The Politics of Pure Science

The Politics of Pure Science PDF Author: Daniel S. Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226306322
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents in revealing detail the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the 1970s.

The Politics of Pure Science

The Politics of Pure Science PDF Author: Daniel S. Greenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226306322
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents in revealing detail the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Communicating Science Effectively

Communicating Science Effectively PDF Author: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309451051
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 153

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Book Description
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.

Science, Politics And The Pharmaceutical Industry

Science, Politics And The Pharmaceutical Industry PDF Author: John Abraham
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000951308
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
Drug disasters from Thalidomide to Opren, and other less dramatic cases of drug injury, raise questions about whether the testing and control of medicines provides satisfactory protection for the public. In this revealing study, John Abrahan develops a theoretically challenging realist approach, in order to probe deeply into the work of scientists in the pharmaceutical industry and governmental drug regulatory authorities on both sides of the Atlantic. Through the examination of contemporary controversial case studies, he exposes how the commercial interest of drug manufacturers are consistently given the benefit of the scientific doubts about medicine safety and effectiveness, over and above the best interests of patients.; A highly original combination of philosophical rigour, historical sensitivity and empirical depth enables the "black box" of industrial and government science to be opened up to critical scrutiny much more than in previous social scientific study. All major aspects of drug testing and regulation are considered, including pre- clinical animal tests, clinical trials and postmarketing surveillance of adverse drug reactions. The author argues that drug regulators are too dependent on pharmaceutical industry resources and expertise, and too divorced from public accountability. The problem of corporate bias is particularly severe in the UK, where regulatory decisions about medicine safety are shrouded in greater secrecy than in the US.; Since the purpose of drug regulation should be to maximize the safety and effectiveness of medicines for patients, the public needs and deserves policies to counteract corporate bias in drug testing and evaluation. John Abraham's realist analysis provides a robust basis for policy interventions at the institutional and legislative levels. He proposes that corporate bias could be reduced by more extensive freedom of information, greater autonomy of government scientists from pharmaceutical industry, the development of independent drug testing by the regulatory authority, increased patient representation on regulatory committees, and more frequent and thorough oversight of regulatory performance by the legislature. This book should be of interest to anyone who cares about how medicines should be controlled in modern society. It should prove particularly rewarding for students and researchers in the sociology of science and technology, science and medicines policy, medical sociologists, the medical and pharmaceutical professions, and consumer organizations.

PROXY POLITICS

PROXY POLITICS PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783943620719
Category : Art and society
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description


Controversial Science

Controversial Science PDF Author: Thomas Brante
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791414736
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This book represents emerging alternative perspectives to the "constructivist" orthodoxy that currently dominates the field of science and technology studies. Various contributions from distinguished Americans and Europeans in the field, provide arguments and evidence that it is not enough simply to say that science is "socially situated." Controversial Science focuses on important political, ethical, and broadly normative considerations that have yet to be given their due, but which point to a more realistic and critical perspective on science policy.

Controversy

Controversy PDF Author: Dorothy Nelkin
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book of controversies over science and technology describes and analyses the struggles between different perspectives: between those who see technological development as a rational and objective process and those who see this process as primarily political. 'No one has produced a more formidable body of work on technology, politics, and decision-making than Dorothy Nelkin; and I, like many others, have come to look forward to each new instalment. Controversy, a set of case studies edited by Nelkin...easily earns its place on my bookshelf.' -- Knowledge, Vol 1 No 4, June 1980

Leviathan and the Air-Pump

Leviathan and the Air-Pump PDF Author: Steven Shapin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400838495
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines the conflicts over the value and propriety of experimental methods between two major seventeenth-century thinkers: Thomas Hobbes, author of the political treatise Leviathan and vehement critic of systematic experimentation in natural philosophy, and Robert Boyle, mechanical philosopher and owner of the newly invented air-pump. The issues at stake in their disputes ranged from the physical integrity of the air-pump to the intellectual integrity of the knowledge it might yield. Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild. The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens--facts, interpretations, experiment, truth--were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer use the confrontation between Hobbes and Boyle as a way of understanding what was at stake in the early history of scientific experimentation. They describe the protagonists' divergent views of natural knowledge, and situate the Hobbes-Boyle disputes within contemporary debates over the role of intellectuals in public life and the problems of social order and assent in Restoration England. In a new introduction, the authors describe how science and its social context were understood when this book was first published, and how the study of the history of science has changed since then.

Impure Science

Impure Science PDF Author: Steven Epstein
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520214455
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
Epstein shows the extent to which AIDS research has been a social and political phenomenon and how the AIDS movement has transformed biomedical research practices through its capacity to garner credibility by novel strategies.

Politics and Expertise

Politics and Expertise PDF Author: Zeynep Pamuk
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691219265
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A new model for the relationship between science and democracy that spans policymaking, the funding and conduct of research, and our approach to new technologies Our ability to act on some of the most pressing issues of our time, from pandemics and climate change to artificial intelligence and nuclear weapons, depends on knowledge provided by scientists and other experts. Meanwhile, contemporary political life is increasingly characterized by problematic responses to expertise, with denials of science on the one hand and complaints about the ignorance of the citizenry on the other. Politics and Expertise offers a new model for the relationship between science and democracy, rooted in the ways in which scientific knowledge and the political context of its use are imperfect. Zeynep Pamuk starts from the fact that science is uncertain, incomplete, and contested, and shows how scientists’ judgments about what is significant and useful shape the agenda and framing of political decisions. The challenge, Pamuk argues, is to ensure that democracies can expose and contest the assumptions and omissions of scientists, instead of choosing between wholesale acceptance or rejection of expertise. To this end, she argues for institutions that support scientific dissent, proposes an adversarial “science court” to facilitate the public scrutiny of science, reimagines structures for funding scientific research, and provocatively suggests restricting research into dangerous new technologies. Through rigorous philosophical analysis and fascinating examples, Politics and Expertise moves the conversation beyond the dichotomy between technocracy and populism and develops a better answer for how to govern and use science democratically.

People's Science

People's Science PDF Author: Ruha Benjamin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804786739
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
“An engaging, insightful, and challenging call to examine both the rhetoric and reality of innovation and inclusion in science and science policy.” —Daniel R. Morrison, American Journal of Sociology Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals.