It is amazing to me how sometimes the concept of scope is misunderstood or not even considered by some people. Do you expect an astronomy journal to publish articles in medicine? Or a math journal to publish short stories? Usually not. How would you judge and trust the scientific claims made in a fashion magazine?
While we may grasp the concept of the scope in above examples easily, when it comes to news organization and public media, expectations seem to change drastically. For example, some accuse Voice of America for not being the voice of the people of other countries outside the U.S such as Iran, Egypt, Turkey, etc. Well, of course it is not and nor should it be in my opinion. They can report the events and news as they happen, and how U.S. government responds to it, but that is about it. Similarly, a local newspaper for Los Angeles has different content and objectives from a local newspaper in Baltimore or Tokyo. In fact, if one government's media talk about goals and points of views of people in other countries, one should question their authority and judgement in doing so, in my opinion. One can only expect truthfulness and validity of the claims and news being broadcast and hold media accountable and demand evidence for what they deliver within their scope of work, not for what they are not supposed to deliver nor for what they did not deliver.
I have seen the same thing happen on personal Blogs and Facebook pages. Some think to show your cool factor and open-mindedness you should accept and keep all posts and comments made by others on your personal page. Well, it is my "personal" page not a board for others to spread their ideas, especially if I do not like to promote those ideas. My personal page is out of scope for reflecting many topics of interest to others! I find it acceptable to delete automatic ads that are posted as comments to my blog posts as well as out of scope comments, equally the same.
I have just been needing to throw it out there once and for all.
My learning experiences, feelings, and memories often in form of a poem or a story.
Full Moon Rising
This picture is by Stefan Seip.
4 comments:
Hi Nargess, concerning your thoughts about out-of-scope comments to your posts I probably should tell you how much I feel honoured that you always considered my comments worth of publishing.
And by a funny coincident, my first publication after I deflected from physics into molecular-biology was indeed in an space-research journal who accepted our studies in DNA repair (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11537053 or http://www.michael-rosemann.de/DasWerk/Cospar-DNA-Structures.pdf). Sometimes I think that an open view beyond the narrow boundaries of a single scientific discipline can be very inspiring and important for innovations. The big breakthroughs in molecular genetics, understand in the function of DNA, the human genome etc. was considerably driven by scientists with a physics or chemistry background. Without their contributions, biology would still deal with counting the feets of thousand-leggers or classifying the shapes of raspberries. I mean that staying focussed on one scientific problem should never make us restrictive to allow "newcomers" to contribute their expertise.
greetings, Michael
Hi Michael,
That is a great point, thanks for sharing. Multidisciplinary research can have breakthrough results, adding new perspectives and results from one field to another. Specially that nothing is more valuable than having new eyes and minds looking at hard problems. However, I still feel that in those cases, one field is trying to achieve objectives/goals of another field and hence those work become part of their scope. I was trying to see why a space journal was interested in your DNA research (I assume for human space flight or research for humans living in outer space?). I was surprised that I could not find this motivation in your paper's introduction nor conclusion. So, it is fascination to me that they published it without the need for you to justify its scope; or maybe it is such an obvious interesting problem to them that I do not know about.
Hi Nargess, NASA and the ESA have a great interest in the medical effects of short or long space missions. The absence of gravitational force causes loss of muscle mass and osteoporosis, already after short missions. Our interest, however, is the impact of the high-energy cosmic radiation, which outside of the van-Allen-Belt is can be huge. The high-energy makes it difficult to shield, but fortunately the high-energy radiation particles also have much lower interaction with biological matter. But this is to a large degree not very well understoud. There is a lot of concern that the long-term exposure of astronauts to high-energy cosmic radiation might induce germ-line mutations or cancer. And this was the reason for us and others to study DNA-repair in human cells, which were exposed in laboratory conditions to high-energy radiation. This of course has all to do with health risk, and I don't like this research any more so much. I like much more to study the chances and challenges of new technologies and explorations. We are so much living in a risk- and fear society, that people miss all the chances in life only to stay on the safe side. I think that non of the early space pioneers, Gagarin, Sheppard, Armstrong, Aldrin, Leonow were obsessed with safety concerns. They all knew that it is an dangerous adventure, but they thought that the challenge is worth it.
And coming back to the issue of cross-disciplin research: this of course is also risky, and might lead to frustration. But sometimes it opens a completely new view to the world.
best greetings
Michael
Thanks for the information. That is great. I think statistics and data does in fact suggest that astronauts and pilots have higher rates of cancer due to exposure to more radiation. Well, understanding the risks is not that bad if we be able to find ways or develop technologies to mitigate them and make our brightest and bravest, already willing to take risks, live longer.
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