Articles by Dorothy Nelkin

The hope is to discover clues to these conditions before symptoms appear. The goal is to detect susceptible individuals--those who are "at risk." Reflecting the growing focus on the hereditary basis of disease, genetic testing is becoming a part of general medical practice--so much so that, in 1992, the American Medical Association recognized medical genetics as a separate subspecialty of internal medicine. Scientists should be awa

The hope is to discover clues to these conditions before symptoms appear. The goal is to detect susceptible individuals--those who are "at risk." Reflecting the growing focus on the hereditary basis of disease, genetic testing is becoming a part of general medical practice--so much so that, in 1992, the American Medical Association recognized medical genetics as a separate subspecialty of internal medicine. Scientists should be awa

Date: November 23, 1992 Editor's Note: Indications are that the National Institutes of Health's controversial gene-patenting initiative, now widely seen as moribund, is really as good as dead. At press time, a final decision on the matter was still in the hands of Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan, but sources at HHS feel the initiative is on insecure legal footing and will be dropped. Before the proposal more or less gave up its ghost, however, it served to stimulate anim

[Editor’s note: Sophisticated biological tests that can uncover latent problems or predict future diseases have been developed over the past few years. Such tests have important clinical applications, but they also have found their way into nonclinical contexts in which they provide unprecedented threats to our traditional concepts of privacy and personal autonomy. So say Dorothy Nelkin and Laurence Tancredi, coauthors of a new book, Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological I

Once upon a time, scientists assumed that a record of solid accomplishment was sufficient to maintain research support. They were not really interested in public visibility; on the contrary, they feared it would encourage outsiders to interfere in the research process. Even when research had obvious applications, scientists in most fields were careful to direct their initial findings toward their professional colleagues. Once supported by peer review, they then would go public through the pre

LIBERTY DENIED: The Current Rise Of Censorship In America Donna Demac PEN American Center; New York 171 pages; $6.95 Why in the world is a book on censorship of interest to the scientific community? After all, we’re not writing pornography. And our research—objective and usually not very sensational—hardly seems vulnerable to libelous accusations. Indeed, for most scientists—and most Americans, for that matter— censorship seems to be a form of suppression that h

"True descendants of Prometheus, science writers take the fire from the scientific Olympus, the laboratories and the universities, and bring it down to the people." That was how William Laurence, a science writer for The New York Times, described the work of science writers in the 1930s. Fifty years later, many scientists might be more likely to compare their opposite numbers in the media to the troublesome Pandora, whose impulsive opening of the box sent by Zeus unleashed a host of evils on hum

After years of studying the creation-evolution controversy, I  have no doubts about the religious intent of the  creationists. As Ayala, Gould and Gell-Mann suggest, creationists are simply using science to bolster their credibility as they seek to bring their religious theories to the public schools. In fact, this goal is made explicit in a creationist newsletter, which advises their vanguard to "sell more science. . . . Who can object to teaching more science?" Yet the creationists h