Nice Phenotype You Have There


      
    

Is scientific method a technique for screening out unconscious bias or a megaphone for amplifying it? Or, put another way, is the correct application of method a warrant for thinking we have avoided bias? Can the honest, sincere application of scientific procedures produce a result so comically absurd, so shockingly unscientific that it puts the entire notion of ‘method’ in doubt? This is the question that confronts me as I consider the case of the now notorious Italian study (https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(12)02127-9/fulltext?fbclid=IwAR1LA6s-8u4pK62llSGDZskE-l4VSV7xOdCR_XnnuYlyMxBDSKK-qVaHou4) which began (possibly sincerely) as an attempt to isolate the phenotypic features of women who suffer from endometriosis and ended up rating them against a control group on their slender figures and the attractiveness of their breasts. One of the authors of this study is a pre-eminent figure in the field and still defends his procedures and his results. In his mind, it seems, he raised an interesting and important scientific question and pursued it to a conclusion. What us ordinary mortals can see is that he produced an absurd travesty of research that was an exercise in objectifying and eroticizing the very women he was supposed to be helping. What if both these impressions are correct? David Hume held that it is the passions that are in the driver’s seat where humans are concerned and Nietzsche who added that they are extremely cunning in doing so; far more cunning than our conscious processes for shutting them out. Indeed they USE these processes themselves for furthering their aims. Is this a case in point? Ethical violations aside (none of the women involved in the study consented to participation in a beauty contest) can unconscious fantasy completely and successfully hijack science? Should we be worried if it can? I say this becasue this 'research' seems to have passed every mechanism of censorship we have. It passed through the internal censors that are supposed to govern rational, self-critical scientists. It passed an ethics review board whose very purpose is to stop scientists whose inner censors fail. It then passed peer review in an important journal! All of this, presumably was a function of patriarchy but patriarchy, at the end of the day, is a system for governing libidinal energy and libindinal energy here has subverted every mechanism civilization has erected to block its inconvenient discharge: a scientific study has turned into an erotic reverie on the beauty of white Italian women (the only ones in the study) for BOTH the male and female doctors involved in it.These are white Italian women in distress which seems to add further to their sexualization. The doctor is voyeur, seducer and hero all in one! It has been suggested to me that one lesson from this is that to lessen the frequency and impact of such irruptions we cannot rely on one 'method' for doing things canonized in textbooks and university classes. Such iterations of method will still be vulnerable to what ever implicit biases the researcher brings to their application. 'Method' cannot substitute for a genuine plurality of voices within our medical, scientific and scholalry communities.   

                 

                 

                 

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