Jonathan Eisen dresses down university press departments that oversell science, and also hits on one of my pet peeves: the attempt to portray all scientific research as addressing human ills. In this case, it’s claiming that research on shark gene expression will help treat birth defects.

In my own research, I look at the effects of alcohol (among other things) on embryonic development in zebrafish, and it is a kind of animal model of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. People always jump to the assumption that I’m trying to find a cure for FAS, and I have to correct them: I definitely am not. FAS is a developmental disorder, and is not curable … and we already have a solution in the form of public policy and maternal education that can prevent the problem. I use teratogens as a simple tool to perturb the process of development so I can view the interactions involved; I also see development as an event involving both genes and the environment, and just about everyone mucks around with genes, so I’m looking at it from the other side.

So my work with teratogens is much more directly applicable to research on birth defects, and I deny the association; most of the work out there on gene expression in fins is going to even more remote from applied medical uses, not that that will stop PR departments.

Despite a miserable red-eye flight — I left San Jose at 6:30 last night, and arrived in Minneapolis at 4am, followed by my familiar long drive home — I’ll try to say a few words about Sci Foo.

Short version: weirdest meeting ever. That’s a good thing, though.

[Read more…]

My last Seed column is online. Print media feels a little weird — it’s like I wrote that one long ago, the one I finished earlier in July is going to print right now (and will be out in mid-August), and I’m already working on the column after that. It’s like looking at old history for me.

It’s also an old story for you subscribers. It’s just those who haven’t subscribed yet who are months behind the times. So when are you people going to join the rest of us…in the future?

I’d reconciled myself to the fact that the sun will die in about 5 billion years — time enough to get all the important stuff done, I thought — but now Chris Mims tells me we’ve only got 12 million years. I mean, that’s like going to the doctor, and he says, “Good news, Mr Myers, you’re going to live to be 90” and then he calls you up a little later and says “whoops, little slip up there, you’ve got a month to live.” It’s not good news.

The story is a bit speculative—we’ve long known that there are these very rough periodic extinctions in the fossil record, and now a few wild-eyed theoreticians suggest that it might be correlated with our system’s rotation around the galaxy, and every 60 some million years we swing around to the side that’s getting zapped a little more heavily.

Just to throw a little restraint into the guesswork, though, the mass extinction data shows considerable variability, and also the idea that we’re going to get irradiated is a little excessive. Passage through the rough side of the galaxy would be an event spanning millions of years: the earth was not sterilized in previous events, but if this were the cause, it would mean that there would be a low level increase in radiation over a very long period of time that would have stressed life to varying degrees. We do have 12 million years to manufacture lead-lined umbrellas and try to develop cosmic-ray resistant wheat. I’m just going to have to trust my great^600000th-grandchildren to get their act together in time.