BioViews: perspectives on the life sciences across time and space: Recent Episodes
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Imagine being suddenly struck by constant, extreme fatigue that no amount of rest or sleep alleviates. Imagine going from an active, engaged, and healthy life, to having trouble with ordinary daily tasks, being bedridden, living in a feeling of brain fog and body pain, where going out or interacting socially can leave you drained for days. Imagine being dismissed by doctors, frantically seeking medical care and going through test after test with inconclusive results, where nobody seems able to explain what is happening to you and nothing seems to help. This is the lived reality of many people who have been eventually diagnosed with ME/CFS. In a recent paper "The biopolitics of CFS/ME" published in Studies C Dr Nikos Karfakis of the University of the West of England argues that the diagnosis of CFS/ME is not only a scientific issue nor only contested within the confines of the clinic, but a much broader, biopolitical problem. ME/CFS is still an often misunderstood and stigmatised condition. To gain greater insight into this illness and historical and current issues around its research, diagnosis, and treatment, I spoke to patient and ME/CFS Australia (SA) committee member Penelope McMillan and clinical immunologist Dr Rob Loblay for a BioViews double episode focusing on ME/CFS. The critically acclaimed 2017 documentary film Unrest, which tells the patient story of Jennifer Brea’s journey with ME/CFS can be found here.
For more information on the controversial PACE study, have a read of this account and a longer discussion of the issues with the trial here.
You can also read more about ME/CFS here.
Thank you for tuning in to BioViews. You can subscribe to the Bioviews podcast by email, or follow us on Twitter @BioViewsHPS.
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At some stage most of us will have come across the notion of a placebo (from the Latin, meaning “I shall please”) or its negative incarnation, the nocebo (meaning “I shall harm”). From inert pharmaceuticals through to crystal healing, witchcraft, and curses, the placebo concept is often invoked in a hand-wavy manner when the causes of an effect are not well understood or are thought to be psychological. However, for decades now, placebo effects have been studied by scientists and statisticians attempting to better understand how they are produced. Such effects are the subject of much debate and controversy, and often prove surprisingly difficult to replicate.
In this episode, we talk to Dr David Teira, a professor at UNED, the Spanish Open University, who specialises in the history and philosophy of statistics. Earlier this year he published a paper in Studies C looking at placebo interventions and how the ways we study these currently limit our ability to understand and reproduce their effects.
You can read more in David Teira's recent article Placebo trials without mechanisms: How far can they go?
Thank you for tuning in to BioViews! Keep an ear out for our next (double!) episode, where we will be looking at perspectives on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.
Subscribe to the Bioviews podcast by email, or follow us on Twitter @BioViewsHPS.
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Greetings all! Last weekend, the BioViews team headed to the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) conference at the International Convention Centre in Sydney, Australia. The theme for this year’s 4S conference was “TRA
NSnational Society and Technology Studies (STS)” – with a focus on the global scale and diverse regional natures of STS. Talks covered a huge range of topics drawing upon a plurality of approaches – foregrounding indigenous knowledge, examining global collaboration, and emphasising regional expertise, embodied, and embedded practices.
While we were there, I spoke to a few researchers about their work and what they were presenting on at the conference, and put together a little video highlighting some of the "Making and Doing" session highlights, as well as some of these conversations.
David Munns from the City University of New York gave us some historical and social perspectives on infrastructure for waste disposal in space and coupled environmental systems, through the lens of projects like the Alga-tron and the Aqua-Hampster.
I also spoke with Erika Szymanski (@ErikaSzymanski) University of Edinburgh, who talked about her work with yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) on projects such as Engineering Life and TRANSGENE. Erika's interests span from wine science and technology through to science communication and microbiology. At the conference she reflected on how the different frames and metaphors scientists use to describe and think about organisms such as yeast affect and direct research programmes, scientific protocols, and help construct what yeast is becoming.
Finally, Rachel Ankeny (@ankeny_rachel) spoke about a session on changing trends for academic publication in an increasingly global and open access world. She also put together the Organisms and Us in dialogue session and, together with Heather Bray (@heatherbray6) the "Transgressing the Intersection of Science and Food" sessions that came out of the Food Values Research Group project.
Thank you to all the organisers and participants who made this year's 4S such a wonderfully enriching event!
We’ve all been sick at some time – from the annoyance of suffering through a cold, through to life-changing chronic illnesses that some of us must learn to live with. Through our intimate familiarity with such illnesses and their consequences, it’s easy to think that understanding illness would be simple. But as it turns out, it is much more difficult to specify precisely what illness is than we might have thought. Medical researchers and philosophers of medicine have developed various different frameworks that help us to talk about illness, but these frameworks often have significant limitations.
Juliette Ferry-Danini, who works on Philosophy of Medicine at Sorbonne University in Paris, is one of these researchers. Her research critically appraises humanistic frameworks for understanding illness. She joined us on BioViews to talk about her recent paper, entitled ‘Should phenomenological approaches to illness be wary of naturalism?’
You can read more about Philosophy of Medicine and about Phenomenology at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries. You can follow Juliette Ferry-Danini's research here, or follow her on Twitter @FerryDanini.
Subscribe to the Bioviews podcast by email, or follow us on Twitter @BioViewsHPS.
When you picture different levels of organisation in the biological world, what is it that springs to mind? For a lot of us it is a picture that probably expands from bottom upwards, something like: molecules -->cells -->tissues -->organs -->organ systems -->organisms. Most of us will have encountered this way of thinking about biological levels first in some introductory biology textbook somewhere along the way. This is related to what is sometimes called the "layer cake" model of biological organisation: all of biology is seen as layered into such levels, different theories that apply at each level, and there is some way of translating between them that shows how the upper levels reduce to lower ones.
However, this way of thinking about levels in biology actually comes with a lot of problems, and has been widely criticised. How, then, to best think about different "levels" in biology? What do scientists mean when they use language like this, and what role do such concepts play in shaping the process of biological science? This episode, we were joined by philosopher Dr Daniel Brooks from the University of Cincinnati, to tell us more about the significance of "levels" concepts in biology.
You can read more on this topic by Dr Daniel Brooks and Dr Markus Eronen at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page, Levels of Biological Organisation. Give their recent paper The significance of levels of organization for scientific research: A heuristic approach a read and follow Dr Brooks' research here.
Thank you for tuning in to BioViews! Keep an ear out for our next episode, where we will be joined by Juliette Ferry-Danini, who will be talking about humanistic approaches to understanding illness.
Subscribe to the Bioviews podcast by email, or follow us on Twitter @BioViewsHPS.
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With their morphing bodies, colour-changing skin, many suckered arms, and their curious, intelligent behaviour, octopuses are among the strangest and most fascinating of sea-dwellers. A paper published this year caused a recent media frenzy when it announced, among other things, that octopuses might be extraterrestrial in origin. Scientists were quick to respond in the negative - we have plenty of evidence about the evolutionary history and relatives of octopuses, all of which points to an aquatic rather than a cosmic origin. However, although octopuses are not aliens, interacting with them is, as philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith puts it in his recent book Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life, "probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien."
This strange, aquatic intelligence is what leads philosopher Dr Marta Halina in a recent paper to describe octopuses as a kind of "conscious exotica." She is particularly interested in octopuses as useful case studies for thinking about how we can assess and understand consciousness and intelligence in systems that are very different from ourselves - from other organisms through to artificial systems. Dr Halina is a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Cambridge, and is a program director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. In this episode of BioViews, she talks about octopus intelligence and the challenges of consciousness research.
Read more about Dr Marta Halina and her research, have a read of her paper Octopuses as conscious exotica, and check out the projects at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. You can also follow her on Twitter @MartaHalina.
If you are interested in reading more about the philosophy of consciousness, head over to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article for a good overview. Check out Roger Hanlon's site at the University of Chicago for some awesome footage of octopus camouflage and threat displays, and read more about chromatophores, the complex skin structures that octopuses use to achieve these incredible feats.
Peter Godfrey-Smith's book Other Minds: The Octopus And The Evolution of Intelligent Life is well worth a read, or head over to his blog at metazoan.net. Peter Godfrey-Smith and others will be presenting at the upcoming workshop Animal Sentience: Pushing the Boundaries, which is being held at the ANU in Canberra on 17th August 2018.
Thank you for tuning in to BioViews - keep an ear out for our next episode, subscribe to our podcast, or follow us on Twitter @BioViewsHPS!
Michael Crichton's classic 1990 novel Jurassic Park spawned a blockbuster movie franchise of death-defying dinosaur action adventures that continue with this year's latest release: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. A casual audience of these films could certainly be forgiven for thinking that the science of Ancient DNA is all about reckless scientists resurrecting extinct dinosaurs from ancient mosquitoes trapped in amber. However, while we don't actually have dinosaurs roaming the earth (spoiler alert: and probably never will!), the science of Ancient DNA continues to develop and evolve all the time, with new tools, techniques, and challenges.
For this very first double episode of our brand new podcast, BioViews, we are joined by two very special guests to tell us more about the field of Ancient DNA research.
Dr Elizabeth Jones is a historian of science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. She has spent the past few years at University College London interviewing scientists and studying the history of ancient DNA research. She has recently written a paper entitled Ancient DNA: a history of the science before Jurassic Park. On the show, she talks to us about how ancient DNA research began, and about the interplay between the media, entertainment, and science in the early days of the field.
Dr Laura Weyrich is a paleomicrobiologist at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide. She talks about what Ancient DNA research looks like in practice today, and about her own work reconstructing the microbiomes of ancient humans, using DNA techniques that give us a unique window into the lives of our ancient ancestors.
Follow this link to learn more about ancient DNA and what goes on at ACAD. You can also follow Dr Elizabeth Jones @edobsonjones and Dr Laura Weyrich @lsweyrich on Twitter.
Tune in to the next episode of the BioViews podcast, where we will be hearing all about octopus intelligence and the challenges of consciousness research. In the meantime, follow us at BioViews on Twitter @BioViewsHPS!