because science is fundamental in the 21st century
In the podcast we talk about topics related to science, humanities, society, and of course progress!
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In the light of the latest animal use numbers in Germany (2017), Bart and I are having a conversation about animal use in fundamental research. We then move on to talk about a new statistical method that might help researchers get some of their data out of their drawers and into an article!
Science Communication is one way academics can apply themselves outside of academia. But how does one transition between careers? I talked with Dr. Deboki Chakravarti, a biomedical engineer who worked on cancer treatments. She graduated in 2018 and then did an internship with Scientific American, a leading brand in Science Communication in the USA.
First we learn a little bit about her scientific work, and her personal experiences in graduate school. Already during graduate school she began a YouTube channel about books and life as a graduate student. She then shares why she decided to leave academia, and she explains how she managed to find an internship with Scientific American. And finally, she explains what the internship looks like.
At the end of November 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had genetically modified human embryos which were then brought to term. The resulting twin sisters appear to be healthy. But this experiment was not greeted with enthusiasm by the scientific community.
The critique attacks every aspect of the experiment: the treatment’s medical necessity, the reasoning behind the treatment approach, the way it was conducted, the ethical implications, and it also wasn’t legal.
I talked with Dr. Nuno Henrique Franco about animal welfare in scientific research. The questions we address are
Once a month I sit down with my friend and co-host Bart Geurten. We talk about things within and around academia, and exchange opinions on earlier episodes.
In this episode, we first talk about the concept of overlay journals in the context of the newly founded community based journal “Neurons, Behavior, Data Analysis, and Theory”. NBDT is a journal for computational neuroscience, and it’s community lead, completely free, open, and not for profit.
We then talk about the role researchers should play in the dissemination of science to the public. This discussion has been on the internet for a while. In one of her recent youtube videos, the German science communicator Mai Thi Nguyen-Kim picked it up. She says, scientists should be forced to write summaries for a lay readership for every one of their articles.
And in the main section we revisit my interview with Hélène Pidon on GMOs. We talk about the fears we think are behind the anti-GMO sentiments, and why the verdict of the EU court on gene modification was unscientific.
While the number of PhD graduates per year is rising worldwide, the number of proper long-term or permanent positions in academia isn’t. This leaves PhDs with ever decreasing chances of staying in academia. And it means that increasing numbers PhDs stay postdocs for a decade or longer, only to have to leave after all.
This episode is the first ‘Q&A’ episode, where my new co-host Dr. Bart Geurten (see episode 8) and I talk about what’s new in academia. Our conversations are free form and may lead us astray here and there.
We discuss the concept of ‘merit’ in the natural sciences. And we begin with a quick recap on episode 9, where I talked to Dr. Björn Brembs about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). The JIF is a metric designed to measure the impact a journal had in the scientific community. There are many problems with how JIFs are generated. What is even worse is the misuse of this metric for estimating the scientific ability of a single author of one article published in a journal.
Dr. Hélène Pidon is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research. She searches for genes that give plants resistance to diseases. She wants to use these genes to fortify cultivated Barley against these diseases, and thus reduce the amount of pesticides used to grow the plant. When the European Court of Justice ruled on the status of crops modified with gene editing methods like CRISPR, Hélène contacted me to talk with me about GMO crops.
In contrast to what was promised in the last podcast episode, we don’t have a full question and answer episode this time. I hope this will not happen too often, in future.
The Journal Impact Factor is widely used as a tool to evaluate studies, and researchers. It supposedly measures the quality of a journal by scoring how many citations an average article in this journal achieves. Committees making hiring and funding decisions use the ‘JIF’ as an approximation for the quality of the work a researcher has published, and in extension as an approximation for the capabilities of an applicant.