Genes, trains and eureka-moments
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
2w ago
I was in the process of writing a blog post on metaphors in genetics and genomics which was getting longer and longer and I had some personal stuff to deal with. So, I stopped. I might come back to this another time. In the process of writing, I discovered that trains have been quite an important source domain for metaphorical inspiration in genetics and genomics. In this post I’ll give you three examples, but there might be more. If you know any, please let me know. We all know that there are various metaphors that are fundamental for thinking and speaking about issues in genetics and genomi ..read more
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Making epigenetics familiar: The visual construction of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in the news
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
1M ago
Some time ago I wrote a blog post with Aleksandra Stelmach and Alan Miguel Valdez  about visuals used to make epigenetics public through the popular lens of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. I then promised some image analysis. Here is a summary of what we found (I thank ChatGPT for helping me summarise our findings. If you want references, ask me. I won’t hallucinate them!) Introduction Epigenetics is a complex field that deals with the study of heritable changes in gene function that do not involve alterations to the underlying DNA sequence. It encompasses a variety o ..read more
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John Herschel: A snapshot of his adventures in photography
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
1M ago
Sitting at home on a miserable day last week, I was reading a tweet, then a blog post by Stephen Case who wrote a book with my sort of title: Making Stars Physical: The Astronomy of Sir John Herschel. That post cheered me up, as I learned something new. I went to the kitchen to fetch a coffee and asked my husband: “Do you know that John Herschel invented the word snapshot?” He said he did not and added: “I see a blog post coming”. I said, but everybody interested in the history of science probably knows that (apart from me, obviously). But he argued that there might be more people like me out ..read more
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Truth, post-truth, and post-fake
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
1M ago
I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I engaged in a bit of ‘reading the tea leaves’. That is, I messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged in the Oxford English Dictionary and looked at Wikipedia, all the while reading tweets on the side. I’ll tell you what I found. This includes some longish quotes, but I think they are quite important. Truth The word truth has a very long history and sprouted many meanings from Old English to now. Much has been written about truth, initially in ph ..read more
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Humanising artificial intelligence and dehumanising actual intelligence
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
2M ago
Millions of people will now have interacted with a new form of accessible artificial intelligence, in the form of ChatGPT, DALL-E or Midjourney. Many will have had (at first) quite strange feelings of empathy with the bot, saying please and thank you and trying not to overburden it. We might also admire its apparent humility or get exasperated by its arrogance. We, as humans, have a tendency to anthropmorphise, that is, “to imbue the real or imagined behaviour of non-human agents with humanlike characteristics, motivations, intentions or emotions“. This tendency to humanise the non-human can ..read more
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Sickle cell disease and identity
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
2M ago
In my background post, I tried to provide some information about what sickle cell disease is, how it has so far been treated and what a new therapy using gene editing might involve. When such as treatment possibility was announced as approved by health agencies in the UK and the US, newspapers took (some) notice, especially since gene editing was involved. A detailed analysis of the newspaper coverage would extract a variety of themes relating to science, patients, challenges and so on. In this post I only want to provide some limited insight into one of the bigger themes that emerged, namely ..read more
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Sickle cell disease and gene editing
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
2M ago
Before the end of 2023, I had rarely heard of sickle cell disease (or anaemia). I knew it existed, but that was all. Then, around November and December, it was suddenly in the media spotlight, because UK and US health authorities approved a new therapy and because the new therapy used the still new and shiny method of CRISPR-based gene editing. This brought hope to many sufferers and it brought the disease to public attention. As ​​Sharl Azar, medical director of the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Disease Treatment Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, pointed out, this is “allowing ..read more
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Climate change, metaphors and me
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
3M ago
We were sitting round the kitchen table chatting after Christmas, reminiscing about last Christmas. I nostalgically said that last year such conversations had sparked my interest in AI in the form of ChatGPT and given me ideas for blogging. I wondered what I should blog about now. We all agreed that there was always climate change and my son talked a bit about the flood of climate fiction swamping the market. Then, just for a laugh, he asked ChatGPT a question: “Write a paragraph on metaphor and climate change in the style of Brigitte Nerlich”. This elicited a rather astonishing answer (I hav ..read more
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Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
3M ago
The year 2023 began with a bang. Suddenly there was a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’, and by ‘new’ I mean a form of AI that even I could use and vaguely understand. There was, it seems, some monstrous machine (called LLM) gobbling up everything we have ever produced in science, literature and art and spitting it back at us in any form we liked. from a recipe for shakshuka in the style of Bruno Latour to a picture of the tree of life in all its glory (and that was only on one random day on Twitter/X). So quite a few of my posts tried to deal with this emerging phenomenon. Artificial Int ..read more
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The human side of AI: Delivery robots in Milton Keynes
Making Science Public | Epigenetics
by Brigitte Nerlich
4M ago
This post has been written in collaboration with Alan Miguel Valdez, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, The Open University, Milton Keynes *** At the beginning of November 2023, an international AI Safety Summit took place at Bletchley Park, the iconic location of World War II code breaking feats. What has perhaps not been stressed enough, unless you live there, is that Bletchley Park is located in Milton Keynes. Now, Milton Keynes is also famous for its network of straight streets and, we should not forget, its pavement robots that use these streets to deliver groceries.  ..read more
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