For Scientific Institutions, Racial Reconciliation Requires Reparations
By C. Brandon Ogbunu,
Scientific American
| 06. 12. 2020
Antiracism in science must be about much more than challenging the bigoted graybeards of our past such as Ronald A. Fisher.
Ronald Fisher as a steward at the First International Eugenics Conference, 1912 (via wikipedia)
Amidst protests and conversations on racism following several instances of police violence, scientific institutions are reevaluating their approach to dealing with anti-Black racism—extant, historical or symbolic. For example, on Wednesday, June 10, a large segment of the scientific community (and the staffs of prominent journals) participated in a strike, where the goal was to reflect on how Black people—students, trainees, staff, and faculty—are treated, and how we can make the scientific paradigm more inclusive.
This includes several ongoing policy discussions surrounding diversity and inclusion, and very specific exchanges about how we remember and celebrate historical figures. For example, the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) is one of many influential scientific societies embroiled in a debate over renaming a prestigious award that currently commemorates Ronald A. Fisher (the R.A. Fisher Prize). Fisher was a pioneer of modern population genetics and one of the most influential scientists of the last century. His influence is as great in genetics as it is statistics, the latter...
Related Articles
By Katie Palmer and Usha Lee McFarling, Stat | 09.03.2024
Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade Photography on Unsplash
Pediatrician Alexandra Epee-Bounya had had enough. In her 20 years caring for children in Boston, she had seen hundreds of kids with suspected urinary tract infections. Each time, she’d turn to a...
By Emily R. Klancher Merchant, Los Angeles Review of Books | 08.22.2024
IN THE Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their...
By Julia Brown, The Conversation | 08.16.2024
With their primary goal to advance scientific knowledge, most scientists are not trained or incentivized to think through the societal implications of the technologies they are developing. Even in genomic medicine, which is geared toward benefiting future patients, time and...
By Antonio Regalado, MIT Technology Review | 08.22.2024
In 2016, I attended a large meeting of journalists in Washington, DC. The keynote speaker was Jennifer Doudna, who just a few years before had co-invented CRISPR, a revolutionary method of changing genes that was sweeping across biology labs because...