Keeping an open mind
It was an image more evocative of Hannibal Lecter than healers; a South African musician noodled on his guitar while brain surgeons laboured to remove most of his tumour in what was charmingly called an ‘‘awake craniotomy’’.
It’s not a case of cheaping out on anaesthetic expenses.
Happily this was an educated – and in this case seemingly successful – way for the surgeons to receive real-time guidance that they were hitting the right spot, so to speak, and something that’s been done in New Zealand (albeit without DIY musical accompaniment) for more than a decade.
It turns out our ability to produce music requires complex interaction of pathways in the brain. So by contenting themselves that they were not meddling with the (actually drowsy, not fully alert) patient’s ability to make music the medics knew they weren’t affecting his functional capacities. Beautiful – albeit in a conceptual sense, rather than a pictorial one.
It was a near-perfect way to bring the year’s science stories towards a close; a dovetailing of our scientific and artistic selves.
The scientific community worldwide has had a year combining extra-ordinary achievement with the profoundly worrying rise of social mistrust of scientific method.
Ignorant thinking has even found embodiment in the present occupant of the White House who declares himself to have ‘‘a natural instinct for science’’ – one of several cases in which he prefers instinct over education.
This is perhaps most starkly represented by the potentially disastrous dullardry of denialists – they don’t qualify as sceptics – of human-influenced climate change.
Runner-up in the idiocy stakes would be the revival of anti-vaxxer sentiment, and the resulting resurgence in diseases that we should have shed from our midst.
It can be easy enough, even for those who think they are checking things out, to mis-step.
ACT leader David Seymour warned that the banning of single-use plastic bags in supermarkets could lead to deaths from food-borne illnesses in reusable bags turns.
This turns out to have been based on a debunked study from San Francisco. Which was less than impressive, but scarcely the worst case of over-reaction on our shores have seen of late.
This was the year the meth-house contamination myth was exposed. This was not a case where the scientists got it wrong; they were drowned out by lead-from-the-front politicians sounding the bugle charge.
It turned out the ‘‘can’t be too careful’’ approach isn’t always correct.
At the risk of tempting fate, the nationwide campaign for New Zealand to be the first country anywhere to successfully quash an outbreak of Mycoplasma bovis is tracking pretty well.
So high are the stakes in this that we need to draw a deep breath, contemplate the $886 million eradication plan, and the more than 150,000 culled cattle, and tell ourselves that this is what success looks like.
Next year Food Standards Australia New Zealand will make its determination on how our laws might cover foods made using new genetic techniques.
Will we go the same way as Europe, that gene-edited crops should face the same tough regulations as genetically modified organisms, or the US approach not to regulate plants that ‘‘could otherwise have been developed through traditional breeding techniques’’.
That will be a big call.
‘‘The scientific community worldwide has had a year combining extra-ordinary achievement with the profoundly worrying rise of social mistrust of scientific method.’’