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"An investigation of some of the most contentious debates of our time, Galileo's Middle Finger describes Alice Dreger's experiences on the front lines of scientific controversy, where for two decades she has worked as an advocate for victims of unethical research while also defending the right of scientists to pursue challenging research into human identities. Dreger's own attempts to reconcile academic freedom with the pursuit of justice grew out of her research into the treatment of people born intersex (formerly called hermaphrodites). The shocking history of surgical mutilation and ethical abuses conducted in the name of "normalizing" intersex children moved her to become a patient rights' activist. By bringing evidence to physicians and the public, she helped change the medical system. But even as she worked to correct these injustices, Dreger began to witness how some fellow liberal activists, motivated by identity politics, were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed inconvenient truths. Troubled, she traveled around the country digging up sources and interviewing the targets of these politically motivated campaigns. Among the subjects she covers in the book are the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, falsely accused in a bestselling book of committing genocide against a South American tribe; the psychologist Michael Bailey, accused of abusing transgender women; and the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, accused of fomenting rightwing ideas about human nature. Galileo's Middle Finger describes Dreger's long and harrowing journey back and forth between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice warriors and researchers determined to put truth before politics"--… (more)
Media reviews
The easy (and correct) answer is that it’s incredibly difficult. Dreger ends by noting that we usually get it right —
“We are almost always too late,” Dreger writes. “We can bear witness afterward, of course. And witnessing matters. But so many days, I find myself selfishly wishing that witnessing felt like enough.”
Dreger’s lament aside, I suspect most readers will find that her witnessing of these wild skirmishes provides a splendidly entertaining education in ethics, activism and science.
User reviews
Then she spends a while defending a Northwestern professor’s research on transgender women; he came under fire for (1) saying some dumb things and allowing a really dumb, exploitative cover for his book, and (2) maintaining that one category of transgender women identifies as such because they receive sexual pleasure from understanding/imagining themselves as women. If that’s where the science takes you, she says, then you have to say that, even if it risks feeding into a narrative of sexual deviance against which transgender people are quite rightly fighting. She cuts him a lot of slack for being well-meaning in the dumb things he said, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not okay to sleep with the subjects of your books unless (at the very minimum) you disclose that even if they aren’t in any way vulnerable to your power. (He refuses to say whether he slept with one of his subjects because he says it shouldn’t matter; this strikes me as bullshit, though it doesn’t invalidate all his research.)
Finally she recounts her experience on the other side—trying to halt a doctor’s use of an unapproved treatment on fetuses at risk of being intersex, which was designed to prevent girls from having externally male genitalia and also to prevent them from being lesbians. She finds that the institutions that are supposed to protect vulnerable patients aren’t doing their job, because the doctor is able to say she’s not doing “research,” even as she gets grants to research outcomes in these patients. It’s an engaging but crotchety book, and hard to take larger lessons from.
I also understood why the author would focus on issues relating to gender, sexuality, and identity; this is her field of study. I don't think this meant the story had to be as purely anecdotal as it was. I loved the author's enthusiasm for using science to find the truth and then build an ethical system based on the facts instead of nice, simplistic stories. I only wish I'd seen some of that here. For example, I'm very curious about the number of scientists experiencing personal attacks because of their work and how many of them are in different fields. For example, I would guess that scientists have been personally attacked for controversial research in genetic engineering (a topic I work on) as well. This wasn't a bad book, but in retrospect, I think the stock description did it an injustice. Had this been billed as a memoir about the author's science activism, I probably wouldn't have been disappointed when she failed to more generally address the interaction of science and activism. As long as you go into this with more accurate expectations, it's a book I'd recommend.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.
I very much wish the majority of my fellow citizens would read this book.