Yesterday my Fresh Air interview was broadcast. You can listen to it here. I’ve been lots of emails with follow-up questions, and it occurred to me that I really ought to gather up some links to more information about the topics I discussed.
If I haven’t addressed a question you had listening to the show, leave a comment to this post and I’ll add a link.
Discover, April 18, 2012
Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain.
Continue reading “Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make?”
This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Titanic: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Greatest Shipwreck. By National Geographic Shorts. Published by National Geographic.
Reviewed by Jennifer Ouellette
April 18, 2012
As I blogged yesterday, I have a story in the New York Times today about some scientists who are calling for a reformation of science, pointing to troubling indicators such as the rise in retractions of scientific papers.
As any sane journalist would do, I consulted the fantastic Retraction Watch, written by Adam Marcus (left) and Ivan Oransky, while working on my own piece. I also called Oransky for his thoughts on the argument I was describing, championed by, among others, Ferric Fang of the University of Washington and Arturo Casadevall of Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Continue reading “Retraction Watch in the Boston Globe: Make Science More Transparent”
In tomorrow’s New York Times, I’ve got a long story about a growing sense among scientists that science itself is getting dysfunctional. For them, the clearest sign of this dysfunction is the growing rate of retractions of scientific papers, either due to errors or due to misconduct. But retractions represent just the most obvious symptom of deep institutional problems with how science is done these days–how projects get funded, how scientists find jobs, and how they keep labs up and running.
Along with the main story, I also wrote a sidebar about how hard it is to hear from the scientists who write retracted papers. I also spoke on the latest Timescast video, which I’ve embedded below. I show up with Arturo Casadevall at about 4:30. There are also lots of links in my story to the original papers. And if you don’t already read it, be sure to check out the blog Retraction Watch, which has been digging deep into the retraction story for years now.
Originally published April 16, 2012. Copyright 2012 Carl Zimmer.