A CRISPR View of Human Genome Editing in the 21st Century

Scientists, policymakers, and bioethicists agree that the public should weigh in on the ethical issues raised by genomics and biotechnology. But it’s not always clear what role non-experts can play in these debates, or how scholars should measure public opinion about complex scientific issues. The gene-editing technology CRISPR-cas9 offers an excellent case to consider how the public is invited into and excluded from debates about promising and controversial new technologies. This dissertation advances our understanding of social and ethical dimensions of gene-editing by asking how the news media present CRISPR to the public, analyzing the role laid out for the public in media discourse about CRISPR, and investigating U.S. public attitudes about gene-editing using data from a national survey. Chapter 1 analyzes 304 articles from 8 ideologically diverse U.S. news sources to learn how CRISPR was framed in the news media in its early years (2012-2018). Most CRISPR coverage adopted a master frame I call “cautious optimism” consistently weighing both risks and benefits, but some veered into “boosterism,” framing that hypes possible benefits but ignores risks. Critical coverage of CRISPR was discernible though it was marginalized and under-represented. In general, coverage of CRISPR emphasized progress, profits and promises of cures, but generally steered clear of earlier decades’ worst tendencies (naïve genetic determinism, discrimination and perfectionism). Chapter 2 uses the news corpus to investigate the role of the public in the media narratives of CRISPR. Drawing on theories of expertise and lay publics developed by scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, I argue that in the case of CRISPR, the hope for meaningful, policy-informing public engagement may be trapped in a temporal paradox wherein the time for the public to participate is always too soon, until it turns out to be too late. What appears as an earnest desire on the part of expert communities for the public to join in dialogue, discussion, or even consensus building about the future of CRISPR turns out to be illusory. A push and pull of inclusion and exclusion leaves the public no clear entry point to the discussion. Further, while some experts used public relations tactics to manage public opinion, others engaged in protective boundary work that had the effect of crowding publics out. The net effect of these dynamics is a public largely absent from the discourse and debates over gene-editing. Chapter 3 draws on nationally representative survey data to understand U.S. lay public perspectives on the development of gene-editing. Prior survey research about gene-editing asks how the technology may impact the respondent individually. To expand on this framing, we ask about respondents’ hopes and fears about the future of gene-editing for themselves, their families and society. We also go beyond asking simply whether respondents favor gene-editing by inquiring about their willingness to spend public money and contribute their own biospecimens to support gene-editing research. We find that public opinion is still somewhat underdeveloped, with most respondents neither strongly optimistic nor fearful and that trust in the healthcare system is an important predictor of attitudes about gene-editing. With the gene-editing revolution underway, the future of media framing and public inclusion in shaping the direction of this technology is uncertain, but this research identifies pitfalls to avoid and insights to build on to improve engagement moving forward.PHDHlth Svc Org & Plcy & Soc PhDUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169935/1/dbthiel_1.pd

Women in Science 2013

“Women in Science” summarizes research done by Smith College’s Summer Research Fellowship (SURF) Program participants. Ever since its 1967 start, SURF has been a cornerstone of Smith’s science education. In 2013, 167 students participated in SURF, supervised by 57 faculty mentor-advisors drawn from the Clark Science Center’s fourteen science, mathematics, and engineering departments and programs, and associated centers and units. At summer’s end, SURF participants were asked to summarize their research experiences for this publication.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/clark_womeninscience/1000/thumbnail.jp

2021 Student Symposium Research and Creative Activity Book of Abstracts

The UMaine Student Symposium (UMSS) is an annual event that celebrates undergraduate and graduate student research and creative work. Students from a variety of disciplines present their achievements with video presentations. It’s the ideal occasion for the community to see how UMaine students’ work impacts locally – and beyond. The 2021 Student Symposium Research and Creative Activity Book of Abstracts includes a complete list of student presenters as well as abstracts related to their works

2015 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Ninth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1009/thumbnail.jp

2016 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Tenth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1010/thumbnail.jp

NLP Driven Models for Automatically Generating Survey Articles for Scientific Topics.

This thesis presents new methods that use natural language processing (NLP) driven models for summarizing research in scientific fields. Given a topic query in the form of a text string, we present methods for finding research articles relevant to the topic as well as summarization algorithms that use lexical and discourse information present in the text of these articles to generate coherent and readable extractive summaries of past research on the topic. In addition to summarizing prior research, good survey articles should also forecast future trends. With this motivation, we present work on forecasting future impact of scientific publications using NLP driven features.PhDComputer Science and EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113407/1/rahuljha_1.pd

Imagining the Global: Transnational Media and Popular Culture Beyond East and West

Based on a series of case studies of globally distributed media and their reception in different parts of the world, Imagining the Global reflects on what contemporary global culture can teach us about transnational cultural dynamics in the 21st century. A focused multisited cultural analysis that reflects on the symbiotic relationship between the local, the national, and the global, it also explores how individuals’ consumption of global media shapes their imagination of both faraway places and their own local lives. Chosen for their continuing influence, historical relationships, and different geopolitical positions, the case sites of France, Japan, and the United States provide opportunities to move beyond common dichotomies between East and West, or United States and “the rest.” From a theoretical point of view, Imagining the Global endeavors to answer the question of how one locale can help us understand another locale. Drawing from a wealth of primary sources—several years of fieldwork; extensive participant observation; more than 80 formal interviews with some 160 media consumers (and occasionally producers) in France, Japan, and the United States; and analyses of media in different languages—author Fabienne Darling-Wolf considers how global culture intersects with other significant identity factors, including gender, race, class, and geography. Imagining the Global investigates who gets to participate in and who gets excluded from global media representation, as well as how and why the distinction matters

Weight Management

Weight management is a multi- and cross-disciplinary challenge. This book covers many etiological and diagnostic aspects of weight-related disorders and their treatment. This book explains how body weight influences and is influenced by the brain, hormones and immune system, diet, physical activity, posture and gait, and the social environment. This book also elucidates the health consequences of significantly low or pathologically increased body weight. Furthermore, ideas on how to influence and manage body weight including anti-obesity medical devices, diet counselling, artificial sweeteners, prebiotics and probiotics, proanthocyanidins, bariatric surgery, microbiota transplantation, warming, physical exercise, music and psychological therapy are discussed