Category: Books and culture

What I’m Reading: Stem Cell Century

John Quiggin4 Comments

Research on human stem cells has been at the centre of one the more ferocious science policy debates in the US, only partially cooled off by recent claims that the necessary cultures can be generated from samples taking from adults, rather than from human embryos destroyed in the process.


“Stem Cell Century: Law and Policy for a Breakthrough Technology”

by Russell Korobkin (with a joint chapter on patents by Stephen Munzer) is a useful guide to the way the debate evolved in the US. There doesn’t seem to have been anything like the same controversy in Oz, although there has been at least one notable example of what might be called common or garden scientific misconduct.

Perhaps because the US stem cell debate is a bit remote for me, I found more interest in the chapters showing how commercial interests in research collided with general scientific ideals of free communications and with donors’ anger when they found that their donated (or appropriated) body tissue had been used to make highly profitable products.Kieran Healy of CT


wrote the book on the latter topic

.

Much of the debate about the relationship between donors and researchers on these issues has been cast in the framework of “informed consent”, which I think is not very helpful here. Neither I think is a focus on property rights over body parts. The real issue is how to finance the provision of public goods like medical research, characterized by highly uncertain returns.

I’ve looked at how to pay for medical research before and generally reached the conclusion that patents are not the best way to go, a view that is strengthened by a reading of Stem Cell Century. Looking at the conflicts discussed here, it seems that they might be less severe if successful research were rewarded by prizes, including ex gratia payments to crucial participants such as tissue donors.

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Books I’ve been reading

John Quiggin4 Comments

As well as Dance to the Music of Time, there’s Bob Burton’s Inside Spin a well-researched look at the operations of PR in Australia. As well as standard PR and Astroturf operations, there’s plenty of interesting material on think tanks like CIS and IPA. And I’m also reading To Firmer Ground edited by John Langmore, which provides a lot of useful policy suggestions for a social-democratic government. Sadly, the decision to match Howard’s tax cuts has closed off much of the room for manoeuvre available to Labor over the next three years, assuming they get in.

Life imitates art

John Quiggin10 Comments

I thought, at first that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later, I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin’s work was something to be discussed rather than tackled and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day

Anthony Powell, in A Dance to the Music of Time. Any of my co-authors will recognise this much of the picture, at least.

Glacial

John Quiggin2 Comments

In a piece on the canon wars which quotes CT member Michael Berube, the NYT asserts that college English curricula have seen “a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.â€? In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.”

TS Eliot died in 1965, but given the lags in assigning textbooks, I think it would be reasonable to regard him has having been a living author when his work was set. So, the number of living authors in the top six has moved from one to … one. The only other evidence of the recent past is the inclusion of Virginia Woolf, whose major works were written only 70 years before they made it into the curriculum. Indeed, we are in the throes of radical change here, it seems.

Since the NYT doesn’t mention the obvious difference between the two lists, I won’t either, but I will say that I think the 1998 list is an improvement.

Ozonomics in Brisbane

John Quiggin11 Comments

For any Brisbane readers who haven’t already made their plans for this evening, there’s a book event run by the Brisbane Institute at the Customs House tonight. Andrew Charlton will present a talk on the title “Inside the myth of Australia’s economic superheroes” based on his new book, Ozonomics Charlton is the co-author with Joseph Stiglitz, of Fair Trade for All. Of the new book, Stiglitz writes

Charlton makes a convincing case that Australia’s remarkable performance is not because of the Howard Government – indeed, it may be despite it.’

More details here

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin42 Comments

National Insecurity: The Howard Government’s Betrayal of Australia by Weiss, Thurbon and Mathews, which follows up their earlier book How to Kill A Country, an attack on the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

The hyperbolic titles of these books are not to my taste (though they may help to sell books). The books themselves are less strident than the titles would suggest, and raise issues that should be debated more. Weiss, Thurbon and Mathews take a left-nationalist perspective on Australia’s relationship with the United States, seeing the Liberal party and the Howard government in particular as representing a segment of the capitalist class that benefits from an alliance with US Republicans at the expense of Australia as a whole including workers, domestically-focused business and Australians in general considered as citizens of a putatively independent country.

Before examining this claim, I think it’s worth making some factual points that ought to be common ground to most of us

First, since World War II, Australia has followed the US line in foreign policy more closely than any other country (maybe there are some unimportant statelets who’ve been closer, but I’m not aware of them).

Second, the Liberal party has generally favoured an more complete identification of Australian and US interests than Labor

Third, among Liberal governments, the Howard government has gone further than any other in this respect[1}

Fourth, the Howard government has, since 2000, aligned itself strongly with the Republican Party and the Bush Administration, and explicitly against the Democratic Party.
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What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin2 Comments

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. I’ve bought a lovely Folio edition of this, and have just got started on it. While I’m not a book fetishist, and am perfectly happy to do most of my reading on screen, the book does embody a great tradition of craft values, which will, I hope, never disappear.

What I’m reading

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Sophie’s World which my son received as a present and enjoyed (I read it when it came out a few years back and thought it might be good to refresh my memory). An introduction to philosophy (roughly along the lines of Russell’s History of Western Philosophy) presented as a story in which a young girl receives a series of mysterious messages.

Higher Ground – an analysis of the Project Hope scheme run in Wisconsin with the aim of improving outcomes for the working poor there. I’ll be writing a review some time.

What I’m reading

John Quiggin2 Comments

Vanity Fair by Thackeray. Becky Sharp is a wonderful creation, even better than I remembered her. Thackeray’s only problem is to keep her plans from succeeding so well as to establish her in the boringly safe wealthy position she aspires to. Rather than stress out over verisimilitude in this respect, he just keeps reminding us that if Becky’s plans (to snare a rich husband, or to placate her poor husband’s wealthy relatives) had come off, we wouldn’t have anything more to read.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin6 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these, so I’ll just put down a list of books I’ve read in the past few months, and open it up to discussion. If there’s an interest in particular books, I might do a mini-review, so just ask and see. Here’s a list:

The Triumph of the Airheads by Shelley Gare
Gittinomics by Ross Gittins
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
Lost by Larissa Behrendt
The Marketplace of Christianity by Ekeleund, Hébert and Tollison
Culture and Prosperity by John Kay
The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (reviewed in AFR)
What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts by Michael Bérubé
Cosmonaut Keep by Ken MacLeod