Penn Science Policy and Diplomacy Group

Adam is the Policy and Advocacy Specialist at Research!America, where he leads a variety of advocacy initiatives to make science and medical research a higher national priority. When he visited PSPG on Nov. 12th he spoke about how and why scientists, especially those in academia, should engage in the political system. Academic scientists in particular are heavily supported by federal funding and taxpayers, so it is important to initiate and maintain a dialog between researchers, politicians and the American people. Research!America has conducted numerous polls to understand the relationship between these three groups, and they have found that while Americans believe scientific research should be a top priority, the public does not have a clear understanding of how this research is funded (only a small fraction of those polled identified the NIH as the main source of basic biomedical research funding). Therefore it is important that we as scientists, taxpayers and constituents take it ...

One goal of PSPG is to make science more accessible to the general public. Our first science spotlight features work by Matt Churgin and the Fang-Yen lab. Scientists who want to understand how specific genes function in specific cells need the ability to manipulate gene expression, but there are few tools that allow us to ask questions at the single cell level. At best these tools can target populations of cells, but that’s not good enough for the developmental biologist who wants to know the fate of a particular cell within an embryo. A recent study out of Penn (Churgin et al. Genes Genomes Genetics, 2013) addresses these limitations by improving on a method that relies on heat-inducible gene expression and a continuous wave laser. This type of laser constantly bombards the specimen with heat and tends to warm up not just the target cell but the cells around it, causing the gene of interest to be expressed in the wrong place. To address this problem the authors used a pulsed inf...

Dr. Paul Offit stopped by PSPG to lead a discussion on snake oil and pseudoscience and how scientists can combat misinformation. An excellent example of this issue is the ubiquitous use of dietary supplements to treat everything from colds to weight loss to depression. Dietary supplements are not regulated by the FDA and are not rigorously tested for safety and efficacy and yet millions of Americans believe that multi-vitamins and supplements keep them healthy. These daily supplement capsules are packed with more vitamins than a person could possibly get from a normal diet, and yet there is no evidence that more is better. Because supplements are unregulated, what you see on the bottle is not necessarily what you get: there have been instances in which the supplement was actually 30x more concentrated than what the label claimed, and there have been cases of contaminated supplements causing death. So why is the general public so easily fooled? Because they believe they're ingesting...

  How is the government shutdown affecting me? Well, it hasn’t… yet. But even if this shutdown is over in the next few days, its impacts will ripple through American scientific research and our innovation-dependent economy for years to come.      No, I have not been furloughed. I am free to keep doing my research since I work in a university lab which are usually state or private institutions. However I, like the vast majority of American scientists (and for that matter most scientists world-wide), work with federal grant money. We scientists have to compete incredibly hard to get those grants, and the process is long and arduous. On October 1 st , the main grant funding departments were shut down including the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). It takes a lot of work for them to sift through the thousands of brilliant grant applications to find the absolutely most brilliant and promising ones. Since many steps of th...

Check out our guest blog on ResearchAmerica! blog- http://researchamerica.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/the-science-policy-group-at-the-university-of-pennsylvania/

Michael Allegrezza It’s easy to forget about infectious disease when one has access to quality healthcare that includes vaccines and antibiotics for most major pathogens. But infections still account for 22% of all deaths worldwide. In the developing world, it is far worse. For instance, over half of all deaths in sub-Saharan Africa are from infectious diseases. While many researchers are using science and technology to combat this problem, others have noticed that creating international policies for monitoring and controlling infectious disease would also greatly decrease mortality and minimize global outbreaks.   In June, Dr. Harvey Rubin gave a talk entitled “A Proposal for a Global Governance System for Infectious Diseases” to members of the Penn Science Policy Group. In addition running a research lab, Dr. Rubin has established himself as a critical intellect on the topic of global disease and acts as the Director of Penn's Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and ...

Whole genome sequencing and the future of medicine: A discussion of policy implications ranging from genome privacy to designer babies. Michael Allegrezza The presidential race of 2016 was tight. That is, until information was leaked that Hillary Clinton has a genetic predisposition to early onset Alzheimer’s disease. How her genetic info was obtained is unknown; her campaign staff followed strict protocols to collect and destroy everything she touched – toothbrushes, bed sheets, cups. It may be that years before she was a candidate, a cunning opponent attended her book signings and patiently preserved the pages she penned until the moment was ripe. But the method and legality of the leak is irrelevant. Unlike in a jury case, one can’t instruct an entire electorate to ignore information that may have been illegally obtained. Thus began a new era of American politics: no longer was it simply video or written evidence of your past that was under scrutiny. Now, the DNA code prophes...