Our New Index; Liberal Science; Gazzaley in Time

The long-promised index to Science Café topics debuted yesterday, in case you hadn’t noticed. Now you can search for everything I’ve discussed and written about for the last 21 months – from addiction science to xeroderma pigmentosum – quickly and easily. We’ve made a little headway on the transcripts, as well, and plan to add some more this week. Thanks to everyone who made a suggestion on how to speed up the process. The next index will list the names of the scientists interviewed for Science Café. That should be live in the next seven to 10 days. Included on that list, of course, will be Science Café’s resident Brain Man, cognitive neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, who has received prominent mention in a Time magazine story on memory. I hope to catch up with him later this spring and update my original episode, which so far has proven the most popular Science Café in 2008. Speaking of catching up, if you missed Michael Gerson’s column, “A Phony ‘War on Science,’” in the Washington Post, I’ve linked to it here. His central point: There is war within liberalism because liberals have yet to resolve the conflict between humanitarianism and egalitarianism. In short, quoting liberally as he does from an essay by Yuval Levin in New Atlantis, he contends that because science is objective, it cannot concern itself with equality. This opens the door to authoritarian abuse. Here is one response from a Post reader: “I have been a scientist for over 25 years, and I have never heard a scientist discuss such ideas or suggest anything that could be construed as ‘a war on equality.’ I hear scientists talking about preventing cancer, or treating Alzheimer’s disease or promoting recovery after brain trauma.” More responses are posted on Nature’s blog. You should send your comments directly to Michael Gerson or the Post’s Letters to the Editor, and copy me as well. The Association of American Medical Colleges’ awards page for Science Café is now available online. Sad to say, both Thom Watson and Julie Bernstein no longer work at UCSF Public Affairs. But they both deserve considerable credit for the café’s success, which continues to build. The total number of podcast downloads for the year, now at more than 80,000, is way ahead of last year’s pace. It’s possible that we could sneak past 200,000 before the year is over.