Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label politicized science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politicized science. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2023

The Frankenstein Effect


We're never without some weird shit floating around way down deep in our brains that makes us feel uneasy about what's going on in the world because we think someone we may not like, or trust - or even know about - is doing something that threatens our security, or upsets our sense of how things should be.

Call it a variation on Type 1 / Type 2 Logic Errors which have been programmed into our firmware over 3 million years of homonin evolution.
  1. We hear a rustling in the bushes, we conclude it's a predator, and we run away. It turns out to be the wind, but we've survived long enough to have a shot at getting our DNA into subsequent generations.
  2. We hear a rustling in the bushes, we conclude it's nothing, and we just keep going on our merry little ape-like way. It turns out to be predator, and we're lunch, which means our DNA is left in a pile of leopard shit on the plains of Africa.
That paranoia regarding the unknown has been selected for us by a seemingly random, but very efficient process of evolution.

We're hard-wired to be cautious, which is a good thing, but it can be exploited by cynical manipulators to keep us frightened enough to knee-jerk our way into full-blown authoritarian rule if we're not really careful.

Enter COVID-19, and take a close look at how Rand Paul plays on that paranoia by pimping the bullshit about "gain of function" and "vaccination hysteria" etc, until he's whipped the wingnuts into a rich creamy lather, and has enough people doubting every aspect of science that they just fall in line and follow along with whatever The Daddy State tells them.

Anyway, back to Rational World, where we know there are real threats regarding the use of scientific discovery, and where we hopefully can get a better handle on the pluses and minuses by calmly and un-politically assessing situations as they arise, and before assholes like Rand Paul can exploit them so he can drum up a good old-fashioned torch-n-pitchfork mob just to score a few points with the rubes.


Biology Is Dangerously Outpacing Policy

The original source of the coronavirus pandemic remains unconfirmed. While it was likely the result of a spillover from animals to humans, a lab origin cannot be ruled out. Given the uncertainty, additional scrutiny on research with pathogens that are engineered to be more transmissible or dangerous is warranted to prevent any future devastating pandemics.

In response to that risk, the United States recently took an important step toward strengthening the government’s oversight of research with viruses and other pathogens. An expert panel known as the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity voted unanimously in January to recommend a major overhaul of how the United States supervises what’s called dual-use research. Research is considered dual use if the intended use of the work is for peaceful purposes but there is concern it could result in a more dangerous pathogen or information that could be used maliciously.

As experts with four decades of combined experience studying biosecurity and the risks of dual-use research, we think the board’s proposals pave the way for welcome and needed changes. We hope the Biden administration will codify many of these recommendations into policy and work with Congress to secure the funding and legislation needed to implement the more far-reaching reforms.

Historically, the United States has taken a reactive and haphazard approach to preventing lab accidents and the misuse of high-risk science. A patchwork of regulations, guidance and policies exists based on the specific pathogen being researched, the type of research being conducted and the source of funding. But some research doesn’t fall under any agency, leaving an oversight vacuum.

This fragmented system has not kept pace with the evolving risk landscape. There are now more powerful tools for genetic engineering, and these tools are easier to use and more widely available than ever before. There are also more researchers interested in conducting research with engineered pathogens for scientific and medical purposes. According to the Global Biolabs Initiative, of which Dr. Koblentz is a co-director, there are more than 100 high and maximum containment labs around the world conducting high-risk research, with more planned. The United States has more such labs than any other country. Failure to update bio-risk-management policies is too great a concern.

When will the pandemic end? We asked three experts — two immunologists and an epidemiologist — to weigh in on this and some of the hundreds of other questions we’ve gathered from readers recently, including how to make sense of booster and test timing, recommendations for children, whether getting covid is just inevitable and other pressing queries.

How concerning are things like long covid and reinfections? That’s a difficult question to answer definitely, writes the Opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci, because of the lack of adequate research and support for sufferers, as well as confusion about what the condition even is. She has suggestions for how to approach the problem. Regarding another ongoing Covid danger, that of reinfections, a virologist sets the record straight:
“There has yet to be a variant that negates the benefits of vaccines.”

How will the virus continue to change?
As a group of scientists who study viruses explains, “There’s no reason, at least biologically, that the virus won’t continue to evolve.” From a different angle, the science writer David Quammen surveys some of the highly effective tools and techniques that are now available for studying Covid and other viruses, but notes that such knowledge alone won’t blunt the danger.

What could endemic Covid look like?
David Wallace Wells writes that by one estimate, 100,000 Americans could die each year from the coronavirus. Stopping that will require a creative effort to increase and sustain high levels of vaccination. The immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki writes that new vaccines, particular those delivered through the nose, may be part of the answer.

The board has recommended far-reaching changes that would greatly extend oversight of research that could be misused to cause harm. The proposal would expand the range of pathogens subject to oversight to include those currently considered less dangerous, and include privately funded research as well. It would also lower the threshold for genetic engineering experiments that could trigger extra scrutiny. The board also recommended this strengthened oversight system be administered by a government office that can provide guidance to researchers and transparency to the public.

The Biden administration has the authority to implement many of these recommendations, such as expanding current oversight over more pathogens and providing more transparent guidance to researchers and the public. These reforms are consistent with the administration’s biodefense strategy and should be implemented immediately. The administration has already requested $1.8 billion to strengthen biosafety and biosecurity, some of which could be used for this purpose.

But funding and implementing some of the board’s more far-reaching recommendations will likely require congressional action. Pathogens don’t care about politics, and efforts to strengthen biosafety and biosecurity should receive bipartisan support.

Currently, only a small number of private labs need to seek approval for dual-use research with a short list of pathogens. This creates a loophole that allows scientists with private funding — from a foundation, a corporation or even a crowdfunding site — to conduct unsupervised research with potential pandemic pathogens that are not on this list. For example, scientists at Boston University were able to create a chimera version of the coronavirus with enhanced properties without seeking government review because they did not use government funding to conduct the experiment. Given the potential consequences of a misstep, any institutions or researchers who work with such pathogens, regardless of their source of funding, should have their research reviewed to make sure it is being conducted safely, securely and responsibly.

The United States also needs to establish an independent government agency that has the authority and resources to regulate this research. This agency would serve a similar purpose as the National Transportation Safety Board or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and be dedicated to understanding the cause of accidents and mitigating risk anywhere in the United States. This would provide a central place for scientists to receive guidance about their work or to raise concerns. Such an agency could develop and promote policies so that all institutions doing this work would be held to the same standards.

Some researchers argue that these recommendations are too far-reaching and will inhibit science. But many of these measures would align the regulatory environment of the United States with those of its peers, such as Canada, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Germany. Fears that more oversight will have a chilling effect on research are belied by the robust research programs found in each of these countries. Still, the implementation of these recommendations will require a careful balancing act: fostering innovation in the life sciences while minimizing the safety and security risks.

As longtime participants in the debate about how to achieve this balance between science and security, we have been frustrated by the lack of progress for so long. Notably, the recommendations put forward by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity are not substantively different from those offered by the same board in 2007. We sincerely hope it doesn’t take another 16 years, or another pandemic, to seize this opportunity for reducing the risks posed by dual-use research with viruses and other pathogens.

Wednesday, September 08, 2021

About That Ivermectin Stuff

Rebecca Watson is the founder of the Skepchick Network, a collection of sites focused on science and critical thinking. She has written for outlets such as Slate, Popular Science, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. She's also the host of Quiz-o-tron, a rowdy, live quiz show that pits scientists against comedians.

Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Today's Really Scary Shit


Some fun new terminology:

  1. "Massive Predictive Crisis" (not sure I wanna know - sounds pretty bad)
  2. "Large Charismatic Animals" (ya mean like The Rock and Rob Gronkowski?)
  3. "Mass Extinction Event" (aka: Cross Check and the 2018 mid-terms)
So anyway:


"It's the little things that run the world."

Sunday, January 08, 2017

It Begins

...or more accurately, it continues - and accelerates.

Union For Concerned Scientists:
The increasingly reckless House of Representatives, caught up in a public mutiny, may have walked back its abandonment of congressional ethics. But it simultaneously took several other steps that will enable corruption and greatly expand political influence over the work of experts at NASA, NOAA, EPA, and other science agencies, compromising their ability to serve the public interest.
This week, the House made significant changes to the rules under which it operates. First and foremost is the Holman rule, resurrected from the 1870s, just at the end of Reconstruction. This rule allows Congress, through spending bills, to target specific initiatives and reduce the salaries of individual federal employees whose work they find irksome to $1.
Does your research suggest a chemical company that happens to be located in the district of a powerful member of Congress is responsible for environmental contamination? You could be on that list.
So, Repubs are saying they'll keep science from becoming politicized by subjecting scientists to political pressures and ideological tests.

OK and away we go.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Dismantling

NOLA.com:
LSU and many other public colleges in Louisiana might be forced to file for financial exigency, essentially academic bankruptcy, if state higher education funding doesn't soon take a turn for the better.
Louisiana's flagship university began putting together the paperwork for declaring financial exigency this week when the Legislature appeared to make little progress on finding a state budget solution, according to F. King Alexander, president and chancellor of LSU.
"We don't say that to scare people," he said. "Basically, it is how we are going to survive."
Moody's Investors Service also announced this month that it was lowering LSU's credit outlook from positive to stable based on concerns about the university's overall financial support. The lowering of LSU's credit rating makes it more likely the university will have to pay more for its building projects in the future.
This kinda crap doesn't happen by accident, kids.  Try to resist thinking Jindal and his Client Cronies aren't doing this on purpose. LSU is a prestigious joint, which makes it a valuable property, which means it should be awarded to a Corporate Friend who'll take it under his benevolent wing and blah blah blah.

And in case anybody needed the reminder, LSU was very much up front about calling out BP for the Deep Water Horizon fuck up - along with any number of other monumentally shitty things that go on in Louisiana in the name of freedom and Unfettered Market Economics.

So let's see if we can identify the basics here - your Environmental Science guys get all uppity about how Big Petro-Chem is making it next to impossible for actual human-type people to live anywhere near The Gulf, so what we'll do is buy lotsa face-time with a yokel governor who wants to run for president, and trade him a pile of campaign cash for looking the other way while we also pour money into the pockets of state legislators (not to mention  US Senators & Representatives) so we can cut the school's budget to the point of no return - and then use that little bit of convenient leverage to get our buddies at Moody's to put the squeeze on their credit - all of which drives the price down to where we can swoop in and "rescue" the failing failure from the failures of the failing eggheads who've failed utterly in their failed efforts to make all of God's America fail.  And before ya know it, our schools will be turning out good wholesome young academics who know the real value of a dollar and who won't be having their minds poisoned with all that boring science-y stuff, which everybody knows is the devil's propaganda anyway.

We are so fucked.


Friday, July 18, 2014

Living In The Penumbral Age

(paraphrasing) What the Deniers tell us to fear most - massive government intervention and over-reach and meddling in the free market - is exactly what we're going to get when catastrophic changes due to Climate Change really kick in.

The podcast at Inquiring Minds:





hat tip = MoJo

Monday, August 12, 2013

And That's The Real Problem

Researchers at Virginia Commonwealth Univ have been studying the various aspects of River Health along portions of the James River, and while they came up with some rather alarming levels of toxins present in the blue crabs taken from the river, what they really discovered was a Political Controversy.  Imagine that.

Richmond Times Dispatch:
State officials say the public is not in danger.
“We do not have any reason to believe that current microcystin levels in the James River present a health threat,” said Rebecca LePrell, the Virginia Department of Health’s director of environmental epidemiology.
 Yeah, but:
(river ecologist Paul) Bukaveckas acknowledged that his expertise lies in river health and not human health.
“The only thing I can say is that in crab muscle tissue in certain times of the year, the toxins build up to levels that the World Health Organization considers unsafe for consumption.”
And just so we know what the big deal is (Ecotoxicology report out of California EPA from 2009):
Cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, are a family of single-celled algae that proliferate in water bodies such as ponds, lakes, reservoirs, and slow-moving streams when the water is warm and nutrients are available. Many cyanobacteria species produce a group of toxins known as microcystins, some of which are toxic. The species most commonly associated with microcystin production is Microcystis aeruginosa [1]. Upon ingestion, toxic microcystins are actively absorbed by fish, birds and mammals. Microcystin primarily affects the liver, causing minor to widespread damage, depending on the amount of toxin absorbed. People swimming, waterskiing, or boating in contaminated water can be exposed to microcytins. Microcystins may also accumulate in fish that are caught and eaten by people. Finally, pets and livestock have died after drinking water contaminated with microcystins.
In the end, at least for some folks, it's all about the money:
Blue crabs are Virginia’s top commercial seafood catch and produced a $24 million harvest last year.
“Consumers can be utterly confident that the product they are purchasing is of the highest quality,” said John Bull, a spokesman for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, which manages fish in Virginia’s tidal waters.
I'm not dismissing the potential for undue harm that can befall a particular business or even a whole sector when we get alarmed about something - especially when the alarm sounds a lot like "there's something wrong with the food".  That said, I need to feel more confident that the alarm isn't simply being muffled artificially (if not dismantled completely) - which has become something of a habit for way too many people in positions of power.

I have a call in to an old pal at the poison center in Richmond, but as of now, he hasn't called me back.  Update when/if that happens.

hat tip = Blue Virginia