If you are one of the 17,570 people who have signed UCU’s petition against the so-called Research Excellence Framework (REF) proposal and now you are wondering what happened to your signature, you might be interested to know that besides submitting it to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), UCU also turned the signatures into a giant poster of Albert Einstein, who on this topic of research is reported to have said: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
Calling all academics: stand up for research and sign the University and College Union’s (UCU) petition against the current Research Excellence Framework (REF) proposal, which is an attack on fundamental research in the UK. According to this proposal, 25% of the assessment of a given research output would be based on its perceived ‘economic and social impact.’ Why is this important? Because this assessment will affect the amount of research funding granted to the particular university.
More than 16,000 academics have signed the petition as of today, including six Nobel laureates and 2,500 professors. However, time is running out, as the consultation process ends on 16 December. Read Sally Hunt’s article (general secretary of UCU) on why this REF proposal is the “worst of all worlds.”
A quote from Michael Polanyi on the Stalinist disdain for ‘pure research’ would also seem appropriate here:
I first met questions of philosophy when I came up against the Soviet ideology under Stalin which denied justification to the pursuit of science. I remember a conversation I had with Bukharin in Moscow in 1935. Though he was heading towards his fall and execution three years later, he was still a leading theoretician of the Communist party. When I asked him about the pursuit of pure science in Soviet Russia, he said that pure science was a morbid symptom of a class society: under socialism the conception of science pursued for its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would spontaneously turn to problems of the current Five-Year Plan. (p. 3)
[Michael Polanyi (1966) The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul]
Finally, listen to the words of 2009 Chemistry Nobel prizewinner Venki Ramakrishnan (one of the signatories) on his views on the relationship between basic research and applied research (comment starts at 5:15) [hat tip to The Nature Blog]:
A Latourian moment in Michael Polanyi’s “A Society of Explorers” lecture:
The popular conception of science teaches that science is a collection of observable facts, which anybody can verify for himself. We have seen that this is not true in the case of expert knowledge, as in diagnosing a disease. But it is not true either in the physical sciences. In the first place, you cannot possibly get hold of the equipment for testing, for example, a statement of astronomy or of chemistry. And supposing you could somehow get the use of an observatory or a chemical laboratory, you would probably damage their instruments beyond repair before you ever made an observation. And even if you should succeed in carrying out an observation to check upon a statement of science and you found a result which contradicted it, you would rightly assume that you had made a mistake. (more…)
A review of Graham Harman’s Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics in The Philosophers’ Magazine by Brian Smith from the University of Dundee.
The aim of Prince of Networks is twofold: it is both a secondary text, introducing Latour to a wider philosophical audience, and a primary text, presenting Harman’s own increasingly well-formed and complex “object-oriented” philosophy.
Aramis is coming back from the dead, this time rearing its head in London. The personal rapid transport (PRT) vehicle can now be viewed at the Science Museum in London and it is being tested at Heathrow’s Terminal 5, to be launched next year.
It’s interesting to observe just how explicit the ANT notion of translation (no transportation without transformation) becomes in synthetic biology. J Craig Venter and his colleagues seem to be doing nothing else but transformations in order to ensure the transportation of a synthetic genome into a living bacterium. According to The Scientist Blog, this translation involved the following steps:
Last year, Venter … reported that he and his collaborators had created a synthetic bacterial genome and cloned it into a yeast cell. However, they were unable to transfer the genome into a cell that would use the genetic code to produce a functioning version of the organism. In the current paper, the researchers present a technique for doing just that.
The Venter team first cloned the genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides into a yeast cell. They then altered the genome, using the myriad tools available for yeast gene manipulation. In the procedure’s trickiest step, they transplanted the yeast-bound bacterial genome into a closely related bacterium, Mycoplasma capricolum, coaxing it to “take this bacterial genome and boot it up” and generate their mutant strain (…).
The hurdle Vashee and his team had to overcome to achieve this feat involved bypassing the bacterial equivalent of an immune system — essentially a collection of restriction enzymes. These enzymes, thought to have evolved to chew up the genomes of viruses infecting bacterial cells, were preventing the successful transplantation of the modified M. mycoides genome into wild-type M. capricolum. So the group developed two fixes, which together solved the problem: First, they inactivated M. capricolum’s restriction enzymes. Then, they chemically modified their mutant M. mycoides genome where these enzymes typically cleave the genomes of intruders.
