Category Archives: Non-science

The good things

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I had a staggeringly bad day. I am fighting the NIH over deeply unnecessary red tape. It’s been a shock to me how much worse the bureaucracy is in America compared to any where else I have lived (NZ, UK, Germany). Even buying and selling a car privately, which I did yesterday, involves way more bureaucracy than it does in those other countries. I am also trying to deal with bad chemistry between key people in my working life. And there are ongoing discipline problems in the class (which I will blog about when they are sorted).  

But, four good things happened today, and sanity requires I focus on those. I can tell you about three of them.

(1) It looks like we turned up Marek’s disease virus in the farm samples we got Wednesday.  Very good news for us; very bad news for the farmer involved.

coffee-cup.jpg(2) I had a breakfast coffee with one of the SC200 students. She is highly motivated about the course, loves the critical thinking aspect, and is enjoying the topics I am teaching (these are the vehicles I use for getting across hard concepts). She is a theater major, and we had a very interesting discussion about performance art. My sort of teaching is performance art. Clearly, she had not thought about teaching like that before, though she got it as soon as I raised it. She made me think it would be really great to do a class (be student) in Professorial Theater 101. I wonder what we could do for PSU teaching if we got into that.
(3) I talked with Eberly College of Science Dean Mary Beth Williams (1, 2) about Gen Ed teaching. She and I are trying to change the world, starting at Penn State. She now tells me that in conjunction with Chris Long in Liberal Arts, she wants to go rogue. To really push the boundaries. To behave very, very unorthodox (in this context we can do bad grammar). To push the university (American education?) into something really new. Something really good. And really brave. To really extend our students–and our faculty. Hallelujah. I bet the University doesn’t have the balls for this. She does.
And I note that somehow, she does this all the time to me. I am cripplingly busy. And she wants to push me harder. She never once says “Andrew, I know you are busy but..”. She just says: here’s a vision. She doesn’t even have the decency to ask: “wanna run with it?’.

Calming chickens

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I spent the morning on chicken farms. We have an EEID grant to look for Marek’s disease virus in Pennsylvania. MDV has evolved to become seriously nasty. We’re working on the possibility that vaccines made it so. To me, it’s a fascinating question (although I have no deep understanding of why). And the context is fabulous. The efficiency of the poultry industry is mind blowing. It is incredible what smart people and market forces can achieve. Chickens used to be more expensive than oysters. Now…  If humans can make chickens dirt cheap, and go to the moon, how come we can’t do simple things, like Middle East peace?

Even better though, think about the scene from the virus’ perspective. Broiler chickens (the ones we eat) exist for 6-7 weeks, with maybe 30,000 birds of identical genotype and phenotype all in a single room. No wonder merry evolutionary hell is let loose.

Aviagen Trip 043.JPGBut today, none of that coolness mattered. It was just really nice to be out with proper scientists Patty and Dave in a relaxed setting. And the nature of the work – sampling dust – is lovely. After a few hours, things are done, targets reached, and everyone is happy. It is never like that when you are teaching or running a research group. Always there is something you could do better, faster, more efficiently. Its enough to drive you mad.

Indian summer

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I got back from India yesterday, in time to start SiOW 2012 tomorrow. I wish I could take the class on a trip to India. The places we work – the places where malaria is – are not the places tourists go. Yet among the trash and the smells and the grime and the very poor, there are advertisements for schools and colleges that offer math and science as a way out. And while we were there, the Indian prime minister was talking enthusiastically about investing in science as a way to maintain the phenomenal growth of the last decade. It is such a contrast to the Presidential campaign happening here.  The Indians see math and science the way Americans did in the 1950s.  I wonder whose century the 21st Century will be.

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One of our field sites: Basant Nager, Chennai, S. India

American education

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From a beautiful article in this week’s Time magazine from Fareed Zakaria, one of Time‘s many great journalists (italics mine):

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“I went through the Asian educational system, which is now so admired. It gave me an impressive base of knowledge and taught me how to study hard and fast. But when I got to the U.S. for college, I found that it had not trained me that well to think. American education at its best teaches you how to solve problems, truly understand the material, question authority, think for yourself and be creative. It teaches you to learn what you love and to love learning. These are incredibly important values, and they are why the U.S. has been able to maintain an edge in creative industries and innovation in general.“

Many of my students are hungry for American education at its best and work hard on my attempts to offer it. This is indeed so the point of it all. I agonize about whether I am pushing them hard enough at this. And how to reach the other students, for their own good and for everyone else’s. Zakaria’s article appears in an issue of Time which is asking where the American dream went.

Power anecdotes

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Sometimes I wonder if I am the wrong guy for this job.

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In recent classes I have discussed the power of anecdotes. I do this in the context of vaccines. A few parents have seen their children turn autistic in the days following vaccination and assume causality. And it’s hard not to (particularly if the parent telling the story is gorgeous and eloquent). But many vaccines are given around the time autism sets in, so it could be coincidence. Science is needed to check for cause and effect.  
And there’s the rub.  Hundreds of studies and thousands of statistical analyses have failed to find any evidence for a link…and yet, those anecdotes remain very powerful. And way easier to understand than a bunch of tedious science, none which ever directly proclaims: ‘Vaccines safe!’  Instead, the best soundbite a scientist can honestly contribute is: ‘No evidence vaccines are not safe….’  A tough asymmetry in public health messaging, and one from which humanity suffers.
I thought I had taught it all pretty well. But the other day, I overheard a student saying she would no longer be getting vaccines and she wouldn’t vaccinate her yet-to-be-born children. Until my class, she had never realized there were risks…. So much for my attempts to put tiny risk into perspective. 
Another student tells me he was damaged by the MMR vaccine; he and his parents — and the doctor who eventually cured him — are completely convinced. Quite how the vaccine damaged him, and how the cure could have cured him…well it was all a bit odd and I’d have liked to know more.  But the student drew back from my questioning.
So I didn’t do well by either student.  But that’s two powerful anecdotes I can use next year to teach, well, the power of anecdotes to overwhelm science.

Introductory class 2011

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Who’d have thought that we would have had technical problems today because of a 5.9 earthquake in Virginia.  It took out the wireless networks, so that was the end of Poll Everywhere fun.  If the networks go down when everyone is saying they’re ok, you wonder what will happen when a serious disaster strikes.

As an ice breaker, I asked the class to decide in groups what the most (i) important and (ii) interesting science questions are.  The answers:

The most important:
(1) curing disease (3 groups)
(2) energy sustainability (4)
(3) global warming and the environment (2)

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for alien.pngThe most interesting:
(4) Will California break off from America? (1)
(5) Is religion true? (1)
(6) Nanotechnology (1)
(7) How will we meet our energy needs? (1)
(8) Is there life out there? (3)
(9) How to stop disease transmission? (1)
(10) Will the robots take over? (1)

Mmmm.  Currently, I plan something on less than half of these (#1, 6, 8, 9).  Must ponder the others.  I wonder why climate change is such a minority interest.  But this settles it.  I must do aliens, abduction and all, just as Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Kathleen Postle strongly (and unexpectedly) advocated over lunch last winter.  It is not her contention that we can prove it occurs, just that it is in the category of things we cannot disprove. And fun to talk about!

It’s all very well for her: since then, I’ve been trying to finding a reliable source on alien abduction.

How lousy is non-science?

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Perhaps the most important implication of the gross inefficiencies of medical science actually lies beyond science.  If just 2% of medical ideas generate positive benefits, and as many generate harm as help, think what the hit rate must be in fields of human inquiry where experimentation and hard inference are impossible.

Think economics.  Whole chunks of politics.  And law.  Policy makers must be really groping in the dark.

One of the best things about teaching…

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Oddly, I found myself presenting one of my SiOW classes at lab meeting this week. Odder still, none among the assembled PhD students, Post-docs, Senior Research Fellows and Faculty complained about being taught a class I designed for undergraduate non-scientists.  

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It was on what is NOT science.  It is easier to recognize and understand science if you explore other ways of knowing.  For thousands of years, people calling themselves physicians and doctors have embodied the very essence of NOT–science, working instead on the basis of personal experience, half-baked theory, anecdotes, and wisdom handed down from eminent people.  Most physicians still do. Great stuff to teach to because it is easy to show that millions of people have been killed by their doctors’ scientific failings, even this century, in the US.  Powerful stuff, easy to get across.  
What I was not expecting is that I myself would learn something about science by talking about medical non-science.  And that I would in turn talk to so many people about what I found out, including the lab group – and now the blogosphere.
Teaching can be important and very challenging.  For researchers, it can also be a great way to shine a light on the world beyond our daily focus.  Certainly, since Dean Larson taught the class astronomy last week, the view from my hot tub got a whole lot more interesting.

Prayer

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As a means to get across the principles of hypothesis testing, I think a stimulating hook is the scientific analysis of the healing power of prayer.  [The latest [2008] ‘answer’ is here].

I did worry.  This is the first time I’ve tried teaching this to US students.  Yet from the outset, they were pretty broad minded (polls can take time to load):
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although about half the class could not imagine opinion-changing empiricism:  
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That is faith.  I wonder if skeptics and believers are equally represented in the two camps.
The learning experience?  A comment on the wall: “For the record, I have a lot of trouble paying attention in class for the last 20 minutes or so.”  But a student after class: “Just so you know, today’s class was wild.  Really wild.”  My feeling precisely.