AAAS 2008 Meeting Coverage Highlights, Roundups

The improbability of an HIV vaccine, possibilities for improving scientific communication, and cheap laptops all made news at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held this past weekend in Boston.

After offering a scathing critique of federal science policy last Thursday, David Baltimore, AAAS president and Noble-prizing winning biologist, speaking to a packed room of scientists and journalists, said that “little hope” exists for a HIV vaccine after almost 20 years of research.

“We know that politically motivated stakeholders reject scientific analysis that challenges their policy positions,” said MIT professor Lawrence Susskind during a talk on science and policymaking. Introducing stakeholders to third-party “neutrals” while designing scientific studies could support a more fruitful “joint-fact finding” process, he suggested, and could facilitate science-based decisionmaking in the public sphere. MIT and the U.S. Geological Survey have a pilot program, the Science Impact Collaborative, that aims “to harmonize science and policy” by implementing such approaches.

Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and the One Laptop Per Child organization, spoke on the current state of play at OLPC, the goal of which is to bring cheap laptops (currently $187) to children in the developing world. Using Moore’s law, Negroponte believes they can bring the laptop’s price down to $50 by 2011. The original cost target for the project was $100 per laptop.

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Wired, and the CJR Observatory all feature round-ups and analysis of the AAAS meeting.

Tags: events, Innovation, medicine

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