For the next few weeks, to go along with the video about my lab, I'm going to write some snippets about what I care about most, aside from my family (and TV sports of course): applying science.

The science I do day-to-day is on the abstract side but I also spend a lot of time thinking about, and teaching about, applying science to the problems that should be keeping all of us up at night, questions like: Is the world over-heating? Why don’t our antibiotics work any more? Will there be any nature left for our grandchildren that isn’t in a Disney park?

I think we have a better chance of surviving these challenges if we can develop habits of mind that play down the malarkey and play up the evidence.

An old friend of mine who exemplifies this mindset, Tyrone Hayes, spoke at UWW’s recent Earth Day celebration. Tyrone and I were colleagues when I was in grad school at Harvard. Since then, he has fallen into the study of how the herbicide atrazine may 'chemically castrate’ frogs, messing up the development of males so that some of them go so far as to stop croaking and produce eggs (and no, that is not normal for the species he studies).

Because he takes science seriously, Tyrone could not ignore his results and is now making a concerted effort to communicate his findings far and wide and have atrazine banned. Standing up to giant herbicide companies is a seriously brave thing to do. I hope our students, and all the high school students we invited to his talk, learned from his example. Tyrone is applying science.




RETURN TO THE STORY: THE BIG QUESTIONS