In Response to Valerie Strauss’ Criticism of Stephen Hawking

Last week, Valerie Strauss wrote, “Why Stephen Hawking made a mistake backing Israel boycott,” in her Answer Sheet blog in the Washington Post.

Here is my extended response:

Academic boycotts may be ineffective forms of protest and it is certainly difficult to maintain philosophical consistency—both legitimate reasons for not using this tactic. However, Strauss’ claim that “Academics is [sic] supposed to be about the pursuit of knowledge and truth” begs the question, To What Purpose? Knowledge and Truth may give a person intellectual satisfaction, but they do not put food on the table, nor do they keep repressive regimes from bulldozing homes or imprisoning dissidents.

The notion that academics exist on another plane, divorced from the socioeconomic and political realities of the rest of the world, is absurd. With many discoveries, the potential for making profits becomes far more important than the potential to save lives, leading to patents that prevent poor people from accessing them (e.g., AIDS medicines in Africa). The emphasis on profits even influences what research will be done in the first place. More and more scientists are now relying on funding from private companies, thus biasing their research, while federal funding for public health and preventative healthcare research has always been small compared with the share going to research on weapons and patentable drugs.

The naïve or uncritical “pursuit of knowledge and truth,” abstracted from their sociopolitical context, often results in corrupted research, incorrect analyses and conclusions, and sometimes tragic social consequences (e.g., eugenics research supporting the racist beliefs that Jews or Africans were subhuman). In other examples, the “pursuit of knowledge and truth” has been used to justify research that is inhumane, ecologically devastating or otherwise unethical (e.g., U.S. radiation experiments on prisoners and soldiers; Mengele’s experiments on concentration camp prisoners; the Tuskegee syphilis experiments). And sometimes the sponsors of research have no interest in truth and are trying to obscure reality (e.g., Big Tobacco’s research “proving” secondhand smoke is not dangerous; Big Oil and Coal’s research “disproving” human influenced climate change).

Mengele in America

My students often ask me why they need to take science. My answer is pretty simple: scientific thought is the most effective method for understanding natural phenomena and making accurate predictions about it. When used correctly, the scientific method can also be useful in understanding some social phenomena. However, the scientific method is sometimes misused and abused, even by scientists themselves.

There are “innocent” examples of this, such as poorly designed experiment with too many uncontrolled variables, or when there are inadvertent biases.

However, there have also been numerous examples of deliberate or malicious attempts to subvert the scientific process for private gain. The tobacco companies, for example, have hired their own scientists to do research that “proved” cigarettes or second hand smoke were safe or, when this was no longer a tenable position to argue, to provide evidence that sowed doubt about the dangers. Oil companies have done likewise to sow doubt about climate change. (See Merchants of Doubt, numerous articles by Robert Procter, The Republican War on Science, among other sources).

Then there are the cases where scientists have done dangerous, terrible and unethical things to specific classes of human beings because they were deemed “undesirable” or “subhuman,” or because they thought they could get away with it. The most infamous examples are the experiments conducted by Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners. However, an American researcher, Dr. John Cutler, was doing heinous experiments on Guatemalans in 1946, at the same time that the Nuremberg trials were going on and Mengele’s work was being exposed to the world. The following details of these experiments are from a Democracy Now on 8/31/2011.

Cutler and his colleagues, with the complicity of the Guatemalan and U.S. governments, intentionally infected over 1,300 Guatemalan sex workers, prisoners, soldiers, orphans and mental patients with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs)—without their permission—in order to study the effects of penicillin. In some cases, when victims failed to contract an STD through unprotected sex, they were inoculated with STD bacteria through wounds made on the penis or face, or injected into the urethra, rectum or spine. Many of the victims were never provided any treatment. Others were provided inadequate or incomplete treatment and, as a result, infected their family members.

But Those Were Different Times, Not

It has been argued that those were different times, with laxer ethical values and a weaker understanding of the ramifications of such experiments. However, Cutler knew full well that what he was doing was unethical, dangerous and cruel, which is why he went to Guatemala to do it. According a New York Times report, Cutler’s reports made it up the chain of command to the U.S. Surgeon General, Thomas Parran Jr. In a letter to Cutler, one of his colleagues said, "The surgeon general says, 'Well, we couldn't do this in the United States,’" which is not only an acknowledgment of what was going on, but an admission that it was ethically wrong.

Cutler had already attempted similar research on prisoners in Indiana. While he supposedly acquired informed consent from the inmates, he deliberately misled them about the nature and dangers of the research in order to increase the number of participants. The fact that he went to prisoners in the first place was an attempt to circumvent safety and ethical norms, as prisoners were believed to be more willing to consent to dangerous research because they had less education or believed that compliance would help them get released earlier.

Tuskegee syphilis research victims

Tuskegee blood draw, 1953

 Tuskegee syphilis experiments

Not surprisingly, Cutler went on to be a major player in the Tuskegee experiments (1932-1972) in which more than 600 African American men were deliberately denied treatment for syphilis in order to study its progression. The men were never even told they had syphilis and were denied treatment, even after the advent of penicillin. Over 100 of the participants died of the disease or complications from syphilis, while many of their wives and children contracted the disease from them. Cutler was never apologetic for his role in the research and continued to insist that the work was valuable and appropriate.