Policy & Ethics

Let's just say that things aren't going especially well in the US right now. COVID is scaring the hell out of people (and I'm sick of writing about it), there is civil unrest all over the place and there ain't gonna be no baseball.

Scientists would like to have a list of all the species on Earth. That sounds like a relatively straightforward, purely academic exercise, but it really isn't. Unfortunately, one major reason is politics.

The researchers made use of two datasets. C-Span provided information on the verified Twitter accounts of the members of the 116th Congress; Twitter’s interface provided the tweets.

Most days, the world is unfair. Bad people succeed, good people fail, and those who deserve justice never get it.

The American Medical Association was two years late to the party when it issued its first statement

Everyone I know likes to think of himself or herself as pro-science and open-minded. I don't think I've ever heard anyone proudly claim to be anti-science and closed-minded.

Peer review, especially peer review of chemical safety/risk assessments, is under assault.  Despite the fact that government agencies, industries, universities, NGOs and consulting groups recognize the added credibility that peer review bring

Well, this is certainly interesting. An article from CNBC that I posted on my personal Facebook page has been flagged by Facebook fact-checkers as containing "partly false information."

In medicine’s recent past, Dr. Welby could be counted on to dispense sage fatherly advice. Fast forward a decade or two, and Dr. Grey often lays out the options while addressing their and their patient’s angst.

A few weeks ago, we received an email from Dutch journalist Jannes van Roermund, who works for the newspaper De Telegraaf.