Scientific Knowledge

By Samer Angelone, Ph.D. “Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you’ll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they’ll see dollar signs: moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require” – Randy Olson If you ask a scientist ‘what does it mean if your research project is about animal cloning

Review by Felicity Mellor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Dan Kahan and Dietram A. Scheufele The Oxford Handbook of The Science of Science Communication, Oxford University Press, 2017 This volume of 47 chapters by 57 contributors is divided into six parts, the first offering overviews of different aspects of the field and the later sections picking up specific themes, such as the role of the media

Review by Birte Fähnrich Sarah Davies and Maja Horst, both renowned STS scholars at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), have taken a very valuable approach to mapping the field of science communication. Their starting point is the obvious but also fundamental acknowledgment that science communication is a complex phenomenon that has seen several changes in the last decades and has been both

Review by Maximilian Fochler Stephen Hilgartner Reordering Life: Knowledge and Control in the Genomics Revolution Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 2017 Who controls access to and use of knowledge? Which different entitlements and obligations are connected to specific knowledge and data, even those seemingly openly available to wider constituencies? Who stands to profit from specific kinds of

Review by Hans Peter Peters Hilary Rose & Steven Rose Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2016 Neuroscientist Steven Rose and social scientist Hilary Rose have written a critique of the relationship of neuroscience and society and, more specifically, of the links between neuroscience and policy. They tell the story of neuroscientists selling and overselling

Review by Peter Broks This is a wonderful book, both in the sense of being a pleasure to read and being full of wonders. Its overall aim is to examine the myths about science and its practitioners that have been deeply embedded in western culture over the past seven centuries. It does so by “tracing the representation of the scientists as a character in Western literature and film from the

The cunning of uncertaintyHelga Nowotny | Malden, MA: Polity, 2016 . Helga Nowotny is author and coauthor of an impressive number of significant contributions to understanding our contemporary late-modern condition with respect to knowledge, science, and technology. She has always emphasized the importance of research-based knowledge, while acknowledging that science is both tentative and

Haeckel’s Embryos. Images, Evolution, and Fraud Nick Hopwood, | The University of Chicago Press, 2015 The book addresses one of the most intriguing and fresh topics in the history of science of the last few decades: the relationship between science and the visual. Nick Hopwood, historian of science and medicine at the University of Cambridge, focuses on a single set of biological

Christmas gift ideas Publishing and the Advancement of Science Michael Rodgers Imperial College Press, 2014. Reviewed by: Ullica Segerstrale Michael Rodgers describes his ‘star scientists’ as multifarious individuals with many levels of intuition who naturally produce beautiful writing and structure. But beyond them is the intricate world of science book production, which has so far