic causes of disease, a pioneer in the field says.

Harvard geneticist George Church provided a status report on the genome market, and its implications for medical research, during this week’s “Open Questions in Neuroscience” symposium in Seattle, sponsored by the Allen Institute for Brain Science. Church is not only a Harvard professor and research, but also the founder of the Knome commercial venture for genome-sequencing.

Thanks to competition in the sequencing field, the price of decoding a complete human genome has been following an affordability curve that looks like Moore’s Law on steroids. The cost of the federal Human Genome Project, which issued its first draft in 2000 and a complete genome sequence in 2003, was estimated at $2.7 billion in 1991 dollars. But that price tag has been falling by as much as an order of magnitude per year, and today the going rate for whole-genome sequencing is edging below $10,000 (counseling costs extra). The cost of materials — that is, the chemical reagents required to do the tests — is merely $1,000, Church said in June.

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The Mirror of the Cosmos: Is Cosmology a Form of Theology for a Secular Age?

Published on October 8, 2010 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

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From Mark Vernon, Big Questions Online

Why is cosmology so popular? Books by writers such as Paul Davies and Stephen Hawking on fine-tuning or the multiverse routinely become bestsellers. They’re good writers, of course. And there’s the aesthetic appeal of cosmology too, offering a ceaseless stream of heavenly images at which to wonder and gaze. But I suspect there’s more to it than that.

After all, many other branches of physics are progressing as fast, and arguably have a bigger impact upon our daily lives. But when did you last pick up a paperback on solid state physics, one of the largest contemporary research fields? Or who would choose a book about optics over one about the Big Bang? Chaos theory gets a look in, as does quantum theory — though that’s very close to cosmology, as the history of universe turns on the physics of the very small.

So here’s a possibility. Cosmology is so popular, not just because of the science, but because it allows us to ask the big questions — where we come from, who we are, where we’re going. It’s metaphysics by other means. If the Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages liked to speculate about the number of angels on the heads of pins, we today like to speculate about the number of dimensions wrapped up in string theory. The activities are similar insofar as they feed the delight we find in awe-inspiring wonder.

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