Lifeboat Foundation

But Manichean views and tropes of ‘dual use’ miss the point. Some of the key questions that confront science today are about whether its methods, practices and ethos, pursued with very little real change since Maxwell’s day, are fit for purpose in the light of the challenges — conceptual and practical — we now face. Can science continue to fulfil its social contract and to reach new horizons by advancing on the same footing into the future? Or does something need to shift?

Research cannot fulfil its social contract and reach new horizons by advancing on the same footing into the future, argues Philip Ball in the last essay of a series on how the past 150 years have shaped today’s science system, to mark Nature’s anniversary.

Both Marie Curie and Lise Meitner, the only two women to be immortalized on the Periodic Table, celebrate the same November 7 birthday. Here are more reasons why they’re remarkable.

Physicists, philosophers debate whether research can ever solve certain mysteries of the universe—and the human mind.

Shanghai hosted one of the largest gatherings of Nobel laureates in the world last week, with 44 Nobel Prize-winning scientists in the city for a government-sponsored forum with the lofty goal of discussing science and technology for the “common destiny of mankind”.

Chinese academics and young scientists join global scientific elite to explore frontiers of research.

Continue reading “China’s Nobel ambitions on show as dozens of science laureates meet” »

Unlike chemotherapy or radiation, which attack cancer directly, CAR-T engineers patients’ immune cells so they can do it themselves. T-cells are removed from the blood and given new genes that produce receptors that let the T-cells recognize and bind to leukemia cells with a specific protein, CD19.

The genetically modified T-cells are then multiplied in the lab and infused back into the patient, where they ideally multiply even further and begin to target and kill cancer cells with CD19.

Alzheimer’s and diabetes could be connected in ways we’re only beginning to identify, say scientists presenting the latest research on links between blood sugar metabolism and dementia.

Such studies are distrusted by professionals because of possible conflicts of interest. But important research will be increasingly conducted, funded or aided by such firms.