Mar 24 2010

FOSEP Book Club recently read Tomorrow’s Table – Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food

Category: Books, Events — Riley @ 2:56 pm

Tomorrow’s Table – Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food by Pamela C. Ronald and Raoul W. Adamchak, 2008

More info can be found at: http://pamelaronald.blogspot.com/2009/10/tomorrows-table-moves-to-science-blogs.html

The FOSEP Book Club met recently at Third Place Books, Ravenna to discuss Tomorrow’s Table, a book that describes the tale of bringing together organic agriculture and genetic engineering.  Pamela C. Ronald is a Professor of Plant Pathology at the University of California, Davis and is married to her co-author Raoul W. Adamchak who has been growing organic crops for 20 years and is currently teaching organic farming practices at University of California, Davis.  

We had a very lively discussion about organic farming and genetic engineering, the pros and cons of both and trying to glean a better understanding of what they both mean in the context of the food industry.  We also debated whether these two practices can co-exist?  The group didn’t come up with definitive answers, but in the process I think everyone in the group learned more about conventional and organic farming and has a better understanding of genetic engineering in the food industry and what the major issues are going to be as we move forward. 

Some of the other discussion topics were local versus organic farming, and trying to define what “organic” really means and who decides that something is “organic,” as some argue all food produced is organic, so is it more about how food is grown, the tools employed, and whether or not pesticides/chemicals are used to aid the growing process.  We discussed the pros and cons of pesticide use as well – for example, the negative impacts of pesticides on the environment and human health versus the utility of pesticides to increase crop yields and feed the ever increasing world population.

If you enjoy reading and discussing books, please consider joining us for our next book club meeting.  We have not set a date yet, but will be doing so shortly.  There are a couple of books on the docket, including Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud by Robert Park and Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate by Stephen Schneider.

Please check back with the FOSEP website for updated information on the book club.

Cheers,

Catharine

Feb 14 2010

FOSEP Bookclub: Denialism by Michael Specter

Category: Books — Andy McMillan @ 10:55 pm

At thDenialism Covere last book club meeting we discussed the Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter. As Kate described from the talk he gave while in town, the book described how people’s personal biases can sometimes overwhelm their ability to think rationally about certain subjects, particularly when it comes to evaluating risks. In this book Specter addressed issues relating to pharmaceuticals, vaccines, organic food and nutritional supplements, and race and genetics. I thought he covered such a range of subjects in a clear way and was able to put things an understandable context.

I was particularly interested reading about his take on synthetic biology. This field seems to have lots of potential benefits, while also having potential to be very controversial and is not well known by the general public. This chapter seemed a good introduction to learn about what kind of research is being done in this area. Parts of this chapter were also used in Specter’s article in the New Yorker last year.

Another section that brought up interesting discussions was the chapter on genetically engineered and organic food. This led to us deciding to read a book on these topics referenced by Specter, Tomorrow’s Table by the husband and wife Dr. Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak. Ronald is a plant geneticist working on developing rice strains that can be resistant to disease and flooding, while Adamchak is an organic farmer, and the book discusses how their work can complement each other. If you want to join us March 7th this book should provide fodder for more interesting conversations.

Nov 23 2009

Michael Specter talks of “Denialism” at UW

Category: Books, Events — Kate @ 7:42 pm

denialism_cover

Last week I attended a World Affairs Council event “Denialism: Balancing Skepticism and Science to Shape Global Health and Sustainability Policies” with science writer Michael Specter. His talk served as a preview to FOSEP’s next book club selection “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens our Lives” by the same author.

I have not yet read the book, but in his talk Specter outlined several examples of what he terms “denialism” in which scientific consensus is ignored or risk is not properly assessed. Specter explains that a large problem concerning fear of technology is the inability of people to evaluate risks properly. People usually do not think statistically. Specter cited that out of eleven million people vaccinated for the H1N1 flu, only one reported significant adverse reactions, but the H1N1 flu itself has killed thousands of people. Yet there has been an increasing trend to avoid the vaccine out of fear for adverse affects. Specter spent a lot of time discussing vaccines, but other topics were also touched upon, including genetically engineered food, drug regulation, alternative medicine and vitamins, synthetic biology, and more.

Of course there are reasons for denialism, Specter explained, technological promises are not always met, and many things have gone wrong with technology. Fear is the greatest driver for denialism and it is understandable to question. Ultimately, Specter argues that science is a system that can work and in fact it is the best system even considering its mistakes. His proposed solution to countering denialism is to foster better debate and discussion over scientific issues.

We have yet to set a date for the “Denialism” book club, but it is likely to take place in the 2nd week of January. So feel free to join us by replying to the event email for more details. I have no doubt that the topic of denialism will provide plenty of food for thought.

Nov 16 2009

FOSEP Bookclub “Don’t be Such a Scientist” by Randy Olson

Category: Books, Communication, Events — Kate @ 1:10 pm

Dontbesuchascientist_cover

FOSEP held its second book club last night after reading Randy Olson’s “Don’t be Such a Scientist—Talking Substance in an age of Style.” To give a little background, Randy Olson was a professor studying oceanography when he left his tenured faculty position to try to make it big in Hollywood.  No joke.  His goal was to become a better story teller and by all measures, Hollywood affects a bigger audience than basically any other media, so Randy chose to tell his science stories with film. Since his dramatic career change Randy has produced two full length science movies—Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus, and Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy.

The book lays out what Dr. Olson learned from Hollywood about how to tell a good story.  He says that even though science lends itself to the story format (introduction, tension or conflict—the mystery the scientist is trying to solve—followed by resolution) scientists in general are pretty terrible at telling their stories to non-scientists. The key point is to balance substance and style.  Scientists are really good at the substance part, but not so good at the style part. And no matter how good your science is, if the audience sleeps through your presentation or changes the channel, it is as if you never delivered your message in the first place.

The next FOSEP book club selection is “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives” by Michael Specter. Coincidentally, Michael Specter is speaking at UW tomorrow night, Tuesday November 17th, 7pm on the UW campus, Kane Hall 110.

You’ll be hearing about the next book club meeting via email. If you are interested, please join us!

Oct 15 2009

November book club – Don’t Be Such a Scientist

Category: Books, Communication — Elaine Hillenmeyer @ 2:21 pm

scientist_200For the FOSEP book club in November, we’ll be reading Don’t be such a Scientist: Speaking Substance in the Age of Style by Randy Olson.  The former marine biologist is now a filmmaker.  In his book, herelates how scientists can better communicate with the general public.

The author was interviewed on Talk of the Nation on NPR today, and you can listen to the conversation here.

Let us know if you want to attend the book club meeting and we’ll get you the details!

Sep 20 2009

Becoming Well Rounded Scientists

Category: Books, future plans — Phil @ 9:44 am

Chris Mooney came back to Seattle to talk about his and Sheril Kirshenbaum’s book “Unscientific America.” FOSEP co-sponsored the event and it’s easy for me to say that the members present got all riled up in that idealist way that we can change the way science is perceived in this country by changing ourselves.

Several FOSEP members read their book and met to discuss it. This isn’t going to be a book review; we aren’t addressing the messenger (we’re fans of Chris’ efforts anyway) or the means the messages were delivered in this book.

We’re convinced that there is a growing chasm between scientists and those who don’t seek out scientific information so we focused our discussion on what we and FOSEP could do about it.

We had a lively and fun discussion and ended with a few plans:

To increase or gain communication skills we will work with individual departments at the UW to find a set of courses we will recommend all FOSEP members take before they graduate (and we will take them). There are policy certificate programs out there, but this is less formal. We are thinking about 4 or 5 courses that a scientist should take before they consider themselves a well rounded scientist in this century.

This would include mass communication skills, media training (giving interviews, staying on message), preparing an elevator talk and sound bites relating to their specific research, how to find analogies non-specialists can understand, and how to avoid jargon, etc. Check out the wiki page we started.

Eric and I are going to check the feasibility of leading a seminar on science communication that would be a credit or two to develop visualizations of your research and a polished talk aimed at the public. We are hoping to cross-list this class in many science departments, so that many students will know about it and can practice giving their talks to people who aren’t specialists in their field.

Depending on graduate student interest, we’d like to do a public lecture series at the UW. The talks developed in the seminar would be ideal to use in this future versions of this series.

It will start with just the astronomy department, and it would be a grad student and post-doc research showcase. Each talk would start very broadly, for example, do you use Hubble data? Then talk about the telescope, and then end with the questions you are trying to answer. This is kind of like a science on tap except we want it at the university to try and break down the ivory tower barrier. We want to bring the public in to see what we are actually doing here and have a polished talk ready to go at any time. Kate pointed out the only thing we’d have to update in a general talk like this would be our results. We won’t be reaching the part of the public that most needs reaching, but this small step will help us with any public communication.

If it works well with the astronomy grad students, we’ll open it up FOSEP wide and try to get more people in, part of the reason we are doing it this way is because I’m an astronomer, and our planetarium public shows have been really popular so we have a nice public email list to advertise from.

So look forward to posts on our progress, and we hope you’ll all do what you can to bring these two cultures back together.

Finally, we had such a great discussion that we are going to do this again with another book. We’re up for suggestions; so far Andy suggested “Don’t be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style” – who’s in?

This post was written with the help of Eric Hilton, Kate Stoll, Andy McMillan, and Rachel Lipsky

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