An account of the social biases in science, why they persist, and how scientists and the public can deal with them
The pediatrician Béla Schick (1877–1967) reported that in 1919 the roses he had given a maid wilted overnight because, she told him, she was menstruating. For decades afterward, researchers studied the “menotoxin” they believed was to blame. Ideas like this now look absurd, but Cailin O’Connor shows that science is still shaped by the beliefs of the people and cultures that produce it, especially where it touches on sex and gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, neurodiversity, parenting, and obesity. Walking through each stage of research, from choosing a question to communicating results, she draws on examples that include:
• a tenth-century Viking warrior’s grave at Birka, in Sweden, assumed for 128 years to hold a man until genetic analysis showed the skeleton was female
• the stone city of Great Zimbabwe, which European visitors credited to Phoenicians, Arabs, and others rather than to the Africans who built it
• skull measurements by Samuel Morton (1799–1851), which ranked races in an order that matched his era’s prejudices
• a study of stressed rat mothers that became a warning to human mothers about their cell phones
O’Connor does not argue that values can be purged from science; some are indispensable. Understanding how they work, she shows, is how science corrects itself, and how the rest of us can decide which findings to trust.
