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Antivaccine nonsense Biology Complementary and alternative medicine Intelligent design/creationism Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

When right wing loons try to “do” science involving vaccines or HIV/AIDS…

If there’s one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it’s ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree […]

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Biology Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

Cancer research: Is now our time?

The following is a rather curious promotional video that was shown at the plenary sessions of the AACR 2010 meeting. I first saw it yesterday, and thought my readers might be interested in it while I’m winding my way home: It’s basically a compendium of various facts about cancer and cancer research with a rather […]

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Blogging Medicine Science

AACR lazy blogging open thread

Day 3 of the 2010 AACR meeting dawns, and, sadly, I still have no posts. On the other hand, the reason I have no post yet today is because I’ve been attending the meeting and hanging out with old friends to the point where, when I got back to the hotel last night, I was […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

The danger of science denialism

Although this blog is not the Denialism Blog, there is no doubt that one of the overarching themes of Respectful Insolence has been, since its very beginning, combatting science denial. Go back to the very beginning and read a couple of my earliest posts, dating way back to 2004. In one of them I discussed […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Michael Specter on the dangers of science denialism

Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, on the danger of science denial: He also wrote an editorial to go along with it. Given that combatting science denialism, be it the anti-vaccine movement, the “alt-med” movement, or “intelligent design” creationism, maybe I’ll comment further […]