his morning, with the birds still tweeting, the rosy dawn still hours
away, and the world silent except for the gentle munching of the deer outside my
window eating my bushes, I clicked on the Nature magazine website
hoping to find something intelligent about that lab at Boston University that
is doing gain of function research on the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
You might remember that virus. I was in all the papers.
The scary thing was that they're doing it in a BSL-3 lab, not a BSL-4, despite the fact that this brand spanking new virus could kill another five million people. At least, that's what the UK Daily Mail says.
Nature knew nothin' about no steenkin' virus. Their big thing this week is “systemic racism.” Here's what they say:
"Racism casts a huge shadow on science. People of colour and from other historically marginalized groups have been excluded from the scientific enterprise, research has been used to underpin discriminatory thinking, and research outputs have ignored and further disadvantaged marginalized people. Nature has played its part in creating this divisive legacy."
Okay, fine. If your editors are all raging white supremacists, or black supremacists, or whatever, then quit. It would take about twenty seconds. Then get back to telling us about something worthwhile, like oh, I don't know, maybe this deadly new virus that BU is engineering that's 80% fatal?
It's a dark day when a tabloid newspaper that spends its days nattering about what Hailey Bieber is wearing has more science than a leading science magazine.
When Nature calls themselves racist, are they sincere? No, of course they're not. This creates a dilemma: should I continue to cite articles published in a journal that tells me things they believe to be false? What, if anything, that is published in Nature is actually true?
Politics isn't harmless. Their over-the-top pretense about global warming—which consists almost entirely of a bunch of predictions made by computer programs whose source code is carefully guarded to prevent skeptics from tearing it to shreds—convinces many scientists that Nature is falling into the same political sinkhole that Scientific American fell into twenty years ago. Those poor bastards never came out of the muck and reputable scientists stopped publishing in their magazine.
Maybe Nature no longer finds the supposed sex imbalance in Nobel prizes interesting anymore. I mean, what with feminists now falling out over the question of whether there is such a thing as a woman or not, at least that's biology. Why, that's almost like science! Best not to get involved.
I clicked on their article titled “Researchers have found a compound that can block a mutant protein linked to many tumours.” There's nothing. You have to pay $32.00 just to find out the name of the compound and the name of the protein. I assume it's probably p53 or Rb, but I will never know. When I encounter something like this, I conclude it's not important enough to make it available to the public.
To their credit, Science magazine does have an article on the virus, but it too is paywalled. So if we don't hear from our friends in Boston next week, we'll know why. What you can get in this week's Science is their editorial from Holden Thorp calling Florida governor Ron DeSantis an anti-vaxxer. Some commenters complained, but in Science it's just an occasional outburst of curmudgeonitude, not the whole team that has gone bonkers.
Forget about ordinary stupidity, like those morons who blast their high beams at me in revenge because they think that every Subaru has its high beams on, or those other idiots who don't care if their dog plays on the road but would (I assume) scream bloody murder if it gets run over.
Real stupidity is Nancy Pelosi melodramatically tearing up Trump's State of the Union speech. Trump spending countless hours on Twitter. Celebrities from other countries telling us how to vote. And some guy invading Ukraine for reasons that nobody can comprehend. The list is endless of humans who could, at least theoretically, do intelligent things, or at least pretend to do intelligent things, reducing themselves to screaming lunatics, all thanks to politics. Do we want this in science, too?
oct 20 2022, 6:27 am
