What method? And why is it happy?
origin story - grab the popcorn
In July 2020, I almost left my job as a research scientist. My first son was 2 ½ years old, and I had spent most of the spring and summer taking care of him at home when daycare closed due to COVID-19. I was exhausted and disheartened and completely frightened of the upcoming academic year and in person teaching. I was doom-scrolling and raging into the void and thinking it might be nice to simplify my life. Yet at the same time I had an idea for a new class – an idea that I was passionate about.
My starting point was how in US science and medicine, some of the worst historical examples of unethical research have been tied to eugenic thought and the dehumanization of human subjects based on race and/or intelligence [1-6]. With the backdrop of the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, the absence of this theme around unethical research and race seemed to me a glaring omission in my scientific training. With shockingly little effort, I was able to draw up a 12-week syllabus that revolved around historical examples like the Tuskegee incident [4], forced sterilizations in many contexts [5, 6], and lack of informed consent [7]. I shared my syllabus with a few close colleagues and what happened after that? Well, I could never have foreseen the amazing group of people who would assemble around the class, which would become more successful than I could have imagined!
It is with this group that we started using something called “the instrument” to ask questions about race-based bias in science writing and communication. Felicity and Adam were the team members who ideated the approach during an unfunded Spencer foundation grant submission in December 2020. Because our class covers genetics and genomics; we were reading excerpts from eugenicists in the 1920s [8] and newly printed articles trying to associate genome wide variation with educational attainment [9]. We were considering the reference human genome [10] and how well it represents human genetic diversity in a world population of over 8 billion people [11]. So, we developed and refined a set of questions that could be generally applied to thinking about any research article:
Q1 – What is the claim of the paper?
Q2 – Who is the author of the claim? (What is their background/expertise?)
Q3 – Who is the intended audience of the claim?
Q4 – Who or which groups are included or excluded from the claim of the paper? (Is it stated why they are or are not included or is it implied?)
Q5 – Who or which groups are affected by the claim of the paper? (Is it stated or implied?)
Answering these questions can help the reader understand the context of an article. In my first two posts, I apply “the instrument” beyond science writing to examine letters and policies in the present day. I agree with the argument of Dr. Jennifer Weber on this platform [12] that this is a skill to be cultivated in place of quick and emotional reactions to current events and news.
So how did this turn into the “Happy Method” then? Well, you can’t call something “the instrument” forever! We turned “the instrument” into an acronym “FELIX” because its original use was to “find inequity in literature and experimentation” [13]. If you feel like that is a stretch, well it is! But it allowed us to name it after my second son, Felix, who was named after our team member Felicity in 2022. Felix originates from the Latin adjective for happy (or lucky) [14] – and so we have A Happy Method.
Resources
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/about/index.html
[2] https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/543.html
[3] https://revealnews.org/article/female-inmates-sterilized-in-california-prisons-without-approval/
[4] https://www.history.com/articles/the-infamous-40-year-tuskegee-study
[5] Saini, Angela. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Beacon Press, 2019.
[6] Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation On Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday, 2006.
[7] Skloot, Rebecca, 1972-. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York :Random House Audio, 2010.
[8] Davenport, C.B., & Steggerda, M. (1929). Race crossing in Jamaica. Carnegie Institution of Washington.
[9] Okbay et al. Genome-wide association study identifies 74 loci associated with educational attainment. Nature. 2016 May 26;533(7604):539-42. doi: 10.1038/nature17671. Epub 2016 May 11. PMID: 27225129; PMCID: PMC4883595.
[10] https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/educational-resources/fact-sheets/human-genome-project
[11] https://humanpangenome.org/
[12] https://substack.com/home/post/p-161606677
[13] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.06.12.598649v1.full