S&J Training Program Fellow joins delegation in DC to advocate for more graduate training funding

SJTP Fellow and Environmental Studies doctoral student Tiffany Wise-West filed this report from a lobbying trip to Washington, DC with the “UC in DC” program. The statements made in this piece are her own opinions and not those of any UC-affiliated advocacy group.

In late May, 2013 a delegation from UCSC joined other UC campus delegations for UC in DC day, advocating to Congress for strong and sustained federal funding of graduate research and education. Over 26,000 graduate researchers are partially supported by the $3.1 billion in federal research funding annually, representing two-thirds of total research funding awarded to UCs each year. With over 7% of the nation’s PhDs being awarded from the UC system, UC leads the way in building the intellectual capital necessary to fill the 2.6 million jobs in California projected to require advanced degree by year 2020.

The UCSC delegation meets with Representative Sam Farr (CA-20th District) to discuss the consequences of budget cuts on graduate student training.

Graduate training, long a focal area of the Science and Justice Research Center, will be impacted by cuts to federal discretionary funding in the next fiscal year as a result of the sequestration mechanism put into law by the Budget Control Act of 2011. Additional discretionary cuts to research, education, and health programs will be accomplished in future years by decreasing the total funds available for annual appropriations. Without a change to or repeal of the sequestration law, the following impacts to graduate education will go into effect:

 · Deep cuts through year 2021 to key agencies funding graduate research opportunities such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, USDA, NASA, Department of Defense, and others.

· Reductions in student aid support will occur as the number of Pell Grants awarded decrease through year 2021 and interest rates for new federal students loans could increase from 3.4 to 6.8% after July 2013.

Obviously failure to “build the brain trust” has the potential to stifle technological innovation and could be economically damaging for the State. Chancellor Blumenthal, in his Open Forum piece in the May 9, 2013 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, frames this issue in terms of UCSC’s cancer genome research and asks how we, as a society, cannot afford this research that is so clearly in the public’s interest. Thus, crucial social justice questions are also associated with the current funding situation. Societal human health impacts aside, the inability to maintain or increase funding to graduate programs and grant-making agencies will have dire impacts on prospective graduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds or communities with respect to affordability and accessibility of healthcare.

Moreover, as Senator Harkin’s (D-Iowa) Education Policy Advisor pointed out, the Senator believes that education should never be treated as a discretionary expense but rather always speaks of it in terms of an investment in a self-perpetuating source of innovation, an economic driver and equalizer. As long as Congress thinks of educational funding as an “expense” vs. an “investment” and continues to make choices that prohibit pathways to advanced degrees, generations of Americans may accept the notion that advanced degrees are simply “out of reach” and be dissuaded from pursuing them.

So, what are our options? Outside of aggressive advocacy with Congress to improve the situation through legislative means, UC delegates informed Senator Feinstein (D-CA) that UC is working to enhance early and robust alumni contribution campaigns and foster public-private partnerships in research funding as a means to deal with continual uncertainty and reductions in funding. While these actions can make significant contributions, they do not begin to reach the order of magnitude required to offset the divestment of federal funding in graduate research and education. Congressional representatives from districts in which UCSC is located all explicitly support UC’s graduate research funding agenda. But with such a divided Congress, it is unlikely that legislative action will succeed in maintaining or increasing funding levels.

The next opportunity to weigh in on this issue is at the state level by contacting your legislator to support the increases proposed for UC in Governor Brown’s proposed, revised state budget that was released on May 14, 2013 and will be voted on by the legislature on June 14, 2013.

 

 

May 28, 2013 | When does science become justice? Scientific evidence, pesticides and food system justice

Tuesday May 28, 2013

4:00-6:00PM

Engineering 2, 599

Panel guests:

Tyrone Hayes, UC Berkeley

Jill Harrison, Colorado-Boulder

Emily Marquez, Pesticide Action Network of North America

At the heart of disputes over pesticide use in agriculture are questions of evidence. Whose evidence is to be trusted? When causal relations between pesticides and human illness or ecological harm are disputed, who decides on their continued use? Is it appropriate for regulators to take into account matters of political economy and social justice when regulating agricultural practices or are there plainly empirical criteria of risk for regulators to use? This panel will bring together a social scientist, an activist organization, a natural scientist, and a pesticide regulator. We will search for shared insights into the meeting of scientific knowledge and democratic governance of food systems, giving credence to the positions of the many stakeholders in food systems—farmers, workers, neighbors and eaters alike.

 

May 28, 2013 | Putting Earthquake Prediction on Trial: Lessons from the 2009 L’Aquila Earthquake

In spite of recent advances, predicting earthquakes remains difficult and uncertain, challenging scientists both to predict and to communicate the probability of earthquakes to policymakers and to the general public. In October, 2012, seven Italian earthquake scientists were found guilty of manslaughter for their role in failing to communicate the risk of a possible earthquake, shortly before a powerful 2009 earthquake killed more than 300 people in the city of L’Aquila, Italy. This trial has become an international cause celebre; in today’s event, Professor Susan Schwartz (Earth and Planetary Sciences, UCSC) will talk about the state of current knowledge in earthquake prediction, and about her experience of communicating this to multiple audiences in Costa Rica. Professor Massimo Mazzotti, (History, UC Berkeley) will talk about the political and institutional context which led to the seven scientists’ being put on trial, and how their conviction was affected by popular understandings of what scientists and the Italian state should have done.

Following the event, there will be a reception in the Science & Justice Research Center with refreshments and featuring works from our artists in residence.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 | 4:00-6:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Andrew Mathews receives the Harold & Margaret Sprout Award for recent book

Andrew S. Mathews, Director of the Science & Justice Research Center and Associate Professor of Anthropology, received the Harold and Margaret Sprout Award  from the International Studies Association’s Environment Section for his 2011 book Instituting Nature: Authority, Expertise, and Power in Mexican Forests (MIT Press). The Harold and Margaret Sprout Award recognizes the best book in the study of international environmental problems in the preceding two years. Mathew’s book traces the hundred year history of how the science of forestry arrived in the forests of Mexico and was transformed by indigenous communities who live and work in forests.

Apr 10, 2013 | Bruce Ames — Nutritional deficiencies and trace synthetic chemicals: Putting health risks into perspective

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Humanities 1, Room 210

Bruce N. Ames (Senior Scientist, Nutrition and Metabolism Center, Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UC Berkeley)

Bruce Ames’ research in nutritional biochemistry has examined exposure to health risks from a number of perspectives. Early in his career he developed the Ames test, an inexpensive method to measure the mutagenic and carcinogenic potential of chemicals which has become an essential tool of contemporary biochemistry. Although it contributed to public fears about synthetic chemicals, the common carcinogenic effects of ‘natural’ chemicals led Dr. Ames to assert that these fears were largely unfounded or exaggerated. More recently, his research has focused on the hidden biochemical costs of vitamin deficiencies, which are widespread even in wealthy nations. His triage theory posits that the human body protects against short term consequences of essential vitamin deficiencies by reducing the production of longevity proteins that are markers of long term health. This discovery led to his lab’s creation of CHORI-Bars, nutritional food bars that provide high densities of essential vitamins and minerals with very few calories. Preliminary research indicates that resolving nutritional deficiencies in this fashion can have positive effects on a wide range of health problems in wealthy and poor economies alike.

In this presentation, Dr. Ames will discuss the triage theory and what it means for the relative risks of competing nutritional strategies. Have food system reformers significantly over-stated the risks of synthetic chemicals to human health? Does the emphasis on reducing synthetic chemicals actually lead to more negative health outcomes, such as cancer, by making fresh fruits and vegetables more expensive? Can highly-engineered foods such as CHORI-Bars provide the least expensive solutions to a wide variety of negative health outcomes?

Jenny Reardon’s op-ed sparks conversation about medical and genetic privacy

Lung tissue samples taken from the body of a soldier who died of influenza in 1918 are pictured in an undated photo. Credit: Armed Forces Institute Of Pathol, NYT

SJRC Co-Director Jenny Reardon published an Op-Ed in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 2, 2013, “Should patients understand that they are research subjects?” In the article she recounts visiting a physician at UC San Francisco and not being able to parse the standard informed consent to having tissues and/or medical data used anonymously in medical research. At the heart of problem is a confusing mix of U.S. case law that denies ownership over one’s bodily tissues once they have left one’s body, medical privacy standards that require providers and researchers to inform you that they may use the tissues for research without directly requesting permission, and the speed at which medical advances are occurring. Given these conditions, it is actually imposible to know what one is consenting to when one signs these ubiquitous forms, making that ‘consent’ tenuous at best. Reardon, whose research examines the social, ethical political dynamics of biomedicine and genomics, notes that even experts like her are in the dark about how their tissues might be used in the near future, and recent research has shown that while researchers may aspire to keeping tissues and data anonymous it is no longer technically feasible.

I have spent two decades studying this minefield, and even I had a hard time making sense of what it might mean for these researchers to have access to my samples. For example, UCSF would be required by law to make my samples “anonymous,” yet research published in Science the day of my visit revealed that even anonymous samples can be reidentified. Does this mean that information gained from my samples might be linked back to me?

Reardon cites recent developments in patient consent at the University of Washington medical centers as a model for UCSF and other providers to adopt. At the University of Washington, patients are able to opt out of research without their physicians knowing, and thus not feel as if they are risking their access to care. Additionally, Reardon supports giving patients more rights to affirmatively opt in to research whenever their tissues or data is desired by researchers.

The San Francisco Chronicle editorial board also published an editorial in support of Reardon’s proposal. The editors suggest that as the US Department of Health and Human Services revises its standards for medical consent, they should keep these principles in mind:

— Patients may not have legal “property,” but they still have rights. Regulators should err on the side of more patient disclosure, not less.

— Compensation is going to be a big question going forward, but it doesn’t have to be monetary. If there’s no longer a way to provide patients with anonymity, will they have free or reasonably priced access to medical developments that come about as a result of their cells or DNA?

— Standardized disclosures should be encouraged throughout the industry. Different institutions have widely varying policies. Patients don’t deserve to be confused.

In response to these two pieces, UCSF’s Elizabeth A. Boyd, associate vice chancellor for ethics and compliance, and Daniel Dohan, associate professor of health policy and social medicine, noted that the success of medical research rests on relationships of trust between physicians, researchers and patients. The development of personalized medicine, which promises to revolutionize health care by tailoring treatments to individuals, will require willingness on the part of patients to provide samples for research and testing. Boyd and Dohan note that UCSF supports revising consent standards, and cite the recent creati0n of EngageUC, an initiative on the part of UC physicians and faculty to develop new comprehensive guidelines.

We want to develop a consent process and a set of policies that will help ensure that all patients – whether they have volunteered for specific research, are donating leftover tumor samples, or are being admitted to the hospital for care – truly understand what information may be gleaned from their samples, how that information will be used, whom it will be shared with, and what privacy controls can – and cannot – be guaranteed.

Reardon and the rest of the UCSC Science & Justice Research Center will continue to contribute to these conversations.

 

Jenny Reardon Awarded Brocher Foundation Residency

Jenny Reardon, Associate Professor of Sociology, Founder and Co-Director of the Science & Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz was awarded a Residency with The Brocher Foundation to write her upcoming book The Post-Genomic Condition: Ethics, Justice and Knowledge After the Genome.

The Brocher Foundation is a Swiss non profit law Foundation offering visiting researchers the opportunity to stay at the Brocher Centre in a peaceful park on shores of Lake Geneva, to write a book – articles – an essay or a PhD thesis. The visiting positions are a unique occasion to meet other researchers from different disciplines and countries as well as experts from numerous International Organizations & Non Gouvernemental Organizations based in Geneva such as WHO, WTO, WIPO, UNHCR, ILO, WMA, ICRC.

Since 2007 the Brocher Centre has hosted more than a hundred junior and senior researchers from all around the world for stays ranging from one to six months.

Residencies with the Brocher Centre give researchers (PhD students to Professors) the opportunity to work on projects on the ethical, legal and social implications for humankind of recent medical research and new technologies.

 

Mar 08, 2013 | Critical Nutrition Symposium

March 8, 2013

9:00AM-5:30PM

261 Social Sciences I

Advice about what to eat for health and well being is pervasive in the modern world, and such advice is delivered as if it were uncontroversial, universally applicable, welcome, and effective. When it appears not to work, rather than reflection on the scientific, cultural, and sociological underpinnings of the endeavor, the response has been for more informative food labels and more emphasis on food education. What’s wrong or missing in conventional nutritional practice? What are its effects in terms of human health and social justice? What other approaches might work better? This symposium will bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives to comment on the content and delivery of nutritional science. Invited guests include Charlotte Biltekoff (American Studies and Food Science, UC Davis), Jessica Hayes-Conroy (Women’s Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), Adele Hite (Public Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Aya H. Kimura (Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i-Manoa), Hannah Landecker (Sociology and Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA), and Jessica Mudry (Center for Engineering in Society, Concordia University). UCSC food scholars Julie Guthman, Melissa Caldwell, Nancy Chen, and Jake Metcalf will provide commentary.

This event is sponsored by the Multi-campus Research Program on Food and the Body and the “Knowing Food” Research Cluster of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies. Additional support has been provided by the Community Studies Program, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Department of Environmental Studies, and the Department of Sociology.

Please RSVP to Lisa Nishioka (global@ucsc.edu) if you plan to attend.

For questions regarding the program contact Julie Guthman (jguthman@ucsc.edu)

Feb 26, 2013 | Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of Communicating Uncertainty about Landscape Change

Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of communicating uncertainty about landscape change

 

Karen Holl (UCSC, Environmental Studies)

Maggi Kelly (Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Policy & Management, UC Berkeley)

Tim Forsyth (Department of International Development, London School of Economics)

Over the last few years the contribution of deforestation and forest fires to climate change has come to be of increasing interest, even as new technologies of remote sensing and modeling have made it possible to measure and predict landcover change with unprecedented accuracy. These technologies have made it possible to imagine environmental policies which compensate landowners for averted deforestation (known as REDD, Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation), or to support thinning forests in order to prevent forest fires. However, increased precision also introduces new problems of communicating uncertainty to policymakers and of gaining the trust of the general public. Professor Holl will talk about the challenges of including tropical forest restoration in proposed markets in carbon offsets, Professor Kelly will talk about her work with remote sensing technologies such as LIDAR in order to measure California forests and to inform the general public about forest conditions. Tim Forsyth is a specialist in political approaches to environmental change and international development, and will moderate a conversation about the challenges of communicating uncertain knowledge about forests to policymakers and other audiences.

February 26, 2013 | 4:00-6:00PM | Engineering 2, Room 599

"Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires:
Problems of Communicating Uncertainty about Landscape Change"
SJWG Rapporteur Report
26 February 2013
Rapporteur: Martha Kenney, History of Consciousness
Maggi Kelly (Berkeley) spoke about her work on the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management
Project, a collaborative partnership between a UC science team, federal and state agencies, and
the public with the goal of learning how to ensure long-term sustainability of the Sierra Nevada
forest system. Specifically they are looking into the role of fire in forest management. Firesuppression
policies have lead to fuel build-up. The Forest Service developed a “strategic fire
management” plan where fuel treatments would be used on the ground to control the fire.
However, this had only been modeled, not tested. Due to public concern UC scientists were
brought in as a neutral party to investigate the efficacy and impact of the fuel treatment plan.
Kelly was a member of the spatial team who used helicopter-mounted LiDAR (Light Detecting
and Ranging) to measure the efficacy of the treatments. Recent projects for the spatial team
include using LiDAR data to map Fisher (a medium-sized mammal of interest to environmental
activists) habitat and finding the best allometric equations to use LiDAR data to estimate the
forest biomass. One public initiative has been to introduce citizens to virtual forests rendered
from the LiDAR data. This offers one medium to communicate both the potential and
uncertainty of their forest models.

Karen Holl (UCSC) spoke about the opportunities and concerns of the UN’s REDD+ (Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative in the context of tropical forest
restoration. Under the REDD+ scheme local people are paid to participate in reforestation
projects. Holl expressed some logistical concerns about REDD+ including how to set a baseline
for how much carbon you have to begin with, monitoring, permanence, and respecting human
rights. In her own project in Costa Rica, Holl learned that it is important where you restore and
how you restore forests. Her team has been experimenting with creating “tree islands,” which
use fewer resources and stimulates natural recovery. Projects such as these help Holl investigate
why there is such variation in the rate of recovery in order to increase the predictability of active
restoration. However, Hall is still concerned about the efficacy of paying farmers for restoration
and that a focus on carbon obscures questions of biodiversity. Because of these misgivings, Holl
argues that forest policies should concentrate on preserving relatively intact forests and to value
carbon, biodiversity, and human livelihoods together.

Tim Forsythe acted as respondent for Kelly and Holl, drawing from his own experience in forest
policy in Asia. Agreeing with Holl he argued that REDD+ offers a strategy to increase forest
cover and reduce carbon, but it does not necessarily or directly address people’s livelihoods and
biodiversity. Other limitations to REDD+ he noted were that under many schemes only
indigenous people are protect, that plantation forests are acceptable for meeting carbon goals,
and that carbon does cost enough (10 dollars/ton) to encourage the kind of reforestation that is
necessary. Forsythe argued that we need new ways of using climate change policy to make better
livelihoods for the people who rely on the forests for income. One alternative he believes offers
a better model is the approach of Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS),
who ask rural people what they need and value in the context of global climate change.

During the question and answer period, questions centered around the uncertainty of scientific
modeling and problems with climate change policy. Kelly spoke about her role as a trusted
liaison (or neutral party) between the public and the Forest Service. Transparency and clear
communication of uncertainty are central to her team’s success, which includes destabilizing the
notion that a map or a model tells the truth. These uncertainties have lead to combining
approaches. For example the LiDAR data about Fisher habitat is correlated with the Fisher team
who monitor individual animals. However, how much the precision of the LiDAR data helps
resolve questions around fire remains to be tested. There are many equations and models and
they need to be checked against data on the ground. Holl explained that in tropical forests there
are so many species that the numbers you plug into equations for wood density require a lot of
guess work. She also explained that when a model is working it doesn’t necessarily represent the
reality of a situation but helps scientists to identify data gaps and to generate hypotheses.
Forsythe was concerned that these model-generated hypotheses don’t travel well and that, in the
context of REDD+, that these hypotheses have scientists and policy makers asking the wrong
questions. He wondered if REDD+ is helpful for the forests or a fast, cheap, and efficient
solution. Echoing the theme of “slow science” that the SJWG has been considering, he argued
that we should pause and ask more people what they would like to do with their landscapes.
From these discussions we got a real sense of the complex relationships between models, data,
policy, and on the ground efficacy happening within forest science in the context of climate
change.

Feb 23, 2013 | Seeding Sustainability: Hunger, BioTech, and the Future of Food Systems

Saturday February 23, 2013

7:00-10:00PM

UCSC Media Theater

Confirmed Speakers:

Miguel Altieri (UC Berkeley)

Eric Holt-Gimenez (Food First)

Kent Bradford (UC Davis)

Moderator: Jacob Metcalf (UCSC Science & Justice Research Center)

Registration (free) is kindly requested.

In collaboration with the UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the Science & Justice Research Center will host a panel discussion on the role of genetically modified crops within sustainable food systems in the global South. Food and agroecology activist and scholar Dr. Vandana Shiva will headline a panel with diverse perspectives from crop science, philanthropy. This panel will cap the CASFS weekend-long gathering and seed exchange event Strengthening the Roots: Seeds and Justice Convergence.

Two decades of experience with GMO crops, including mixed assessments of environmental impact and increased yield, indicate that controversies about biotech agriculture is not just (or even primarily) about the modified plants themselves. Rather, a complex social system travels with the plants. This system includes intellectual property, legal and political regimes, chemical inputs, industrialized and centralized food processing, farmer debt and much more. As the debate over GMO crops has evolved, particularly in the global South, the controversies have shifted from genetic modification techniques to the appropriateness of that social system for providing environmentally beneficial and economically secure food systems. Thus, this panel seeks to investigate the question of under what conditions ag-biotech is capable of providing sustainable—in all its ecological, cultural, and economic connotations—food systems in the global South? And are achieving those conditions both plausible and worth whatever trade-offs may be made in pursuit of extending and improving upon more traditional modes of growing food?