Science Fact and Fiction

Talking, reading and more talking

This project began with a set of objectives, the primary one being to educate ourselves about a particular area of science, gene editing technology, to understand the ethics surrounding this scientific research, and how scientific discoveries/research etc., is communicated to different publics. We also wanted to explore how science has been told through fiction from comics to films and novels, as a lot of people become interested in the sciences or learn some of their ideas about science, through these fictional forms, a lot of which are grounded in scientific fact, or imagining scientific futures based on current research, or simply imagining a technological future that will come to pass.

This brought us to a number of published papers, journal articles, books, policy reports and news articles. Some of which were enlightening, challenging, and deeply troubling. Our approach was to recommend readings to each other, and then then follow up with in depth discussions. As you can imagine conversations crossed subjects such as race and gender issues within scientific research and histories, guided in part by amazing writers.
We also wanted to explore how the media approaches stories about science, whether new discoveries or tabloid fodder. We hope in this first of our blog posts you might be inspired to read some of the works we covered, and with that in mind take a look at the list below as well.

LIST OF SUGGESTED READINGS
X-Men Comic series
Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance
The biological basis of Marvel Comics mutants, Damián E. Pérez (Not as good a read as we hoped, but interesting)
Going, Plant Species Extinction in the 21st Century, JULIAN JOSEPHSON
Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Changing Life on Earth, Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans