Jared Diamond on Ernest Mayr

A link I wanted to save: Jared Diamond wrote this obituary of Ernest Mayr that appeared in Nature.

India & China to the moon

Check the link above. I'm curious as to whether this is the best use of the limited resources available for science in each of these countries. But it is a way of investing in science and engineering talent and infrastructure, and a way of keeping that talent at home. Also, better that India and China each advance its scientific and technological status (and its symbolic status as a superpower) via this instead of nuclear weaponry.

Also an odd coincidence that this International Conference on Exploration and Utilization of the Moon took place in Udaipur.

Science writing

Unfort my initial post has been lost by the otherwise good folks at blogger. So to partly reconstruct: I was in the shower last Thurs morning (Dec 2), thinking about doing some science-related posts to Steady Blogging. I'd already put a couple science-related posts up there. (See this one about Flores man, and this one about RNAi.) And I'd been planning to do some more in-depth science posts, particularly on stem cells, given their rather sudden and growing importance in the political arena.

It struck me then to set up a separate blog devoted to science posts--this is it. My original plan was to name it "Dropping Science", but that droppingscience.blogspot.com has already been claimed. That was initially disappointing, but after brainstorming for a bit, I came up with the current title, which I rather prefer now. In a later post I'll go into from where I lifted the phrase "Super Scientifical."

But after realizing I should set up a blog to do some more serious science writing, I realized I should start thinking about getting serious about being a science writer. I've been thinking about getting serious about writing off and on for a while, but I've never set aside the time to do it, nor have I had a good idea of what I'd write about. Science and mathematics seem like the natural places to start. Mathematics is what I spent the better part of 10 years of my life learning, and for the past 3 years I've been learning some biology. But I'm a generalist by inclination, and so my interests in mathematics and science tend to be wide and relatively shallow, rather than narrow and deep as a research career seems to demand. (I don't claim to have read or understood Berlin's dichotomy, but it sounds like I'm more a fox than a hedgehog.) Indeed, my strengths as a scientist are primarily in synthesizing and communicating information. So it seems as if my eduction, skills, and interests could lend themselves to expository writing about science. All of that, combined with a growing need for good expository science writing--particularly science writing that is informed by, and can inform, public policy--is what's motivating me to make a go of this.

I started this post with the idea of just archiving a few science writing links. Here they are:

• National Association of Science Writers (and specifically their
  Advice for Beginning Science Writers)
• UC Santa Cruz Science Writing
• Northern California Science Writers Association (NCSWA)
  
• CASW-Council for the Advancement of Science Writing
• A Field Guide for Science Writers


• From Science's NextWave: Field Report 3: Everything You Wanted to Know About Becoming a Science Writer But Were Afraid to Ask
  
  

initial post??

Had a somewhat lengthy initial post that I put up yesterday, explaining the eureka moment and raison d'etre for setting up this additional blog. Also outlined some topics I want to hit, and develop some thoughts and material upon: stem cells, biotechnology and bioethics (w.r.t. the latter, threw up the link to the President's Council on Bioethics). Systems biology.

Some additional topics that have occurred to me since: as I alluded to in the previous post, the pharamco-industrial complex. As a specific focus w.r.t. stem cells, CA Prop 71.

Also threw up a link to a MIT Technology Review article about Avastin. which reminded me of an entry I'd already started about this Fortune article. If the help desk at blogger isn't able to find that initial post somewhere, I'll try to reconstruct it.

medicinal marijuana

Already put up this Slate link on Steady Bloggin about the latest political issues surrounding medicinal marijuana. Here's something from a scientific perspective:

Scientific American: December 2004 issue DRUG DEVELOPMENT

The Brain's Own Marijuana

By Roger A. Nicoll and Bradley N. Alger

Research into natural brain chemicals that act like those in marijuana could suggest new treatments for pain, anxiety and other conditions

Haven't read this yet, but on the surface, it seems to add credence to the fact that marijuana has legitimate medicinal uses.

I'll wait for a future post to get into the hypocrisy of a legal/political/economic system that makes it illegal to use medicine that you can grow for yourself, but OTOH has produced and encourages the use of all kinds of synthetic compounds.

The words "economic" and "synthetic" are key there: it's in the interests of the pharmaco-industrial complex to restrict medicines to compounds that you have to pay them to synthesize. I'll try to develop these ideas in future posts...

inbreeding in Italy

cleaning out some e-mails from Nature.com. Thought I'd post this one, primarily for Simone:

A family affair 554
WALTER BODMER reviews Consanguinity, Inbreeding and Genetic Drift in Italy by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Antonio Moroni & Gianna Zei
doi:10.1038/432554a
Full Text