UC Berkeley and the surrounding National Labs are some of the premier nanotechnology research institutions in the world. In addition, Berkeley is the first government entity to have regulated nanotechnology. The scope for debate between the promotion and regulation of this exciting new scientific development is huge. The day-long event [...]

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A few months ago Berkeley and BP signed what may be the largest public-private research partnership ever. Over the next 10 years BP will provide $500 million to the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) which will conduct basic and applied research into the “problems of global energy production, particularly the development [...]

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The University of California is financed through taxes allotted to it by the Legislature in Sacramento. This money finances 10 very different campuses. Berkeley is the oldest, founded in 1866, and Merced the newest, opened in 2005. While the rationale or need for so many campuses is a contested and [...]

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The regulation of certain scientific and technological applications sometimes relies on building scenarios that range from ‘worst case’ to ‘best case’. Scenarios like this make it easier to make comparisons and balance costs and benefits of different kinds of regulation.

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With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ [...]

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On January 24th I had the opportunity to attend the Fred Friendly Seminar series Nano: the Power of Small. This was a panel debate on the what sorts of questions government needs to ask when evaluating the responsibilities a new company working with nanotechnology needs to assume. Each panelist played [...]

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In a recent three part article, Charles Murray defends the idea that university and mandatory schooling are not for everyone, and that a gifted few should be selected on the basis of their IQ to attend school and university (read part 1, part 2, and part 3). Beyond the many [...]

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In 1964 Phillip Converse wrote his ground breaking work, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”, in which he challenged the idea that most people have structured, coherent opinions on which they base their political decisions. Forty years later this topic still seems to be fascinating to some and scary [...]

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On January 11th, the House of Representatives for the second time approved - it was first passed in 2006, and subsequently vetoed - a bill to allow federal support for research using stem cells extracted from leftover embryos that fertility clinics would otherwise discard, in an attempt to end a funding [...]

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