To The Tar Sands is a documentary of their journey that was directed and produced by UBC School of Journalism student Jodie Martinson. It highlights some of the inherent contradictions in this massive mining project while remaining fair and balanced in its coverage.

I was at the UBC screening of To The Tar Sands on January 20 and recorded a podcast for the Thunderbird.

My aim was to give listeners a sense of the breadth of the film, and to show how one of the film’s main characters feels about the implications the tar sands have for all Canadians.

Simon Baron-Cohen, developmental psychologist and author of the article on which all this hype is based, said that his research is about finding the cause of autism and is not motivated by developing a pre-natal test for autism.

Doesn’t one follow from the other? Regardless of Baron-Cohen’s research motivations, he has no control over the implications of his findings.

A story in Nature today looks at Baron-Cohen’s controversial ‘extreme male brain’ theory of autism, and highlights the opposition from the scientific community.

Another story in the Guardian questions the reliability and safety of such a test, if it were ever developed.

The tools to design are being crafted faster than anyone could imagine.

New research has linked high levels of testosterone in amniotic fluid, the liquid the bathes the fetus, to autism.

Sarah Boseley, health editor at the Guardian, said how it could be used as a pre-natal test for autism in an interview today.

It’s well worth 2:38 of your time. Boseley also squeezes in a few interesting subtleties that could be missed by such a test.

Well, not exactly.

A British baby girl has been born without the BRCA1 gene that is linked to breast cancer. That in itself is not special, however, the embryo she grew from was specially selected for because it didn’t have the defective BRCA1 gene.

Her story made headlines and raised concerns about designer babies. As always, people are asking (or are afraid to ask), what’s next?

Technology is pushing us into unchartered waters where ethical grounds have not been laid down to determine how, and whether at all, people can choose the features of their unborn child.

A story in the Guardian asked, if given the choice, would couples opt to have a child without autism. It then followed with the hypothesis that such a pre-natal test would eliminate future geniuses, citing the example of the briliant British physicist Paul Dirac who was purportedly autistic.

It’s possible to imagine that techniques such as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, which was used to select the BRCA1-free embryo, could be used to select against embryos with diseases that we know very little about and whose acceptance is culturally determind.

Science, tread carefully.

The Pleiades Promoter Project is based at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics in Vancouver.

I had the chance to speak to Beth about the project. Have a listen or download the first Science Perspectives podcast:

The event was trying to send a message to Stephen Harper: don’t play politics with peoples’ lives.

“It really comes down to one man who doesn’t understand the issue. It shouldn’t be about politics. It should be about public health”, said Mark Townsend, executive director of the Portland Hotel Society which runs Insite, in the Vancouver Sun.

On a cold and rainy winter night, hundreds stood in line for free hamburgers and hotdogs that were being served by volunteers. Street performers on stilts entertained the crowd as they waited for the two main acts of the night to take the stage.

Vancouver’s own Black Mountain and Jay Malinowski of the Bedouin Soundclash performed for the event, expressing their strong support for Insite.

Libby Davis, MP for East Vancouver, and Gregor Robertson, Vancouver’s newly elected mayor, took the stage to reaffirm their support for Insite.

But Stephen Harper’s government has long opposed Insite and has been critical of its focus on harm-reduction.

The Conservative government has appealed the decision by the B.C. Supreme Court that allowed Insite to open in 2003.

Insite is designed to help high-risk injection drug users who do not normally access health care services. It gets them in the door and gives them care for anything from open wounds to drug addiction counselling.

They can also safely inject drugs. And that’s what’s made this centre a political and moral battleground.

But for some residents of the Downtown Eastside, there’s no where else they can go. Men and women with mental illness, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C, who are homeless or living in substandard housing make up most of Insite’s clients.

Libby Davis said she hopes a coalition government will ensure that Insite stays open indefinitely.

There’s no doubt that shakey economic times and political turmoil in Ottawa make Insite’s future uncertain.

There’s something about the first few years of life. What happens in those years seems to have a big effect on the development of asthma.

Maybe it’s the crib the baby slept in. Maybe it’s the exposure it had to animals. Maybe it’s the interaction of these environments with a baby’s genetic make-up. We just don’t know.

Dr. Malcom R. Sears, professor of medicine at McMaster University, is leading a study that looks at how genes and the environment affect the development of asthma in childhood. His research project, the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development study, will follow 5,000 children from when they’re inside the womb to their fifth birthday.

Dr. Sears’ hypothesis is that a child’s environment will affect how well their lungs work as adults.

But he doesn’t discount the role gene

s play in the development of asthma.  He said it’s likely that certain children are born with small airways, and that’s why they develop asthma.

Dr. Sears hopes to capture and study some of the elements that make up a child’s early environment.

He’s taking the unusual step of bringing a vaccum into a newborn’s home. When a baby is three months old, his team will vaccum the child’s bed to collect dust. The dust will be analysed for things that could be linked to asthma.

Dr. Sears will also be measuring other things, like stress and socioeconomic status, that could affect disease development. He will look at how the materials and heating system used in a house could, in some way,  contribute to a child’s development of asthma.

When asked when we could expect to see some results, Dr. Sears said he would certainly publish significant findings as soon as they were available.

But we might have to wait a few years.

Dr. Sears’s research is funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the AllerGen Network of Centres of Excellence.

Photo curtesy of RogelSM

And it’s also World AIDS Day.

You probably didn’t know that. I didn’t.

There’s one important factor in the AIDS epidemic that doesn’t get much attention. Tuberculosis has become an epidemic in many parts of the developing world where HIV infection rates are high.

It’s happening in concert with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, says UNAIDS, a United Nations program on combatting HIV/AIDS, which considers them to be co-epidemics.

With the global economy sinking into an ecomomic recession, advocay groups are fearing the worst. A cut in funding from the Canadian government would affect the 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

Here are some more figures from ACTION, an advocay group dedicated to eradicating TB worldwide:

50% of people with HIV/AIDS die from tuberculosis in developing countries

80% of people infected with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis live in Africa

This may lead one to think that one epidemic is fuelling the other. According to ACTION, people are living with AIDS and dying of TB. The head-way that’s been made in managing AIDS/HIV has been undercut by the resurgence of TB, say ACTION.

Results Canada, a memember of ACTION, will release a report in January on the fight against the HIV/TB co-epidemic. They are lobbying the government to increase aid for HIV/AIDS, saying that funding has been cut in half between 2005 and 2007.

What climate change really means was the focus of a  talk given by Massachusetts Institute of Techonology PhD candidate in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Soceity, Candis Callison at the UBC School of Journalism this afternoon.

When Callison visited the Alaskan town of Kotzebue, she was surprised to find an absence of dialogue on climate change.

“That’s not what we talk about,” said a resident of Kotzebue, “It’s what’s on CNN.”

As Callison got to know the community, she found that the people of Kotzebue do in fact, talk about climate change. They just don’t call it that.

The people of Kotzebue talk about climate change in terms of how it affects their daily lives. For example, there was plenty of talk around town on how a changing arctic climate has affected whaling, and altered the frequency of storms.

Interviews in Kotzebue changed Callison’s PhD thesis. She started asking how the science of climate change can be brought into the realm of the everyday. She found that critical questions that would bring meaning and relevance to a conversation on climate change were lacking in media coverage.

Callison acknowledged that it’s hard to cover science without the science. But that’s not what she wants to see. Callison called for the ethical, moral and economic perspectives, amongst others, to be a part of climate change coverage.

The facts are important, but they don’t have to drive the story.

Photo curtesy of kenyai from Flickr