Team:UT-Dallas/HP

the Humanities

POLITICAL SCIENCE

Dr. Douglas Dow is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as the codirector of the Honors College. He specializes in political theory, public law, legal theory and history, and American politics.



Policy does not always reflect the current body of scientific knowledge. Part of the problem arises from the fact that the information that the scientific community brings to the table does not always align with the goals of policy makers and economists. ‘The state of North Carolina, for example, had recently elected to simply disallow the use of current and projected sea level data in political cost benefit analysis [regarding development of the coast],’ says Dr. Douglas Dow, a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Dallas, ‘This would clearly create some conflicts.’


Nevertheless, scientists are far from mute in political sphere. ‘Scientists actually have a major place… in the public policy making process,’ says Dow. Policy makers frequently rely upon science to inform their policy decisions. Selective acceptance of scientific theory, however, seems to be a significant cause of the gap between policy and science—suggesting some sort of broader incompatibility between the two fields. Part of problem, Dow explained, is due to certain fundamental differences in the way that the humanities and the sciences are taught to communicate information. ‘Science is about probability,’ he says, ‘it’s not about an absolute yes or no. That makes for hypotheses that can sometimes be complicated to understand.’ These complicated topics, coupled with a lack of absolute certainty, can be easily manipulated and over simplified—often, just by accident.


It is not enough to simply teach science with the goal of graduating more STEM specialists. The rift between policy and science at hand calls for a more complete integration of science and the humanities, combining the best facets of each academic tradition. To better understand how we might accomplish this, we turned next to Master Teacher and science educator Dr. James McConnell.
Once complete, our system will be able to remain as a stable population in a person’s gut until the event of a V. cholerae infection. Detection of V. cholerae will then activate production of the phage delivery system, which will package the gRNA and Cas9 targeting system into a phage coat, exit the probiotic and transfer the system into V. cholerae present in the gut (transmission of a heterologous DNA message via phage was demonstrated by Ortiz and Endy in 2012 and featured in Waterloo’s 2013 iGEM project (2)). Once inside V. cholerae, the targeting system will bind and cleave sites complementary to the gRNA that correspond to selected pathogenicity genes. We proposed using Cas9/gRNA to target and kill pathogens as opposed to traditional phage therapy using a targeted lytic phage because it allowed us to differentiate and kill harmful pathogens of a strain that has both harmful and harmless serotypes. The gRNA in our system, while specific to V. cholerae, can easily be altered with PCR to target unique regions in other gastrointestinal pathogens.

References

1. Sinclair D., Abba K., Zaman K., Qadri F., Graves P.M., Oral vaccines for preventing cholera. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2011 Mar 16;(3):CD008603.
2. Ortiz M.E., Endy D. Engineered cell-cell communication via DNA messaging. J Biol Eng. 2012 Sep 7;6(1):16.