The discussions following my two last posts about climate change opinion shifts and about an anti-science coalition have made it clear that one of the reasons people distrust science is that “Science” fails to speak with one voice.  There are definitely forces from the outside of Science that erode trust, but there are also internal issues.

The problem is that Science will not ever “speak with one voice.”  Scientists often have different opinions about a given topic.  Often that simply represents a healthy part of the scientific process.  When I hear someone say, “scientists don’t even agree about this!” I want to say, “you don’t know many scientists, do you!”  We are trained to questions assumptions and scrutinize analytical methods.  We are taught how to spot artifacts and how to come up with alternate hypotheses.  Some scientists get a little aggressive about this (there is usually at least one curmudgeon in every department).

There are definitely some topics that are so complex that it is impossible to be 100% sure about conclusions.  There are questions that are not amenable to running a controlled experiment.  These are all factors that make a topic like climate change so controversial.  These are legitimate reasons for the lack of a single “answer from science.”

All the above said, there are plenty of examples of scientific disagreements that arise from what can only, honestly be called bad science. Doing science well is non-trivial.  It requires a good deal of mental rigor and comprehensive information acquisition.  If we scientists are honest we all have to admit that we can fall short of the ideal “scientific method” at times.  Trust in “Science” ultimately means trusting “Scientists” and thats sometimes where the trouble starts.  There are 5 main ways that I can think of that scientsts can “behave badly.”  Maybe you can add some more.

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Along with colleagues, his team has developed a method to selectively “breed” a viral family to bind to specific minerals. In other words, they are developing viri that can find and bind to a chosen mineral in a sludge pile!

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Two Harvard researchers say they have successfully constructed a ribosome.

Harvard Medical School Professor Greg Church and Research Fellow Michael Jewett extracted ribosomes from E. coli bacteria, processed them, and then made new ones from the molecules.

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California passes its first law protecting farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non GE crops.

We’ve all heard the horror stories:  A farmer’s crop is contaminated by Genetically Engineered (GE) seeds, and that farmer is subsequently harassed and brought to court by the biotech patent owners (such as Monsanto) of those seeds.  In some cases, that farmer has also been held liable for contaminating other farmer’s crops with his own unintentionally contaminated crop.  Just this week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark piece of legislation, protecting California’s farmers from just such liability.

It is the first bill to be passed by the California Legislature that brings regulation to the Genetically Engineered (GE) crops.  The bill, AB541 (Huffman, D-Marin/Sonoma)  protects and compensates farmers who have not been able to prevent GE contamination of their non-GE crop.  AB541 was sponsored by a coalition of agriculture organizations and food businesses, including California Certified Organic Farmers, Earthbound Farm and the California Farm Bureau Federation.

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Certainly, anything that can digest itself warrants a closer look — and now a company in Kansas has licensed that proprietary corn offspring, dubbed Spartan Corn III (it even sounds like a name your drunk uncle Larry would approve of), for the ultimate consummation of the marriage in a baptism of commercialization.

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Much attention has been given to producing ethanol from non-food crops like grasses, but the ability to produce something indistinguishable to diesel from grass could be a game-changer. It would require almost no infrastructure change and could fuel all of the existing long-haul trucks on the road without modification.

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The team is part of a joint initiative of University of Stellenbosch and the Danish biotechnology firm, Aresa, which has developed the “RedDetect” bio-sensor technology in a weed called Thales Cress.

The weed changes color from green to autumnal red when it detects nitrogen dioxide leaching from mines buried in the soil.

Because the weed is too small to be seen from a safe distance, the scientists went looking for a more viable alternative, and landed on the tobacco plant, which grows easily in most parts of the world, with a little help from genetic engineering.

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