By: Navya Thakkar
Which all the articles discussed different problems in science, they were linked in their critical question of foundations of science and its frameworks. The Clark Doll Experiment is a science experiment that studies race and racial identity in children. While there were many reiterations and replications of this study, they all showed an extremely important phenomenon in Black children and their perception of their own racial identity as well as of white people. The article Lessons From HeLa Cells is a crucial discussion about informed consent in collection of biospecimens. This paper definitely enraged me for the inhumane actions of people in the name of science, and how they treated Henrietta Lacks and her family for years. The details of regulations involving informed consent was very intriguing as well as frustrating. I’m we are finally trying to improve processes of obtaining an informed consent, so that people can follow their personal views on their bodies. However, it still annoys me that in our developed world, where a tissue sample can be identified by its genetic code, there are still people using samples of clinically collected biospecimens in research without the consent of those it has been extracted from. It is essential to improve this process, not only to allow autonomy (even though this word can be overused in this discussion) but also to start to build trust between the scientific community and the public. The last reading, The Most Common Stereotypes About Science and Scientists was a really interesting paper, intersecting psychological concepts with how we perceive science. The paper was fun to read and discussed the issues of stereotyping and its impacts on science really well. However, it did slightly annoy me because it almost seemed to attack all the negative impacts of stereotypes without acknowledging that parts of it may be true. So while trust issues between the scientific community and the public are rampant, they are not only because of stereotypes but also because of actions of certain scientists in the past. It is going to take a lot of effort, together, from all the groups of people involved to move past this and build a truthful, trustworthy connection.