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Sense and Science: A scientist's thoughts on life and blogging


It was two, maybe three years ago, that I was asked if I would like to do a blog for GMA News Online. I guess what took so long was thinking of a focus for the blog —so allow me explain why I finally decided on "Sense and Science".
 
Writing a column is very left-brained: you have to be logical, thinking linearly.  But I suspect the blog will require more right-brained thinking, which is intuitive and lateral, requiring thinking out of the box. Or boxes. 
 
My background is in the natural and social sciences. My college training included biology and veterinary medicine, with an exodus in graduate school to anthropology and, later, specialization in medical anthropology.  
 
After I was elected into the National Academy of Science and Technology last year, the Inquirer’s Tessa Salazar asked me about my thoughts on science and the public and I replied that we scientists need to do more to popularize science, including doing blogs.  
 
Easier said than done.  Scientists are generally unexciting, our training requiring us to be cold and detached, supposedly out of objectivity.  
 
As a case in point, my thesis in veterinary medicine was “A Preliminary Study on Blood Urea Nitrogen (BUN), Creatinine and Total Protein in the Serum of the Philippine Carabao (Bubalus bubalis)” —a title that doesn’t quite capture the way the study had to be conducted, chasing after 104 carabaos, many in far from normal conditions, overworked and underfed.
 
Which is why I wanted the blog to be about "Sense and Science".   The sense part comes from the late Odette Alcantara, who once came up to me while we were queuing one day at the canteen of the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement, gave me a warm hug, and whispered in my ear: “Your columns are so sensible.”  I’ve heard that compliment several more times since then and I like it.   Science, to be useful, must make sense.  But science must also be born from sensibility.   Objectivity in science is a myth: many of our research projects come out of personal concerns. For example, I’m involved right now in a project with the University of Amsterdam to look at how young people use medicines.  Anita Hardon, my colleague who first conceptualized the research, went into it because of stories from her teenage daughter about the drug scene in the Netherlands.
 
We tend to associate science with “reason” and “rationality”, but when we ask someone to be reasonable, we’re also asking the person to feel, to understand.  In Mandarin Chinese, the words for “reasonable” and “sensible” are interchangeable, and have connotations of wisdom and fairness.  
 
Take acupuncture. It seems to defy logic and rationality to stick a needle in your hand to treat a headache but for practitioners and patients, the needles and points in the body all fall into place and just make sense.
 
My blog on sense and science will, I hope, show how we can be sensible in the widest possible way.  
 
GMA News' Howie Severino first suggested I write about relationships, which I’ll do —but this isn't going to be an advice column.  I’ll write about what science tells us about crazy love and falling out of love and about parenting and about our many other things: food, shelter, clothing, health, security, freedom.  Things that you can make sense of, and relate to your own life.
 
This will be a blog, too, about making sense of science, which includes recognizing how we can’t, as yet, explain everything that happens around us.  
 
I firmly believe there are forces more powerful than we are, but at the same time am wary of people and institutions claiming absolute and divine truths.  True science recognizes that we can never completely know the “truth”, never totally grasp reality.  The language of science is one of possibilities, not absolutes; once we realize that, we will better appreciate our lives, and people, and the world around us, as infinite potentials. — TJD, GMA News  

Michael L. Tan is a veterinarian and a medical anthropologist.  He is currently dean of the College of Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and Clinical Professor at the College of Medicine at UP Manila.  He also writes the opinion-editorial column "Pinoy Kasi" for the Philippine Daily Inquirer. He has been involved in numerous research projects on a range of issues from HIV/AIDS prevention to the culture of impunity. In 2012, he was elected to the National Academy of Science and Technology, the Philippines' highest science advisory body.      

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