What is the Science?

This weekend as part of our first excursion to the Monash Science Centre (more on that later in the week) we visited Cath’s husband Rob in his greenhouse. The trip highlighted for me the importance of presenting a balanced view when teaching a subject especially a controversial one.

Rob is a biomedical researcher at Monash University where he is studying genetic modification. This is of course a very deep and interesting subject but also one that gets a lot of negative attention in the mainstream press. However Rob’s research is in an area you never hear about when people decry the evils of genetic modification.

The research Rob is performing is into improving the effectiveness of vaccines produced by plants and delivering the vaccine orally. In short they are using tomato’s to grow an oral vaccine for tuberculosis. This is an area of study that is of great import as this research could perhaps save many lives. It is however not the sort of thing you hear about when people talk about genetic modification, where the outside impression is of a poorly understood frakenscience (yes I made it up) invading our foodstuffs.

I will leave the debate on genetic modification in our food, and the labeling of such for another time (I am personally undecided on the presence of genetically modified food in our food, but very much for the labeling of its presence). However our excursion showed the need for balanced reporting, and more importantly, balanced education on just what is going on in a scientific field. For a student to get a good understanding of a subject they need their teachers to provided them with an unbiased view of the field, not just that which the mainstream is focused on.

Photos from our excursion.