Author: Mike White

Genomes, Books, and Science Fiction

My year in writing (but not on this blog.)

I did a lot of writing in 2016… just not on this blog, in spite of my good intentions. Aside from a personal record in grant proposals and our latest paper, I continued to write over at Pacific Standard. In case you missed them, here are four favorite picks from the year:

Scientists Can Now Genetically Modify Organisms in the Wild (Feb 17)

Compared to the controversies over GMO foods, gene drives have flown under the radar, but not for long.

Why the National Institutes of Health Should Replace Peer Review With a Lottery (April 8)

There are limits to the fine-scale resolution of peer review; a lottery  to fund grants would openly acknowledge that.

How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans (July 19)

Genetic history is about sex and migration, and both were dramatically affected by the slave trade and its racist aftermath.

How Our Environment Affects Our Genes (Nov 15)

We tend to think genetics is destiny, but the real story is gene by environment interactions.

Sciencesplaining Won’t Solve All Our Problems

I am as guilty of this as any other scientist: we think that by simply informing people about the scientific facts of something – climate change, evolution, GMOs – we’ll resolve our disagreements. People, currently misinformed, will come around to seeing issues from the proper scientific perspective if we just lay out the evidence.

It generally doesn’t work out that way, because not understanding the evidence on an issue like climate, while common, is almost always not the primary barrier. Public skepticism about the science, about whether evolution happens, whether climate change is real, whether GMO foods as safe as conventional foods, is a manifestation of an unarticulated, deeper concern that has less to do with the science – faith in one’s religion, concerns about regulating business, or the impact of Big Ag.

So if scientists want to clear up misunderstood science, we need to do more than sciencesplain* – we need to clarify what the argument is really about, and engage on the unstated issues that are the real barriers to agreement.

This is long-winded lead-in to my latest column in Pacific Standard, about a weird piece of sciencesplaining published in Genetics. The Genetics pieces describes how rates of cancer and other diseases among survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings and their offspring are not as high as you might expect. It accurately summarizes results of the still-running epidemiological study of the survivors, and indeed, most bomb survivors did not get cancer, and there is no evidence of higher rates of genetic disease among their offspring.

But the weird thing about the piece is the framing: its premise is that the public has a wildly exaggerated view of the harmful effects of radiation. By informing people about the actual data on bomb survivors, we can have a less irrational discussion about, say, the place of nuclear energy in our efforts to cut carbon emissions.

In my Pacific Standard article, I explain why this is misguided – irrational fears about radiation are the least of the nuclear industry’s problems: Economics, security, and the fact that, while accidents are extremely rare, they are enormously consequential, probably play a much bigger role than irrational fears.

* Yes, the whole “X-‘splaining” fad is annoying but sometimes effective.

Five Reasons the Government Should Fund Science

So Trump’s Office of Management and Budget pick, Mick Mulvaney,  apparently doesn’t believe the government should fund science. This is argument I hear with some regularity from certain quarters, and I have written multiple rebuttals over the past couple of years in my space at Pacific Standard. Here are six articles and five reasons why the government should fund science:

  1. It provides the basic understanding of disease mechanisms, without which drug companies can’t make effective drugs.
  2. Philanthropy is not enough to make up for government funding.
  3. Government-funded science has brought huge economic benefits by transforming how we eat, travel, communicate, and care for our health.
  4. Government-funded, curiosity-driven science has a history of huge payoffs.
  5. Government-funded science is how we build a well-trained scientific workforce.

Reading Regulatory DNA, or My Attempt to Explain What I Do

At the end of October, our paper on gene regulation in the retina was published in Cell Reports. (We paid good money for open access, so go ahead, click the link – there’s no paywall.) Our editor asked us if we wanted to try two things to help explain our work to our broader audience. The first is Figure360, a brief video guide to one figure in our paper. This is still fairly technical; it’s how I might explain our work in a conference poster presentation.

The second way we were invited to explain our work was in an informal post on the Cell Reporter blog. Here I tried to explain what we did in a way that would make sense to my mother. (Who has a bachelor’s degree in biology, so at least I had a chance)  My mother’s response: “I read it 3 times to better understand it.  It is a difficult topic.” In other words, I failed to make sense…

It’s not the most jargon-free thing I’ve written, but for your edification and enlightenment, I’m posting the link here. Check it out to understand massively parallel reporter gene assays and our Goldilocks theory of gene expression.

 

 

Climate change has altered nearly all of the planet’s ecosystems

It looks like we’re going to have a climate change denier heading up the EPA, Oklahoma’s attorney general Scott Pruitt, who has spent the Obama administration suing the agency he will now lead. So we’ll be hearing a lot about whether the science is “settled” and the uncertainty in climate scientists forecast.

As you listen to these debates, the thing to know is that climate change isn’t just about what might happen in the future. It has already radically altered the planet in ways that may be invisible to those of us who live in wealthy countries, but not to just about all life on Earth. As a recent review of the documented biological impacts of climate change puts it, “Climate change impacts have now been documented across every ecosystem on Earth.”

Last month I wrote about this story for Pacific Standard. The key point is one to keep in mind as we confront denialism in the Trump administration:

The consequences of widespread and rapid changes to something as complex as the world’s ecosystems are difficult to predict. The unpredictability of these consequences has been used as an excuse to dismiss them and paint scientists as alarmists. But unpredictability is exactly what should concern us: Our civilization, including our agriculture, water usage, population geography, and public-health measures, are adapted to fit the global climate that we live in. The prospect of further broad, unpredictable shifts to the world’s ecosystems should spur us to action, not complacency. As the authors of the Science paper write, “humanity depends on intact, functioning ecosystems for a range of goods and services.” For most life in those ecosystems, climate change is not a future event, but a present reality.