Coronavirus, like accelerating climate-related disaster, is exactly what you get when you ignore science
Let us pray, now, for science.
Pray for empiricism and for epidemiology and for vaccines.
Pray for peer review and controlled double-blinds.
For flu shots, herd immunity and washing your hands.
Pray for reason, rigour and expertise.
Pray for the precautionary principle.
Pray for the NIH and the CDC.
Pray for the WHO.
And pray not just for science, but for scientists, too, as well as their colleagues in the application of science — the tireless healthcare workers, the whistleblowing first responders, the rumpled, righteous public servants whose long-ignored warnings we will learn about only when the 12-part coronavirus docu-disaster series drops on Netflix. Wish them all well in the fights ahead. Their weapons, the weapons of science, are all we have left — perhaps the only true weapons our kind has ever marshalled against encroaching oblivion.
It may sound paradoxical to plead for divine sanction of scientific pursuit. But these are dicey times for science and for scientists, and they need all the help they can get. As the coronavirus spreads, it is exposing the fraying seams of our overextended world. In societies as different as China and the United States, those seams are starting to look similar. The failures to contain the outbreak and to understand the scale and scope of its threat stem from an underinvestment in and an under-appreciation of basic science.
Read more at:
www.firstpost.com
Let us pray, now, for science.
Pray for empiricism and for epidemiology and for vaccines.
Pray for peer review and controlled double-blinds.
For flu shots, herd immunity and washing your hands.
Pray for reason, rigour and expertise.
Pray for the precautionary principle.
Pray for the NIH and the CDC.
Pray for the WHO.
And pray not just for science, but for scientists, too, as well as their colleagues in the application of science — the tireless healthcare workers, the whistleblowing first responders, the rumpled, righteous public servants whose long-ignored warnings we will learn about only when the 12-part coronavirus docu-disaster series drops on Netflix. Wish them all well in the fights ahead. Their weapons, the weapons of science, are all we have left — perhaps the only true weapons our kind has ever marshalled against encroaching oblivion.
It may sound paradoxical to plead for divine sanction of scientific pursuit. But these are dicey times for science and for scientists, and they need all the help they can get. As the coronavirus spreads, it is exposing the fraying seams of our overextended world. In societies as different as China and the United States, those seams are starting to look similar. The failures to contain the outbreak and to understand the scale and scope of its threat stem from an underinvestment in and an under-appreciation of basic science.
Read more at:
Coronavirus, like accelerating climate-related disaster, is exactly what you get when you ignore science - Firstpost
If coronavirus doesn’t kill us it should at least shake us out of the delusion that we can keep ignoring the science and scientists who are warning about the long-term dangers to our way of life
www.firstpost.com
