Questions for Howard Markel: Do Mummies Have a Right to Privacy?

On The Responsibility Project, October 2010:

One of the biggest science stories this past year was the publication of the DNA analysis of the remains of King Tut — a project that seemed to finally resolve the mystery of the young pharaoh’s death and revealed a family secret: Tut's parents were siblings. Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan, commented at length on the discoveries in the Journal of the American Medical Association. To Markel, the genetic analysis of King Tut further complicates sticky questions about how freely researchers should extract information from the dead — and how much responsibility we bear toward the dead's wishes and privacy. Markel’s eighth book, An Anatomy of Addiction, about Sigmund Freud’s and William Halstead’s adventures with cocaine, will be published next year by Pantheon.

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On the making of “The Orchid Children”

On The Open Notebook, October 2010:

In a story selected for The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2010, David Dobbs explores the “orchid hypothesis”: the tantalizing idea that certain variants of some behavioral genes can either increase children’s risk for psychiatric and behavioral problems or enable them to flourish spectacularly. Moving from ornery toddlers to a troop of rebellious monkeys to a reckoning with his own DNA, Dobbs reveals how—depending on environment—an accident of genetics can be either a “trap door” to failure or a “springboard” to success.

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How to Set the Bullshit Filter When the Bullshit is Thick

On Neuron Culture, October 2010:

A while back I wrote a short piece in the New York Times Magazine about a researcher named John Ioannidis who had found that over half of all new research findings later prove false:

Many of us consider science the most reliable, accountable way of explaining how the world works. We trust it. Should we?

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Publishing your science paper is only half the job

In The Guardian, September 2010:

Perhaps the oddest and least predictable scientific conference I attend is ScienceOnline, a version of which met earlier this month at the British Library. That event, ScienceOnline London, or SOLO, is a spinoff of the original ScienceOnline held every January in the United States. Both started as science blogger gatherings and morphed into meetups of anyone interested in doing or communicating about science online – scientists, teachers, writers, network and data and design geeks, entrepreneurs. I go because I never know whom I'll meet – or what, on or off the official programme, will emerge as the hot issues.

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A Rush to Moral Judgment

In Slate, September 2010:

The recent (self-)destruction of Harvard evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser is both hard to watch and impossible not to. When the university last month found Hauser guilty of scientific misconduct—ugly and serious words, those, meaning in this case either tweaking data or fabricating it outright—someone really, really big started a long fall in slow motion.

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Bloggers behind the blogs: David Dobbs

On BPS Research Digest, June 2010:

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews with some of the world's leading psychology and neuroscience bloggers.

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Interview with David Dobbs (by Colin Schultz)

On CMBR, March 2010:

David Dobbs is a long-form science journalist, author, and blogger. We talked about “that’s cool” versus “that smells funny” science journalism, the effect of the blogosphere, and the Keepers of the Bullshit Filter.

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How we tried (not) to silence Pepsi

On The Guardian, July 2010:

I'll give this to David Appell: the man's efficient. Few have ever packed as much error and folly into seven paragraphs as he does in his PepsiCo and the shame of the bloggerati. Appell takes a stark but complex event – the exodus of bloggers from Seed's ScienceBlogs network when Seed sold a blog spot to Pepsi – and misrepresents it despite contradictory evidence that his very article links to. He misses the point of just about everything.

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Does depression have an upside? It's complicated.

On Neuron Culture, March 2010:

Jonah Lehrer's story on "Depression's Upside" has created quite a kerfuffle. The idea he explores — that depression creates an analytic, ruminative focus that generates useful insight — sits badly with quite a few people. It's not a brand-new idea, by any means; as Jonah notes, it goes back at least to Aristotle. But Jonah (who — disclosure department — is a friend; plus I write for the Times Magazine, where the piece was published) has stirred the pot with an update drawing from (among other things) a very long review paperpublished last year by psychiatric researchers Paul Andrews and J. Anderson Thomson.

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Metaphor fight! Shenk and Dobbs square off

On David Shenk's blog, December 2009:

In response to this month's Atlantic feature "The Science of Success," by David Dobbs, which I (David Shenk) admired, I invited Dobbs to engage in short back-and-forth over one particular gripe I had. He graciously accepted. Children, avert your eyes. This is literary brawling the likes of which haven't been seen since Norman Mailer head-butted Gore Vidal.

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