Ann Reid is an American scientist. Since 2014, she is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education.
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Ann Reid is an American scientist. Since 2014, she is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education.
Reid graduated from Bard College at Simon's Rock in environmental science, obtained a master's degree in international studies at Johns Hopkins University. [1] [2]
At age 21 Reid worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris for three years. Disappointed with diplomatic work, she went back to the United States to develop a career in medical research, starting as a technician at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, then as a molecular biologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, where she started to write about science education. [1] [2] While at the AFIP, she did a large part of the laboratory work leading to the sequencing of the 1918 influenza virus. [3]
From 2010 to 2013, she was the director of the American Academy of Microbiology. [1] She was appointed as executive director of the National Center for Science Education in 2014. [1] [2]
In her role as a spokesperson for the NCSE, Reid is frequently called upon by the media to comment on news stories related to science education and the place of science in public policy. [4] [5] She has been interviewed by The New York Times , [3] The Washington Post , [6] [7] [8] NPR , [9] CBS, [10] and other national news outlets. [11]
The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is a not-for-profit membership organization in the United States whose stated mission is to educate the press and the public on the scientific and educational aspects of controversies surrounding the teaching of evolution and climate change, and to provide information and resources to schools, parents, and other citizens working to keep those topics in public school science education. Based in Oakland, California, it claims 4,500 members that include scientists, teachers, clergy, and citizens of varied religious and political affiliations. The Center opposes the teaching of religious views in science classes in America's public schools; it does this through initiatives such as Project Steve. The Center has been called the United States' "leading anti-creationist organization". The Center is affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in the state of Kansas in the United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
Eugenie Carol Scott is an American physical anthropologist, a former university professor and educator who has been active in opposing the teaching of young Earth creationism and intelligent design in schools. She coined the term "Gish gallop" to describe a fallacious rhetorical technique of overwhelming an interlocutor with as many individually weak arguments as possible, in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument.
Influenza A virus (IAV) is a pathogen that causes the flu in birds and some mammals, including humans. It is an RNA virus whose subtypes have been isolated from wild birds. Occasionally, it is transmitted from wild to domestic birds, and this may cause severe disease, outbreaks, or human influenza pandemics.
Project Steve is a list of scientists with the given name Stephen or Steven or a variation thereof who "support evolution". It was originally created by the National Center for Science Education as a "tongue-in-cheek parody" of creationist attempts to collect a list of scientists who "doubt evolution", such as the Answers in Genesis's list of scientists who accept the biblical account of the Genesis creation narrative or the Discovery Institute's A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism. The list pokes fun at such endeavors while making it clear that, "We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!" It also honors Stephen Jay Gould. The level of support for evolution among scientists is very high. A 2009 poll by Pew Research Center found that "Nearly all scientists (97%) say humans and other living things have evolved over time."
Swine influenza is an infection caused by any of several types of swine influenza viruses. Swine influenza virus (SIV) or swine-origin influenza virus (S-OIV) refers to any strain of the influenza family of viruses that is endemic in pigs. As of 2009, identified SIV strains include influenza C and the subtypes of influenza A known as H1N1, H1N2, H2N1, H3N1, H3N2, and H2N3.
In virology, influenza A virus subtype H1N1 (A/H1N1) is a subtype of influenza A virus. Major outbreaks of H1N1 strains in humans include the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the 1977 Russian flu pandemic and the 2009 swine flu pandemic. It is an orthomyxovirus that contains the glycoproteins hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), antigens whose subtypes are used to classify the strains of the virus as H1N1, H1N2 etc. Hemagglutinin causes red blood cells to clump together and binds the virus to the infected cell. Neuraminidase is a type of glycoside hydrolase enzyme which helps to move the virus particles through the infected cell and assist in budding from the host cells.
An influenza pandemic is an epidemic of an influenza virus that spreads across a large region and infects a large proportion of the population. There have been six major influenza epidemics in the last 140 years, with the 1918 flu pandemic being the most severe; this is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of 50–100 million people. The 2009 swine flu pandemic, resulted in under 300,000 deaths and is considered relatively mild. These pandemics occur irregularly.
Influenza B virus is the only species in the genus Betainfluenzavirus in the virus family Orthomyxoviridae.
Spanish flu research concerns studies regarding the causes and characteristics of the Spanish flu, a variety of influenza that in 1918 was responsible for the worst influenza pandemic in modern history. Many theories about the origins and progress of the Spanish flu persisted in the literature, but it was not until 2005, when various samples of lung tissue were recovered from American World War I soldiers and from an Inupiat woman buried in permafrost in a mass grave in Brevig Mission, Alaska, that significant genetic research was made possible.
Glenn Branch is the deputy director of the National Center for Science Education. He is a prominent critic of creationism and intelligent design and an activist against campaigns of suppressing teaching of evolution and climate change in school education. He is also a fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
Jeffery K. Taubenberger is an American virologist. With Ann Reid, he was the first to sequence the genome of the influenza virus which caused the 1918 pandemic of Spanish flu. He is Chief of the Viral Pathogenesis and Evolution Section, Laboratory of Infectious Diseases, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health. Taubenberger's laboratory studies a number of viruses, including influenza A viruses (IAVs), which are the pathogens that cause yearly flu epidemics and have caused periodic pandemics, such as the 1968 outbreak that killed an estimated one million people. His research aims to inform public health strategies on several important aspects of flu: seasonal flu; avian flu, which circulates among birds and has infected humans in the past; swine flu, which circulates among pigs and has infected humans in the past; and pandemic flu, which can arise from numerous sources and spread quickly because humans have little to no immunity to it.
Johan Hultin was a Swedish-born American pathologist known for recovering tissues containing traces of the 1918 influenza virus that killed millions worldwide.
The pandemic H1N1/09 virus is a swine origin influenza A virus subtype H1N1 strain that was responsible for the 2009 swine flu pandemic. This strain is often called swine flu by the public media. For other names, see the Nomenclature section below.
Lisa D. White is an American geologist and director of Education and Outreach at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. White is a former professor of geosciences and associate dean of the College of Science and Engineering at San Francisco State University. She was elected to the California Academy of Sciences in 2000 and as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2009. White was awarded her PhD in 1989 from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2022 the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) presented White with the 2022 "Friend of Darwin" award.
The 1957–1958 Asian flu pandemic was a global pandemic of influenza A virus subtype H2N2 that originated in Guizhou in Southern China. The number of excess deaths caused by the pandemic is estimated to be 1–4 million around the world, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history. A decade later, a reassorted viral strain H3N2 further caused the Hong Kong flu pandemic (1968–1969).
1918 flu pandemic in India was the outbreak of an unusually deadly influenza pandemic in British India between 1918 and 1920 as a part of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. Also referred to as the Bombay Influenza or the Bombay Fever in India, the pandemic is believed to have killed up to 17–18 million people in the country, the most among all countries. David Arnold (2019) estimates at least 12 million dead, about 5% of the population. The decade between 1911 and 1921 was the only census period in which India's population fell, mostly due to devastation of the Spanish flu pandemic. The death toll in India's British-ruled districts was 13.88 million.
Bertha Vazquez is director of education for the Center for Inquiry, director of the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science (TIES), a program of the Center for Inquiry and a project of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and a retired middle school science teacher at the George Washington Carver Middle School in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She also manages the educational aspects of Science Saves and Young Skeptics, two other CFI programs.
The 1977 Russian flu was an influenza pandemic that was first reported by the Soviet Union in 1977 and lasted until 1979. The outbreak in northern China started in May 1977, slightly earlier than that in the Soviet Union. The pandemic mostly affected a population younger than 25 or 26 years of age, and resulted in approximately 700,000 deaths worldwide according to some estimate. It was caused by an H1N1 flu strain which highly resembled a virus strain circulating worldwide from 1946 to 1957. Genetic analysis and several unusual characteristics of the 1977 Russian flu have prompted many researchers to say that the virus was released to the public through a laboratory accident, or resulted from a live-vaccine trial escape.
Jason R. Wiles is an American biologist who is an associate professor of biology at Syracuse University. His research focuses on education in the life and earth sciences, with a particular emphasis on the teaching and learning of biological evolution. Wiles was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2022.