Category: Natural Sciences

A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift

January 29, 2015

“The story began in January 1951, when Mrs. Lacks was found to have cervical cancer. She was treated with radium at Johns Hopkins, the standard of care in that day, but there was no stopping the cancer. Her doctor had never seen anything like it. Within months, her body was full of tumors, and she died in excruciating pain that October. She was 31 and left five children, the youngest just a year old. She had been a devoted mother, and the children suffered terribly without her.”

Eugenics movement reaches its height 1923

January 29, 2015

“The trappings of science, anyway. Even in its day, many people saw that eugenics was a dubious discipline, riddled with inconsistencies. But it was championed by a very prominent and respected biologist, Charles Davenport, and its conclusions told many people what they wanted to hear: that certain “racial stock” was superior to others in such traits as intelligence, hard work, cleanliness, and so on. In this view of human behavior, the work of Sigmund Freud was disregarded, while the ideas of behaviorism were just gaining ground.”

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh23eu.html

TED Talk: Brian Cox: CERN’s Supercollider

January 29, 2015

“Rock-star physicist” Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive project.”

This is just an amazing lecture with some great visuals to help explain some complex ideas. Absolutely worth watching. Some interesting questions that get raised: Why bother engaging in research that is so far removed from any seeming relevance to our every day lives? Should we spend billions of dollars to fund research that may never provide any practical outcomes or make our lives materially any better? Is the quest for knowledge and understanding a valuable enough goal to justify these costs?

This lecture was filmed before the supercollider went online in 2008. It has since gone online and done some important work already and the particle he talks about, the Higgs Boson, has since been detected by the super collider as documented in the amazing documentary Particle Fever

Why Nutrition Is So Confusing

January 28, 2015

“The situation is understandable; it’s a learning experience in the limits of science. The protocol of science is the process of hypothesis and test. This three-word phrase, though, does not do it justice. The philosopher Karl Popper did when he described “the method of science as the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”

Dr. Gupta: When religion and medicine meet

January 28, 2015

Dr. Gupta interviews Joel Osteen.

He started by telling the story of his own mother, Dodie Osteen, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer back in 1981. She was told “there was no treatment that could be given to her.”
It was liver cancer, and she was just 48 years old. Osteen told me, “She prayed, she believed, and she quoted scripture. Thirty-something years later, she’s alive.”
Osteen is describing a sort of faith healing or at least the power of prayer, and it is an issue that deeply divides the medical community.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/21/health/gupta-religion-medicine/

Ethics Questions Arise as Genetic Testing of Embryos Increases

January 28, 2015

“Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade, but its use has soared in recent years as methods have improved and more disease-causing genes have been discovered. The in vitro fertilization and testing are expensive — typically about $20,000 — but they make it possible for couples to ensure that their children will not inherit a faulty gene and to avoid the difficult choice of whether to abort a pregnancy if testing of a fetus detects a genetic problem.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/health/ethics-questions-arise-as-genetic-testing-of-embryos-increases.html?_r=0

Online Book: Science, Evolution, and Creationism

January 27, 2015

Here is a copy of an online book published by the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine discussing the differences between the approach taken by scientists when discussing evolution and the approach taken by those who espouse creationism. It’s a relatively short book but you can also click beneath the link to download my shortened version.

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11876&page=R3

Science and Creationism

Why anthropology is ‘true’ even if it is not ‘science

January 27, 2015

“A recent article in Inside Higher Ed documented the latest ‘issue’ in anthropology making its way around the Internet: anger amongst ‘scientific’ anthropologists that the executive board of the American Anthropological Association has rewritten the mission statement of the association and removed language which describes anthropology as a science.Now, I have no intention to defend the executive board of the AAA, and I have no objection to labeling myself a social scientist. However, I am concerned that objections to the new statement 1) do a bad job of understanding what ‘science’ is and 2) fail to understand that the knowledge anthropology produces can still be ‘true’ even if it is not ‘scientific’.”

http://savageminds.org/2010/12/01/why-anthropology-is-true-even-if-it-is-not-science/