New CRESI working papers/publications on transitions to biofuels

4 01 2011

A number of papers have recently been published by CRESI staff and colleagues on the issue of bio-fuels.

The first, by Sarah Pilgrim and Mark Harvey reports a series of interviews with staff at a number of NGOs (Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF, RSPB, Friends of the Earth) and suggests that in many cases the development of NGO policy has been driven more by narrow political opportunities for influence than by broader and more coherent policy responses to global climate change or economic development, or indeed rigorous assessment of the scientific evidence. Read the rest of this entry »





Mark Harvey’s work on bioresources data features in Science

1 11 2010

Writing in the 29th October 2010 issue of Science Mark Harvey and co-authors outline how the development of powerful, high-throughput technologies, together with globalization of scientific research, presents the biomedical research community with unprecedented challenges for the management, archiving, and distribution of data and bioresources. In this context scientific progress depends on efficient and open sharing to generate maximum value.

They suggest that despite this the provision of public funding for these long-term repositories does not fall into the traditional model of science funding and so although funding agencies may exhort their experimental investigators to develop a “dissemination plan” for the data and bioresources they develop, in reality, such requirements are often not fulfilled with few if any consequences. Read the rest of this entry »





Media coverage: A pill for every ill

28 03 2010

CRESI’s Professor Joan Busfield’s research on the expansion in medicine use has been published in Social Science & Medicine in March 2010. The paper documents the substantial increase in expenditure on drugs by the NHS in England (a 60% increase in real terms over the decade to 2006) whilst the number of prescribed medicines dispensed increased from an average of 8 per person in 1989 to 16.4 in 2008 – a doubling over twenty years, with annual increases now running at around 4–5 percent.  Such increases are matched elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »








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