It seems that a meeting underway in Exeter this week may very well draw the conclusion that genes, the mainstay of the whole of the last half century or more of biological science, don’t actually exist, at least according to the published abstract from UPenn’s Karola Stotz and colleagues (link died since time of writing).
Stotz explains that daily findings from the life sciences continually imply that the gene as a particulate entity in the genome is not supported by the evidence. They also suggest that science journalists, as both reporters and critics, perhaps have a role to play in the public understanding of post-genomic science. Presumably, this means we should somehow be mediating the discovery of a supposed gene for this disease or that behaviour, and explaining clearly that there are very few biologists now who see “genes” as the particulate entities that explained Mendel’s findings all those years ago. Indeed, headlines shouting about an “asthma gene”, “a gene for homosexuality”, or “the gene controlling suicidal tendencies” must be spiked as of now (and maybe always should have been). I’ll be on my best behaviour in this regard from now on, although I cannot promise I don’t have the gene for being contrary and so might renege on my promise…
According to America Online’s top searches for Spring this year, most of its users are looking for baseball players, diets, holiday destinations, wedding-related stuff, tax forms, proms, flowers, and other such matters. The nearest they get to anything academic is homework and university searches (Duke is the most popular search apparently). I didn’t see one mention of science, technology, nor computing. But, what is very worrying is that no one was looking for money off vouchers and online coupons, which is odd given the number of visitors the Sciencebase online coupons site gets each day (many of those from AOL). AOL unveils hottest searches for spring 2005, but to be honest the lack of certain subjects suggests to me that this is not a complete list by any means.