Tag: Pablo Ross

So it kills me when scientists and science journalists fret that science is “broken.” I’m not disputing that science has its troubles. Science is a learning machine. There, at a conference session on gene editing and a luncheon hosted by the AAAS program on science, ethics, and religion, I reconnected with ethicists I’d met during the stem-cell wars of the George W. Bush years. But science had. In a session on “generation of human organs in livestock animals,” researchers described their work on “human-porcine chimeric embryos.” Yes, that’s a cross between a human and a pig—though the human cells, when properly controlled, form just one nonbrain organ or another. But Rogalski questioned whether women were more likely to be high-functioning or just more likely to volunteer for the study. Evolution also turns out to be complex in other ways: Animals can switch from predator to prey mode, depending on environmental cues, and this gear-shifting can be chemically triggered in the lab. But many solutions to what’s wrong in science, and in the rest of the world, can also be found in basic scientific principles. If you increase mental plasticity, one speaker observed, you can destabilize the brain. At lunch in Austin, I found myself sitting across from Nicanor Austriaco, a bioethicist I had met 13 years ago at a Vatican conference in Rome.