Protesters all over the US are putting up a great effort aimed at the ending police brutality targeted at blacks. I'm thrilled to see such efforts, but I only wish there was more attention to the uneasy role of science in this mess. For most of science's history, it was on the side of racism. I'm afraid that may still be true today.
Gone are the days of phrenology (the psuedoscience that asserted the superiority of European races based on mostly imagined differences in head shape). The scientific community's recent embarrassment over James Watson is evidence we are moving beyond all of that. What we unfortunately have not moved beyond is a radically different prioritization of human lives. We are entering an era of euthanasia by neglect. The shape of research funding assures only diseases of the well to do matter. Diseases of the masses are viewed as sad tragedies, but are often much more simple than those of the well healed. In every category of disease, there are diseases which are essentially of the poor. Everyone knows many infectious diseases fall into this category. Therefore rich people have an easy out of claiming the poor have essentially infected themselves due to differing lifestyles they deem inferior. But consider a disease like sickle cell which affects predominantly African Americans and to a lesser extent Latinos. The disease is a simple genetic disease which maps to one single point mutation one one single gene. One in twelve of us African Americans are carriers for sickle cell trait. I assure you that if one in twelve senators were carriers of this genetic trait; research, screening and prevention would be amplified up to the point where sickle cell started dropping out of the American population.
The recent University of Chicago trauma center protests illustrate our problems perfectly. For decades academic medical centers have been shutting down public hospitals and building up fancy research buildings to capture grant money from the NIH and private donors. Private donors can be such a significant source of money sometimes films are produced to educate them. I should know, I appeared in one such film about Parkinson's disease as myself- a young scientist. The film was shot in the lab I worked at in Columbia University blocks away from an epidemic of poverty and violence. I believe I was doing important research. I believe we must continue to look for a cure for Parkinson's disease and every other awful disease that causes suffering in patients...but I refuse to remain silent about the creepy priorities of academic science. These priorities reflect the heavy influence of an older generation peopled by scientists who thought nothing of running experiments on prisoners without consent and who still can't understand why the Tuskegee incident was not good science. They also reflect the priorities of big time donors. Such well healed donors aren't particularly concerned that they may be shot on their way to work (if they work at all). Anyone who has worked in an inner city hospital feels differently...that's one of the reasons you will see trauma surgeons , emergency doctors and medical students joining neighborhood youth in organizing for a Southside Chicago trauma center.
At the end of the day, science is both a problem and a solution. Science is therefore the best tool that can be used to take a racist and classist regime apart in an objective way. It's also a tool that has always been easier for the wealthier to access and understand. The rise of the citizen scientist provides us with a unique opportunity...there is very little democracy about the way science funding flies around, and in the past that may have been a good thing. After all our past produced popularly supported eugenics programs among other horrors...but maybe we are ready to start a new kinder science; a science that is democratic in the sense that it weighs all human lives the same...a science that addresses the true needs of humans to support them instead of subvert them to support a profit motive...a science that embraces all of us in our diversity. Such a science would allow us to see we have hit a total crisis of Western science by our own measurements. Life expectancy has begun to fall in places where we have applied the full force of science to our existence....so we can no longer justify our methods by our ends. We need to do things very differently.
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