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In my previous post, I talked about how my experience in changing my way of sneezing taught me how hard it is to change a habit even in instances where we know it would be better for us if we did. Habits don’t merely concern things like the way we sneeze, however. For example, habits writ large are what define a culture, for a culture is nothing but a vast collection of shared habits that go by the more lofty designation “customs.” And though it’s not apparent at first glance, habits also deeply affect artistic style.
In my case, for example, after more than forty years of painting, I’ve developed a “mature” style (or what’s known as a “signature” style). People who have seen my pictures easily recognize one of my new paintings even when they encounter it outside my studio or gallery. All serious painters, no matter the quality of their work, inevitably end up with…
Is it a conflict of interest for a bioethicist to work as a paid consultant for the pharmaceutical industry?
In recent weeks I have posted my conversation with Jenny Dyck Brian of Arizona State University, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards. (See parts one, two and three.) Today we reach the final installment.
Q: A lot of people outside bioethics seem shocked when I tell them about academic bioethicists working for pharma. But within the field, I don’t see a lot of pushback.
A: Within the field there is little pushback. A lot of people said they themselves wouldn’t do it (or that an interesting opportunity has yet to present itself), but they think it’s a good thing that industry is getting some good advice, or at least seeking different perspectives. …
“Texas Cow Poke” by Clotee Pridgen Allochuku via Flickr/CC
Sometimes I find it useful to think about things that bear no obvious relation to one another. For example, I’ve recently been thinking about sneezing, cars, and cows, and a connection to the problem of climate change has occurred to me.
First, sneezing. When I was young, I was taught to cover my mouth with my hand whenever I sneezed. Good girl that I am, I followed this rule until a couple of years ago, when I read that in order not to spread germs, it’s best to sneeze into one’s elbow. (You don’t shake hands, set the table, or serve drinks to your guests with your elbow.) But it was no small matter to alter a longstanding habit that was sustained, in part, by a feeling that I was doing what my mother had told me was the right thing. With a lot…
You have got a fever, your body aches, and you feel dreadful. What should you do? The traditional answer is: “Take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids, get to bed and call me in the morning if you don’t feel better.” Could it be that this is just the wrong advice? That the last thing you should do is reduce your temperature with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever? Is it, to use a phrase, nature’s way of fighting illness?
This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who are pushing what has come to be known as “evolutionary medicine.” Crystallized about 20 years ago by a book – Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine – authored by the distinguished evolutionist George C. Williams and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, it claims that the force that caused us all, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, does not care about human…
Do bioethicists make pharmaceutical companies more ethical?
This is a central question motivating my interview with Jenny Dyck Brian, an Arizona State University professor who wrote her doctoral dissertation on corporate bioethics boards. (See parts one and two of the interview.) Today we turn to Eli Lilly, a company that has had its share of ethical scandal: the recruitment of homeless alcoholics for drug-safety trials, the suicide of a healthy volunteer in a Cymbalta study, the company’s controversial promotion of Xigris, a sepsis drug that was later taken off the market, and most recently, a record-setting penalty for fraudulent marketing of its antipsychotic drug, Zyprexa. Throughout it all, Lilly has been guided by a group of bioethicists that includes some of the most prominent names in…
I know you’re already sick of reading about MOOC’s. But I’m afraid there’s no avoiding them. In The Chronicle this morning, UCLA philosopher Pamela Hieronymi argues:
Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error. Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas.
And so forth, before concluding:
Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities. But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the…
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Those of us engaged in teaching, writing and speaking about science are participating in a Great Deception – well-intended, to be sure, but a deception nonetheless. The gist of that deception is that we teach science as a list of established findings rather than what it really is: The world’s best and most rewarding process of “finding.” Students and the general public are for the most part receptive to learning about science, but all too often, this means learning what we place before them, consuming our discoveries, then waiting for the next course.
The reality, on the other hand, is that it’s the kitchen, not the dining room, where the exciting stuff happens. More to my point, it’s in the imagination of the chefs, those who try new combinations and invent new recipes.
Enough with the culinary metaphor. My point is that…
In the most recent American Freshman Survey, the top reason for going to college was “to be able to get a better job,” with 85.9 percent of respondents rating it as “very important.” Only half of the respondents rated “to make me a more cultured person” as “very important” (50.3 percent).
No wonder the humanities now collect only around 12 percent of bachelor’s degrees, including history. (See the Humanities Indicators project for handy compilations of data.) According to the MLA, all the foreign languages combined (!) pull in only 1.05 percent of all four-year degrees. Even though knowledge of Asian and Middle Eastern languages is, indeed, a potent job skill in numerous areas of business, government, diplomacy, and the military, the humanities strike ambitious 19-year-olds as merely an academic pursuit. Shakespeare, Dante, Wordsworth, George Eliot . . . they seem like little …
Iconic phrase from the old TV show, Dragnet; now reduced to an endangered species (Wikipedia)
I have a great fondness for experiences, ideas, certain people, many animals, places, even some things. And I assume you do, too. Among these sources of delight, respect, and appreciation, I would include regular old-fashioned facts, although with the full recognition that not all of them are equally verifiable, or even equally definable. Nor are they equally pleasant, although part of the pleasure comes from knowing that they have that traditional, pre-postmodernist virtue: being true. Nonetheless, I would like to think that it isn’t only practicing scientists who grant facticity a special place, and that we do so not only when it comes to comprehending and communicating about the natural world but also in our daily…
It’s been almost half a century since Apollo 11 carried Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong to the moon. I remember running to make sure I’d catch the actual landing on television. Like many who heard Neil Armstrong’s first words when he walked on the moon, I heard them incorrectly. They are much more moving the way he actually said them: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” That a single man was walking on the moon was a magnificent idea, even though it was awfully hard to fathom. That mankind, in a historical sense, was now moving into space was unfathomable. In effect, many of us never did much with either of these ideas. Landing on the moon became merely one of many things that marked the 20th-century.
For me, part of the shock of watching men land on the moon came from their having done it on such a rickety-looking mechanical…
It is no secret that many academic physicians work for the pharmaceutical industry as speakers and consultants. Less widely known is that the pharmaceutical industry also employs academic bioethicists.
Beginning in the 1990s, a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies began to set up bioethics advisory boards, ostensibly to obtain guidance about controversial ethical issues. Over the years, the ties between industry and bioethics have gradually grown closer, with companies setting up endowed chairs and hiring bioethics consultants. Yet very little is known about how bioethics advisory boards work. What exactly is their purpose? Do they prevent ethical wrongdoing, or do they provide ethical cover? How many bioethicists are involved and who are they?
More than 30 years ago, Elisabeth Landes and Richard Posner provocatively observed that a “glut” in black babies exists in the United States foster care system. Their controversially framed assessment attracted ardent criticism, including charges of racism. Nonetheless, Posner and his colleague touched on urgent and yet unresolved problems, including how to (a) provide more meaningful life opportunities for child wards of the state by transitioning them into permanent home placements, (b) reduce the prevalence of black children in foster care, and (c) decrease state expenditures on foster care, while not sacrificing quality of care. There were other questions of great importance that arose in response to their research. However, the use of economic terms as analytical tools to describe the collision of both a terrible racial phenomenon and family law crisis launched the type of…
Protesters in front of Pennsylvania Station on Aug. 2, 1962 (Photo by Eddie Hausner/The New York Times. Click on image to get to source page.)
In 1882, New York Central Railroad president William Henry Vanderbilt declared, “The public be damned.” Although one might think this sentiment an anachronism that went away with the demise of 19th-century robber barons, it’s actually a perennial problem for democracies whenever private owners own what function as public spaces.
Here’s an example of what I mean. To get to Hofstra from where I live in Lower Manhattan, I take the train from New York’s Penn Station. I always stop first to grab a coffee at the Starbucks along the main corridor inside the station. While waiting on line, I groggily gaze at the large, black-and-white posters with images of the old Penn…
The AR-15, a semi-automatic version of the military M16 rifle, marketed by Colt for civilian sales. “Thanks” in large part to the NRA, there are no federal restrictions on private ownership of these weapons in the US. Do you feel safer knowing that your neighbor might well have one of these?
David Barash: Not surprisingly, gun control is once again on people’s minds. For those Brainstorm readers tired of my opinions, I’m happy to “host” the thoughts of Dr. Michael Shermer, who writes a regular column for Scientific American, is the force behind Skeptic magazine, author of many excellent books dealing especially with evolution and why people believe weird things, and – interestingly – is a self-described libertarian.
Michael: It is too soon to tell what the motive was behind the accused James Holmes…
Ever since I was in graduate school, I have lamented the inability of scholars to solicit and engage with cultivated lay audiences. With that in mind, I invite you to check out this video, part of a series I have been making which streams on the British New Humanist (a really interesting and intellectually diverse magazine of skeptical thought) and the good ol’ Huffington Post.
I envisioned this series as a sort of “Secularism 101.” I felt that it was necessary because my study of the subject demonstrated that there is massive and crippling confusion as to what secularism is and, probably more importantly, what secularism is not. The video above, however, seems like one that might be of interest to the scholars and university types who read The Chronicle.
In the span of about three minutes, we manage to cover the following artistic points of interest: Danish mid-century modern …
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.
As you may well not have heard on your corporate nightly news, the Obama-era National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been near-paralyzed by years of Republican dirty tricks leading to resignations and scandal that included frequent leaking of confidential board proceedings to former Republican board members advising the Romney camp. With the Department of Justice eyeballing the corporate hacks in question, however, the NLRB may finally be set to address academic labor issues.
Several of the regional NLRB panels have already decided core higher ed cases; just last month a federal judge spanked Chicago’s Columbia College for interfering with faculty union activities, ordering them to the bargaining table, posthaste.
Evidently the national NLRB plans to make up for lost time. Over the next few…
Hip, hip hooray for the NRA, ever-watchful guardian of humanity!
The global arms trade in conventional weapons is in the neighborhood of $60-billion, much of it fueling mayhem, misery, and mass killings around the world. Last week, however, UN negotiators were unable to meet their deadline for writing a comprehensive and much-anticipated Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). And a large share of the blame for that failure rests with that paragon of personal and social responsibility, our own beloved and ever-vigilant National Rifle Association.
That’s correct: Our cherished, life-affirming Second Amendment right to bear arms with which to murder our fellow citizens was evidently threatened by these—as it would be, of course, by any—efforts to establish limits on the sale of automatic weapons to identified…
In 2008, as everybody knows, the youth vote turned out to be one of the strongest Democratic cohorts in recent political history. Voters under 30 went for Obama at nearly a 2-to-1 rate, an enormous gap that looked ominous for Republicans for many years to come. College students in particular showed extremely high “unfavorability” for Sarah Palin and for social conservatives in general. Even though only 51 percent of Millennials bothered to cast their vote in 08, their steep tilt to one side made them a significant political force.
A USA Today/Gallup poll from last week showed the same trend. As reported in USA Today this morning, 18- to 29-year-olds favor Obama over Romney 61 to 33 percent and they give Obama a 64-percent job approval. The poll has a large margin of error (+/-11), and only 40 percent of youth respondents say they have “Given a lot of thought to election,” …
For the past three years, one stream of my work has involved extensive field research on the sexual trafficking of girls in the Philippines, South Africa, and India. For some years, my research has involved trafficking generally, including that of organs, children, and even body parts such as human tissues. However, this project examines trafficking beyond the exploitation and kidnapping women and girls taken against their will and under false consent to work in brothels or on street corners. This current project investigates girls forced into underage marriages or used as “cleaners” or “purifiers” to rid men of HIV in places like South Africa. These transactions violate laws, but not necessarily social norms and customs. Indeed, it has been very…
Posts on Brainstorm present the views of their authors. They do not represent the position of the editors, nor does posting here imply any endorsement by The Chronicle.
is an evolutionary biologist, professor of psychology at the University of Washington, and author of more than 30 books, most recently Homo mysterious: evolutionary mysteries of human nature.
directs the program in history and philosophy of science at
Florida State University. His forthcoming book is Science and
Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science.
is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.
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