THE CLASH OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION
The praise for President Obama’s scientific appointments is faltering. His nomination of “media doctor” Sanjay Gupta of CNN for surgeon general (the foremost spokesperson on US public health) was considered by many to be a lightweight choice. In the event Gupta declined, and Obama’s new nominee, Alabama community physician Regina Benjamin, has raised no eyebrows.
But the nomination of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, which co-ordinates most US biomedical research, is more controversial. Collins is a former leader of the Human Genome Project, he has a track record of large-scale management, and commands respect from peers by remaining scientifically active rather than becoming a pen-pushing administrator. MIT geneticist Eric Lander has called it “a superb choice,” while others praise Collins as a “scientist’s scientist.”
So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, Collins’s 2006 book The Language of God. He is outspoken, even evangelical, about his Christian faith. That might not have been a problem if Collins had not appeared to equivocate about “old-time religion”issues such as the interpretation of the Fall and the possibility of divine intervention in evolution. Some scientists are troubled by what you can find on such issues on the website of the BioLogos Foundation, established by Collins to reconcile science and religion.
Collins will step down from BioLogos before taking up his new role, and some of his colleagues offer reassurances that they have never seen his scientific judgement clouded by his religious beliefs. But with the religious opposition to stem-cell science in researchers’ minds, this may not be enough to dispel concern. Collins has become a hate figure among the “new atheist” scientists seeking to combat the religiosity of American life.
Biologist PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota, whose Pharyngula blog is a flagship of new atheism, calls BioLogos “an embarrassment of poor reasoning and silly Christian apologetics” and worries that Collins “will use his position to act as a propagandist for Christianity.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls him “an advocate of profoundly anti-science beliefs.”
But Myers also offers what might be a more compelling reason to question Collins’s appointment: “He represents a very narrow, gene-jockey style of research, which… I’ve often found exhibits a worrisome lack of understanding of the big picture of biology.” He’s not alone in fearing that Collins’s enthusiasm for “big science,” such as cataloguing genomes, will leach funding from smaller but more intellectually fruitful areas, such as environmental and systems biology. Collins will initially have plenty of cash—the NIH was given $10.4bn as an economic stimulus—but things will get leaner, and it will take boldness and vision to find space for innovation rather than safer but dull genome-crunching.
DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING
It is disconcerting astronomers almost to the point of embarrassment that a scar the size of the Earth has turned up unexpectedly on Jupiter. The dark “bruise” in the planet’s atmosphere is evidence of a gigantic impact, presumably an asteroid or comet. The last time this happened, in 1994, it was widely anticipated and supplied a cosmic fireworks display: the fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ploughed into the planet, leaving a trail of scars, each of Armageddon proportions. But this wasn’t a case of “there but for the grace of God,” so much as a reminder of Jupiter’s role as our guardian angel. The gravitational tug of the gas giant is thought to suck up wandering debris that would otherwise pose a threat to Earth. Some researchers even think that the existence of a big brother to mop up impactors could be a condition of habitability for Earth-like planets around other stars.
All the same, we’d like to see such events coming. But no one foresaw the dark smudge in Jupiter’s south polar region until an amateur astronomer in Australia spotted it on 19th July. We still don’t know what caused it. It could have been a faint icy comet, or a rocky asteroid. It’s going to be hard now to figure out how big the impacting body was, or how much energy was released, especially as Jupiter’s winds will soon wipe away the traces. The similar “holes” left by Shoemaker-Levy 9 were probably made by fragments several hundred metres wide: on Earth, that wouldn’t wipe us out but it would make an almighty bang.
LIKE NOTHING ON EARTH
Has anyone visited the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics recently? It’s well worth it: led by heavyweight astrophysicists, it hosts monthly seminars for specialists, as well as weekly talks and outreach events open to all. But you can’t get there by air, road or rail, because Mica exists nowhere on Earth. It is the first professional research organisation to be based exclusively in the web-based virtual world of Second Life. The potential of virtual reality to bring together scientists for meetings and conferences without leaving their desks has been much heralded. But Mica has taken it farther than most. Its seminars happen in a pleasant, wooded outdoor amphitheatre looking conspicuously like the Californian coast. And it must be said that the audiences are rather better looking than in reality too.
Philip Ball is the author of “Universe of Stone” (Vintage)
The praise for President Obama’s scientific appointments is faltering. His nomination of “media doctor” Sanjay Gupta of CNN for surgeon general (the foremost spokesperson on US public health) was considered by many to be a lightweight choice. In the event Gupta declined, and Obama’s new nominee, Alabama community physician Regina Benjamin, has raised no eyebrows.
But the nomination of Francis Collins to head the National Institutes of Health, which co-ordinates most US biomedical research, is more controversial. Collins is a former leader of the Human Genome Project, he has a track record of large-scale management, and commands respect from peers by remaining scientifically active rather than becoming a pen-pushing administrator. MIT geneticist Eric Lander has called it “a superb choice,” while others praise Collins as a “scientist’s scientist.”
So what’s the problem? In a nutshell, Collins’s 2006 book The Language of God. He is outspoken, even evangelical, about his Christian faith. That might not have been a problem if Collins had not appeared to equivocate about “old-time religion”issues such as the interpretation of the Fall and the possibility of divine intervention in evolution. Some scientists are troubled by what you can find on such issues on the website of the BioLogos Foundation, established by Collins to reconcile science and religion.
Collins will step down from BioLogos before taking up his new role, and some of his colleagues offer reassurances that they have never seen his scientific judgement clouded by his religious beliefs. But with the religious opposition to stem-cell science in researchers’ minds, this may not be enough to dispel concern. Collins has become a hate figure among the “new atheist” scientists seeking to combat the religiosity of American life.
Biologist PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota, whose Pharyngula blog is a flagship of new atheism, calls BioLogos “an embarrassment of poor reasoning and silly Christian apologetics” and worries that Collins “will use his position to act as a propagandist for Christianity.” Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker calls him “an advocate of profoundly anti-science beliefs.”
But Myers also offers what might be a more compelling reason to question Collins’s appointment: “He represents a very narrow, gene-jockey style of research, which… I’ve often found exhibits a worrisome lack of understanding of the big picture of biology.” He’s not alone in fearing that Collins’s enthusiasm for “big science,” such as cataloguing genomes, will leach funding from smaller but more intellectually fruitful areas, such as environmental and systems biology. Collins will initially have plenty of cash—the NIH was given $10.4bn as an economic stimulus—but things will get leaner, and it will take boldness and vision to find space for innovation rather than safer but dull genome-crunching.
DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING
It is disconcerting astronomers almost to the point of embarrassment that a scar the size of the Earth has turned up unexpectedly on Jupiter. The dark “bruise” in the planet’s atmosphere is evidence of a gigantic impact, presumably an asteroid or comet. The last time this happened, in 1994, it was widely anticipated and supplied a cosmic fireworks display: the fragmented comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 ploughed into the planet, leaving a trail of scars, each of Armageddon proportions. But this wasn’t a case of “there but for the grace of God,” so much as a reminder of Jupiter’s role as our guardian angel. The gravitational tug of the gas giant is thought to suck up wandering debris that would otherwise pose a threat to Earth. Some researchers even think that the existence of a big brother to mop up impactors could be a condition of habitability for Earth-like planets around other stars.
All the same, we’d like to see such events coming. But no one foresaw the dark smudge in Jupiter’s south polar region until an amateur astronomer in Australia spotted it on 19th July. We still don’t know what caused it. It could have been a faint icy comet, or a rocky asteroid. It’s going to be hard now to figure out how big the impacting body was, or how much energy was released, especially as Jupiter’s winds will soon wipe away the traces. The similar “holes” left by Shoemaker-Levy 9 were probably made by fragments several hundred metres wide: on Earth, that wouldn’t wipe us out but it would make an almighty bang.
LIKE NOTHING ON EARTH
Has anyone visited the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics recently? It’s well worth it: led by heavyweight astrophysicists, it hosts monthly seminars for specialists, as well as weekly talks and outreach events open to all. But you can’t get there by air, road or rail, because Mica exists nowhere on Earth. It is the first professional research organisation to be based exclusively in the web-based virtual world of Second Life. The potential of virtual reality to bring together scientists for meetings and conferences without leaving their desks has been much heralded. But Mica has taken it farther than most. Its seminars happen in a pleasant, wooded outdoor amphitheatre looking conspicuously like the Californian coast. And it must be said that the audiences are rather better looking than in reality too.
Philip Ball is the author of “Universe of Stone” (Vintage)
