Straight talk about stem cells - Stanford lecture series review

Christopher Scott is a professor at Stanford and one of the very few in podcasts whom you can hear touch upon stem cell research and talk about both the technical as well as the legal and ethical side. Recently I reviewed his latest lecture series, which Stanford has put on line as an enhanced podcast. (Stem Cells: Policy and Ethics - feed)

Already in that review I wrote there is an earlier enhanced podcast, also by Chris Scott and also about stem cells called Straight Talk About Stem Cells (feed). I promised a review, which I give here, although it will be a short one. Straight Talk About Stem Cells is the predecessor of Stem Cells: Policy and Ethics and suffers from two traits that make it rapidly redundant. On the field of ethics and politics (law), there has not been much news and what little there is is added in the new series. The technical advances go very rapidly though. Here is where the two series are radically different.

For information on the techniques, I'd gladly point at Straight Talk as well, however, I wonder how much is still relevant. If I paid proper attention, which I did as much as my very limited biological skills allow, there was information in the first series that suggested certain lines of research to be with little chance of success, or facing too much of technical difficulties or any of such inhibitions that sort of suggested the conclusion that this was not a realistic prospect, whereas the second series comes after soem major breakthroughs and paints a radically different picture. Hence, if you want to know if for example so-called adult stem cells are a way to go, you may find conclusions differ. If next year there is going to be a third version, who knows what we will get by then.

And the law? And the ethics? Most of the slides are reused, and probably will be again. That alone tells us a whole lot.

More bioethics:
The Ethics of Stem Cell Research,
Human rights and the body,
Life and bio-engineering - podcast review,
Bioethics without Christ, please,
A useful map into Bio-Ethics,
Stem Cell Research: Science, Ethics, and Prospects,
Stem Cells - Biology and Politics.

Jeanne d'Arc - OVT podcast recensie

BBC's In Our Time had ook een uitzending over Jeanne d'Arc en ook daar kwamen ze er niet goed uit. Klaarblijkelijk is de historie rondom de maagd van Orleans zo gecompliceerd dat je er niet even een half uurtje of drie kwartier radio aan kunt wijden. Zomin als het de BBC lukte, luke het de VPRO.

De feiten komen wel enigszins op een rijtje in OVT's derde deel over beroemde executies. Een meisje van negentien die stemmen hoort, steunt een van de Franse troonpretendenten in de honderdjarige oorlog en helpt hem op de troon. Maar in de volgende consolidatie-oorlog, weten zijn tegenstanders haar te grijpen en zorgen ervoor dat ze op de brandstapel komt. Wat al snel volgt is een rehabilitatieproces en vervolgens duurt het nog tot de negentiende eeuw voordat ze een heilige wordt.

Hoe kan dat nou allemaal? Met enige moeite haalt ook de VPRO het een en ander aan motieven, motivaties en politieke en kerkelijke machinaties boven tafel, maar net als de BBC, blijft ook hier de geschiedenis in raadselen gehuld. Het meest raadselachtig blijft de persoon van Jeanne bovenal. Het is bijna niet haalbaar om een realistisch midden tussen licht gestoorde boerentrien en gezante van God te vinden.

Meer OVT:
Paulus,
Socrates,
Hoeren en Agenten,
Polen,
Stalingrad.

Tacitus - In Our Time review

The widely acclaimed BBC radio program and podcast In Our Time is going to have its summer recess. Until the end of September we will have to make do with what can be cherished in the streams of the on-line archive. There is much to be found there.

What is left as a podcast, is the latest edition, which is about Tacitus. Host Melvyn Bragg writes in his newsletter: "I fear I’ll be accused of being the man who asked three women scholars to talk about the finer, or rather the grosser, details of Roman sexuality. I’m sure you’ll accept that I simply did it in the interests of a fuller description of what Tacitus was meaning! And that’s true (no exclamation mark)." However, this is a very minor detail in the program and the guests storm through it admirably.

What remains is the historian who delivers us the template for Gibbon's Decline and Fall, the first sources about the tribes in Central Europe and the intricacies of being a senator in Rome. Even if Rome is eternally in decline, it never seems to fade and stop standing as a measure for western civilization.

More In Our Time:
John Donne (The Metaphysical Poets),
The Arab Conquests,
BBC's In Our Time (podcast review),
General review of In Our Time,
Library of Nineveh.

Canada and New Zealand - EH podcast review

The Environmental History Podcast has, in its 19th edition, two interviews about two more environments and how they were changed by man: New Zealand and Canada.

Once upon a time, New Zealand was covered by rain forest, but then came the Maori, who began to take down the forests and after them the Europeans (a lot of Scots and Irish among them) who continued with the deforestation. They turned the islands into pastures for especially sheep, acquiring a stronghold in the market for wool and mutton.

Also in Canada the Irish and Scots arrived to find forests to the size Europe had not had until centuries ago. The scale of for example forest fires was something they could hardly grasp. The podcast tells of the great forest fires in the 19th century and how they made headlines back in Britain. As a side note, there is also mention of the eruption of the Tambora in 1815 in Indonesia and its effect on the climate in Canada.

After this, host Jan Oosthoek projects what is ahead for the 20th edition and announces he is going to address the general question what environmental history is. It turns out that this choice of subject is a reaction to this blog, where it was stated that this definition remains somewhat unclear. In passing Oosthoek pays a compliment to Anne is a Man. You can hear it in the closing minutes of the podcast where he says this blog is

one of the sharpest and smartest podcast reviewers on the web.

More Environmental History:
Environmental history,
Climate Change in recent history,
Urban Air Pollution,
Apartheid and Environmental History,
Environmental History and South Africa.

Rousseau - Philosophy Bites

Sometimes philosophers, culture bearers and educators make this assumption explicit: that there is progress in history. That the herders were better off than the hunter gatherers, the farmers better off than the herders and that urbanized society is basically a kind of evolutionary pinnacle. Implicitly, this belief is very strongly embedded in our view of the world. Yet, there has always been a counter position as well. Philosophy Bites pays attention to one philosopher of this nostalgia or this critique of civilization: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hosts Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds invited Melissa Lane to speak on Rousseau in last week's issue of their podcast. He thinks our psychology and morals have been corrupted by civilization, because of both a dependence of others and a competition with others, not just materially, but also in pride, esteem and such. Once man is engaged in dealing with this dependence and competition, he loses his inner autarkic quality and his pure strive for personal survival deteriorates in an unbounded necessity for expansion. He did not idealize the toughness of the state of nature, but he deplores the unhealthy, unnatural development.

Even though we persist to think in terms of the superiority of civilization and persist to believe in progress, critics such as Rousseau have a profound effect and we see this return in thinkers such as Marx and Freud and in lines of thought in Feminism, Ecologism, Conservatism and on and on.

More Philosophy Bites:
Life on the Scales,
David Hume,
Several issues of Philosophy Bites,
Free rider problem,
Humanism.

Prosody -TWN podcast review

For a long time I haven't paid attention to The Word Nerds, the language podcast. It doesn't come out so frequently, less than a month and I have been concentrating on history podcasts in the past months. The Word Nerds, however, is one of my all time favorite podcasts. The makers have turned really nerdy language subjects into wonderfully entertaining shows of radio quality.

This happened again in the last edition with the subject prosody. That word, to begin with, is for me a term I have to look up, but did not need to as it was so well explained on the show. Prosody is about how we 'sing' our language; how we make pauses, emphasis, intonations and all such methods that make natural language sound natural, as opposed to computer voices, for example, that even today, still, sound very artificial.

It is also with prosody, that show hosts Dave and Barbara discussed the metrum and various rhythmic schemes in poetry. I remember this stuff from high school and at the time it sounded all so artificial, over the top and far out. I have grown up by now and I got the sympathetic and less threatening introduction by Dave, and this allowed me to open up and not only get stuff like iambic verse, but also recognize and appreciate it. Now that is The Word Nerds for you!

Previous reviews of TWN on this blog:
Rhetoric,
Silence and Speechlessness,
Religious Words,
Nicknames,
Public Speaking.