Summaries Flashcards
Summary of overall module
A rapidly growing global population places new demands on our food, water and energy systems. Science can contribute to the development of systems that ensure that all global citizens can have access to clean drinking water, adequate diets and the energy they need. But science alone is not enough to address these issues.
Various large-scale techniques are being seriously considered as a means of trying to deal with anthropogenic global warming. The adoption of these geoengineering techniques raises scientific and social questions.
Modern medicine is increasingly becoming personalised, and this throws up new scientific and social challenges.
Science communication involves the exchange of scientific information between a variety of communicators and their audiences. People communicating science include scientists, journalists, educators, campaigners, and many others.
Peer review is a method by which scientists ensure the quality of work being published. It involves the anonymous checking of scientific papers by appropriate experts before publication.
An assessment of risk involves measuring the probability of an event, and assessing the consequences that might arise from it. Risks are often classified as involuntary or voluntary, and as human-induced or naturally occurring
The study of ethics involves an attempt to clarify what is good and to study how beliefs about what is good come into being.
Some important ethical questions related to scientific knowledge are:
Who owns scientific knowledge?
Are the aims of the scientific research ethical?
Are scientists undertaking their research honestly and straightforwardly?
Are they using ethical techniques and avoiding harm to humans or other animals?
Decisions related to scientific issues are made by individuals and organisations, and can involve taking into account both our level of understanding of the science involved, and political and economic issues.
The next card is a summary of Topic 1: Food security and safety
Lack of food security is a global problem and contributes to political instability.
Advances in agricultural science have enabled the amount of food produced to increase dramatically over the last 100 years.
These increased yields are partly a result of the application of genetics to plant breeding programs; producing superior crop plants.
Current farming techniques in high-income countries rely on heavy inputs of water, agrochemicals and modern varieties of crops, which play a part in environmental degradation.
Expanding the use of these techniques to the low-income and middle-income countries can be problematic for a variety of social and economic reasons.
Conventional plant breeding is insufficient to introduce novel traits in crop plants such as insect resistance and herbicide resistance. This can only be done by genetic modification.
Various techniques exist to introduce novel genes into the genomes of crop plants. These include transformation by A. tumefaciens and use of microprojectile bombardment.
