Category: Student Reports

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/08/26/lawrence-solomon-science-now-settled/ Above is a link to an opinion piece on a financial website. What would this have to do with science? The piece claims that the global warming debate is settled; the new consensus is that global warming is caused by nature, not by humans. There is some rationality at work here–there has indeed been […]

Forget Kant, forget church, forget what your parents and Sesame Street taught you; do you know what’s right and what’s wrong?  Is there an objective good and evil?  Do we live in a moral universe?  Is morality anything more than another human construct?  If so, is it based on inherent biological principles, like the concepts […]

One of the main problems I have had with the material from the very beginning of this course is wrestling with the idea of a truly “objective” science—as an extension of there existing a truly “objective” anything. I am not well versed in philosophy so I am coming at this from what is essentially a […]

Much of what we read this week focuses on the body.  The works emphasize the ideas of Bacon, who considered Nature to be “matter”– tied to form but also in need of domination.  Nature and matter are all associated with the body, and the body is associated with females.  Evelyn Fox Keller examines the need […]

The Republican presidential debates have highlighted an interesting public health issue that is relevant to our current discussion of the role of politics in science.  Texas Governor Rick Perry has been criticized by his rivals for mandating that Texas girls entering the 6th grade receive the vaccine for the HPV virus, which causes cervical cancer.  […]

From Tom Boyett, an auditor to the class who practice as an OB-GYN for 40+ years. One thing that we did not have time for in class last week was Douglas’ 3-4 page illustration of errors in methodology using diethylstilbestrol (DES) as an example. Interestingly, although her points were excellently made, some of the facts […]

This semester the Center is pleased to have student bloggers from the Arts & Humanities graduate course on “Science, Values, and Democracy” (HUHI 6305). They will be posting on topics related to this year’s series on science and politics, as well as on other topics related to the mission of investigating values in medicine, science, […]

One of the more interesting lectures at the Human Enhancement Symposium was given by Dr. Mehlman. The topic of the lecture was biomedically enhanced warfighters. In 2003, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) announced the “Enhanced Human Performance Program” of its Bio-Revolution program. DARPA continues to fund dozens of human augmentation projects to ensure […]

To live forever for fear of death.  To live forever for selfish reasons.  To live forever just because we can. There are many options to consider when thinking about immortality.  Is it simply being impervious to death?  Is it living continuously through multiple lives that are reincarnated?  Is it spending eternity in heaven or hell […]

Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks centers on the concept of informed consent. In the book, George Gey, a doctor from Johns Hopkins, took Henrietta Lacks’ cells without her knowledge and scientists used the so-called HeLa cells – the first immortal human cells grown in culture – in laboratories around the world to […]