The Good, The Bad, and the Scientists Who Don't Know the Difference

     One of the things I’ve been giving a bit of thought to, as I begin to contemplate retiring and not doing the stuff that I’ve been doing for the last few decades, is the biggest gap in my own education. I take no responsibility at all for the gap, for it is totally not my fault: I am the victim of a good science education that gave me no moral education. Like other scientifically-trained scholars, moral arguments intimidate me, I don’t know how to construct them and I don’t know how to evaluate them. I just know, like other scientists, that I’m good and I'm right and that you are a fucking asshole for doubting it.

    Looking back on the beginning of my career, which is what one does at this stage, I realize that there were three things I was most concerned with thirty years ago, aside from my actual lab research. These were questions involving:

(1) Racist science  

(2) Dishonest science

and

(3) Colonial science

    In retrospect, all three of these were linked by the moral question in science. Right and wrong, good and evil.  But having no background in philosophy or theology, I lacked the intellectual framework to understand my own interests, much less any vocabulary with which to describe them. The point is that scientists are expected to develop into moral beings without any education in it, which seems opposed to the rest of both education and the history of our species.

    Yet the public positions I adopted early in my career, which made me a dangerous radical to the older farts in physical anthropology, aren’t so radical any more, at least within contemporary biological anthropology. But some of our colleagues in cognate fields are a bit behind us, and it can be very frustrating to argue about basic moral issues with biologists, who have as little training in the subject as I do. Many of them, after all, spend their lives torturing vermin like fruit flies in order to unravel the mysteries of life. Is it worth it? Sure, ok, yeah, torment the damn flies for the good of science. 

    Back in 1871, John Murray in London published a very important two-volume work on human ancestry. The intellectual times and context were important. There was an important question out there, being debated by first-generation evolutionary biologists.  The Bible clearly states that Adam and Eve were placed in a garden, to till the field. Where, then, did hunter-gatherers come from? Were modern foragers degenerate descendants of the biblical horticulturists? Or were the foragers primordial, and the biblical story simply wrong?

    That question had been definitively answered by Darwin’s neighbor, John Lubbock, in his Pre-Historic Times (1865). Those times had been times of foraging, and they preceded agricultural times.  But that raised a second question: What of the living hunter-gatherers? What’s the matter with them? Why are they even there? The first Darwinian answer to that question came from the German Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, in 1868. To Haeckel, the difference between the “savage” and the European was zoological. They were different species altogether.  In fact, Haeckel argued, savages should not even be classified with people; they should be classified with apes. But don’t take my word for it. Here's the English translation of 1876.

If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.

Lovely guy, Haeckel. And a great Darwinian. A credit to his field. Remember that line when you admire his artwork. Now his explanation for the existence of savages has a lot of biopolitical implications, which we need not dwell on here. Suffice it to say that it was not regarded as a very satisfactory answer in much of the rest of the scholarly community. 

    The next year, 1869, another first-generation Darwinian took a crack at the question: Why were there still savages?  Alfred Russel Wallace acknowledged that savages were smart. In fact, he reasoned, they were too smart. The savage has a brain as large and powerful as that of an Englishman, reasoned Wallace, but the savage doesn’t need it. It doesn’t take much brains to be a savage. And yet the savage has a brain. Moreover, most of human prehistory involved brainy savages, who evolved by natural selection. And yet, natural selection can’t make an organ that the body doesn’t use. So if apes evolved into savages, that process must have involved the acquisition of a big brain that natural selection couldn’t make because the savages don’t need or use it. 

    So if natural selection didn’t produce the big powerful brain that separates savages from apes (and allies them with Europeans, contra Haeckel) then what did produce that big unused brain?

The brain of pre- historic and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power, distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.

You know what produced it. And Who. It was a miracle. From God.

    Charles Darwin wrote to him, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”

    So by 1870 the Darwinians were batting 0 for 2 in trying to explain the evolutionary relationship between savages and civilized people. Which brings us up to 1871 again, and the publication by John Murray of that very important two-volume work on human ancestry. Of course the author was Edward B. Tylor and the book was Primitive Culture.

    What Tylor did in Primitive Culture (1871) was to give yet a third explanation for the difference between the savage and civilized person. It was not a distinction of biological evolution, as Haeckel had it in 1868. Nor was it a distinction of supernatural evolution, as Wallace had it in 1869. Nope, in 1871 it was a distinction of cultural evolution. That was the correct, and ultimately paradigmatic, answer.

    Also, Darwin published The Descent of Man that year. And sadly, it doesn’t stand up much better under a modern reading than Tylor’s Primitive Culture does. They’re both quaint, insightful, and important in their time and place, and dated now. But what makes them all of those things? Graduate students should definitely try to find out with careful, critical readings.

    And that brings me to the direct inspiration for this rant. A few weeks ago, Agustín Fuentes, with whom I agree on the great majority of things I hold a professional opinion about, published an editorial in Science. Science is the leading scientific journal in America, and a guest editorial in it is way up high on the prestige scale. You can bet they vetted the essay pretty carefully. And they published it with some of Fuentes's pretty uncontroversial assessments, like these.

“Descent” is often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious. Darwin thought he was relying on data, objectivity, and scientific thinking in describing human evolutionary outcomes. But for much of the book, he was not. “Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity....

Today, students are taught Darwin as the “father of evolutionary theory,” a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience.

No book on any science from 1871 stands up scientifically today. If you read a science book from 1871 you are probably reading it because someone told you it was important, and maybe it was. But you will have to probe to find what identifies it as a classic, and while you get there, you will struggle through the intellectual primitiveness of the work itself. And it will hopefully be a rewarding exercise, and then you can go back to reading the pdfs on line of the articles that aren’t even published yet in your favorite journals.

    Alas, there are some scientists out there who don’t countenance any critical reading of Darwin. Any criticism of Darwin is fodder for creationists, and therefore he must be defended at all costs. Which is pretty much what the Darwinian All-Stars managed to splutter out in their angry letter to the editor. 

    But first, let's go over the Darwinian All-Stars lineup. Leading off? Psychologist Andrew Whiten. Second, Walter Bodmer. That's right, Sir Walter Fucking Bodmer. Third, the geneticists: Brian and Deborah Charlesworth and Jerry Coyne. Next, psychologist Frans de Waal. And then six more of them, because, one supposes, something about group selection. And what is their top complaint?

We fear that Fuentes’ vituperative exposition will encourage a spectrum of anti-evolution voices... 

    Now if you bothered to read Fuentes's essay (and here's the link again), you may be puzzled by their use of the adjective "vituperative". Let's just assume for the sake of parsimony that they don't know what the word means.

    So anything that we perceive as critical of Darwin must be suppressed, because it may aid the creationists. That is about the most pathetic admission of abject failure on the part of science educators that I have ever encountered. These scientists have been so unsuccessful in convincing the American public we evolved from apes, that they are going to respond by placing Darwin on a pedestal and reading his 19^th century sexist and colonialist views uncritically. Good lord, could they possibly sound more like a cult?

    Without belaboring the essay or the response, I want to shift back to the general moral question in science. I’m expending a little bit of mental energy here pondering what appears to be scientists trying to shield students from confronting sexism, racism, and colonialism in scientific literature. That is an amazing corner to paint yourself into, rather like being anti-antifa, which would seem to be the equivalent of pro-fascist. 

    But to return to the moral question. While Darwin was rewriting the Journal of Researches (aka The Voyage of the Beagle) there was a lot going on politically, and the 1845 second edition contains a digression about how slavery really and truly sucks: 

if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.

And folks have from time to time, trotted out that passage to show what a socially concerned and morally advanced fellow Darwin was.

    But let’s look a bit more closely at that thought. I think we would agree with Darwin (and even with his imaginary interlocutors, who are trivializing slavery by comparing it to mere poverty) that if the misery of the poor is due to our institutions, then great is our sin. But let’s turn the thought around. Suppose the misery of the poor is indeed actually due to the laws of nature. Then what? Fuck them and their misery, because at least we haven’t sinned?

    Darwin’s moral thinking here isn’t very moral at all. It’s weirdly amoral. The point Darwin is making is that slavery is much worse than mere poverty, no matter how much some people may try to equate them. Fair enough. But isn't there a problem with poverty too? The proper reaction to the misery of the poor is to work to alleviate it, not to try and figure out who to blame for it. Darwin is less concerned with the suffering and misery of the poor than he is about the cleanliness of his own soul, and perhaps that of his entire economic class (“our”).  And here is the moral problem for future generations: If the issue is who caused the misery, not how do we alleviate the misery, then that places a scientific premium on showing that at least you aren’t the cause of that misery.

    Which is why Charles Davenport blamed genes, C. C. Brigham blamed IQ scores, and Charles Murray blames them both. The important thing is to somehow blame the misery of the poor on “the laws of nature,” rather than on “our institutions”. For then, not only is “our” social class blameless, but we have used science to answer the unthreatening question we posed, yet actually done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the poor, regardless of why the fuck it’s there.

    The suffering is the problem, its etiology is secondary.

    That is a moral statement, however, and I don’t know how to defend it. Which is why I’m angry at my scientific education. And from the look of things, at a lot of other people’s scientific education as well.

    But this is funny. What had gotten me interested in scientific fraud was the DNA hybridization work of Sibley and Ahlquist back in the 1980s. Sibley is long dead, but Jon Ahlquist only expired recently, and his passing was noted ruefully by the creationists. You see, after a career falsifying data and committing scientific sins, it seems as though Ahlquist gave his life to Jesus, to absolve himself and atone for them.

    Well, that was convenient.

Aretha Franklin, John McCain, Luca Cavalli-Sforza. They always go in threes.

I love Aretha. Got nothing to say about her.

John McCain I’m a little sick of. He was definitely a “flawed human” and will be remembered primarily for his flaws, which is probably better than being remembered for his political ideologies and for his complicity in producing the present political situation. He’s probably really only a great statesman in nostalgic comparison to the current administration.

Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza raises a similar question about the relative value of the flaws that compose our overall assessment of the scientist.  On this side of the ledger, a brilliant population geneticist who literally wrote the book on the subject.  Yup, even once signed my copy of Cavalli-Sforza and Bodmer.

And on that side of the ledger, a scientist who felt that ethics were obstacles, and maintained that the interests of the people whose blood he craved were anti-science, and thus irrelevant.

Gregor Mendel with just a dash of Mengele. (Godwin’s Law is notoriously hard to transcend in conversations about bioethics, isn’t it?)  But I suppose that’s the big question: How much pollution, and of what sort,  does it take to go from “flawed human” to “flaw in a human form”?

How does Cavalli’s bioethics flaw stack up against Paul Kammerer’s data falsification or Francisco Ayala’s sexual harassment? Discuss amongst yourselves.  

There was also that little problem of Cavalli's insistence that "race doesn't exist" while simultaneously reifying it by color-coding the indigenous inhabitants of the continents.  Same intellectual flaw as Linnaeus, but higher tech.

In the meantime, here is a review I wrote of a flawed biography of Cavalli a few years ago.  It originally appeared in  the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12:1001-1002 (2006).

Stone, Linda & Paul F. Lurquin. A genetic

and cultural odyssey: the life and work of L. Luca

Cavalli-Sforza. xxi, 227 pp., maps, figs, illus.,

bibliogr. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2005.

£29.50 (cloth)

   This book attempts an intellectual biography

of the renowned and controversial Stanford

geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza. There had been

many earlier attempts to use genetic data to

study human microevolution, with varying

degrees of success (see, e.g., Man 28: 153 and

28: 171, 1928); many attempts to model cultural

evolution; many retrievals of blood samples as

objects from the field; and certainly many

attempts to identify ethnohistoric events in

genetic patterns. This book, however, never

actually tells us what made Cavalli’s work

necessarily better; it unfortunately has little

interest in situating Cavalli’s work within the

history of human genetics, or of genetic-based

anthropology.

   In the 1960s Cavalli-Sforza began to study the

genetics of African pygmies, probably inspired

by James Neel’s work on Amazonians. His early

work involved applying multivariate statistical

techniques to genetic data from human

populations to see who was more closely related

to whom (assuming that genetic distance was

proportional to time since splitting; that splitting

was all that populations did; and that culturally

defined human groups could unproblematically

be considered as natural taxa); later he began to

model the transmission of ideas from person to

person (assuming they stay reasonably intact

and do not mean different things to different

people in different contexts); and finally he

dreamed up a big science project for human

population genetics – the Human Genome

Diversity Project (HGDP) – which ultimately

failed for its insufficient attention to issues in the

relevant cognate fields, notably anthropology

and bioethics.

   Cavalli-Sforza has been a grand dilettante,

in all the senses of that word, over his entire

professional life. He visits Central Africa as an

explorer and studies its pygmies as a geneticist,

not as an anthropologist. He reconstructs the

Neolithic as an antiquarian, not as an

archaeologist. He models cultural processes as a

statistician, not as an ethnologist. In all of these

cases, Cavalli’s work has been high-profile but

low-impact in anthropology. Does this require

an explanation, or is it simply to be expected,

like the work of a spectrum of anthropological

dilettantes, from Sir Grafton Elliot Smith through

Thor Heyerdahl, Robert Ardrey, and Erich von

Däniken, and right on up to Richard Dawkins

and Jared Diamond?

   Consistently opposing scientific racism,

Cavalli-Sforza has nevertheless never quite

understood the fundamental issues that

ultimately undid his HGDP and which have

recently been admirably analysed by Jenny

Reardon in Race to the finish (2005). He still

regrets his opponents’ politicizing the scientific

project – as if the programme to take, store, and

study the blood of 700 groups of native peoples

(which needs to be done before they go extinct,

he constantly reminded us) did not constitute an

overtly political act.

   Significantly, no great burst of insights or

discoveries have followed Cavalli-Sforza’s work in

anthropology, as it followed, say, the physicists’

early forays into molecular genetics. If we are to

believe the authors, the explanation lies in

American anthropology’s recent infatuation with

postmodernism, and its stand against science. In

lieu of a relevant citation, they provide an

anecdote: at the American Anthropological

Association meetings in New Orleans a few years

ago, a sharp spike in submissions led to an

unprecedented rejection rate of sessions and

abstracts. The authors of some of the rejected

papers decided (rather unscientifically) that this

was an expression of the well-known (or

perhaps widely imagined) hostility of American

anthropology to science, and stormed off to

found their own society and have their own

meeting. But I was there, and that episode

was never about ‘science’ at all; it was about

power and paranoia and too many submitted

abstracts.

   In fact, I have always thought that the root

of Cavalli-Sforza’s failure to connect with the

broader anthropological community is simply

that most anthropologists simply do not know

how seriously to take research that can contrast

the DNA of 64 samples of ‘Chinese ... living in

the San Francisco Bay Area’, 94 samples from

‘two groups of African pygmies’, and 110

samples from ‘individuals of European origin

from ongoing studies in our laboratories or

reported in the literature’, and conclude

sweepingly that ‘ancestral Europeans are

estimated to be an admixture of 65% ancestral

Chinese and 35% ancestral Africans’ (Proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 88:

839, 1991). However sophisticated the statistics,

they simply cannot transcend the limitations of

unsophisticated epistemologies.

   More of a testimonial than a critical

intellectual biography, then, the book resists

engaging with anyone who has had anything

critical to say about any aspect of Cavalli-Sforza’s

oeuvre: Robert Sokal, for example, who

contradicted Cavalli’s interpretation of European

prehistory; Rebecca Cann, whose genetic data

suggested a very different global prehistory than

Cavalli’s; Debra Harry, an American Indian

activist who contradicted the promises and

predictions of Cavalli’s HGDP; Bryan Sykes, who

contradicted Cavalli’s ‘wave of advance’ model;

Masatoshi Nei, who applied a different statistical

technique than Cavalli to global allele

frequencies and got a different phylogenetic tree

and different branching dates; Ranajit

Chakraborty, who raised questions early on

about the HGDP’s navigation of a cultural and

political minefield in the large-scale collection of

native blood, and was quickly dropped from its

inner circle; or the numerous archaeologists

(pace Lord Renfrew) who have been critical of

Cavalli’s work on the spread of agriculture, and

the tenuous relationship between cryptic genetic

patterns and ethnohistory.

   Very oddly, the influential Harvard geneticist

Richard Lewontin’s famous 1972 ‘apportionment

of human diversity’ is even assigned to Cavalli,

and Lewontin himself becomes just ‘another

researcher (who confirmed Cavalli’s observation)

[and] did make a big deal out of this finding six

years later’ (p. 196). The only sense I can make

of the statement is that it may result from

Lewontin’s recently televised comment, ‘If I were

a South American Indian, I wouldn’t have let

them take my blood’ (www.pbs.org/race),

which may have put him in the ‘enemy camp’, if

one sees the community of science in a

sufficiently Manichaean fashion.

   All of which is not to say that Cavalli-Sforza

does not deserve the testimonial; only that this

biography seems to replicate the very criticism

that one could reasonably level at the

anthropological corpus of its subject: an

uncritical and cavalier approach to history, a lot

of bluster, and rather too little reflection.

Jonathan Marks University of North Carolina

at Charlotte

Rest in Peace, Luca Cavalli-Sforza. 

Seriously, please don't rise from the grave and become the vampire geneticist that the Musée de l'Homme warned us about a few years ago, because unfortunately you were precisely the one they had in mind.

The Empire Strikes Back

Some of you older folks may remember the case in which geneticist Therese Markow (then of Arizona State, now of UC-San Diego) bled a Native American tribe on the promise of studying diabetes, and then piggybacked some research on schizophrenia and population structure and history onto that promise; except that she didn't tell them about it and they didn't consent to it.  This had been "situation normal" in the field for decades, but in the wake of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA, born 1990) and the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP, died 1996), it is no longer acceptable practice.

The Havasupai case helped to reframe the relationship between scientists and Native peoples, which had been tested by the HGDP, and which had relied for decades on the assumption that there was a gentleman's agreement between the geneticist and the tribe, and that the geneticist could say anything to get the genetic samples from the tribe, and after it was out of their bodies, it was the property of the scientist, who could then do pretty much anything with it, including research that the tribe had not agreed to, and trading samples to other labs for other research.  But no more.  

In April 2010, the lawsuit brought by the Havasupai against Markow's institution was settled out of court, and the tribe, the university, and the bioethics community were all satisfied with the results.  I wrote it up for Anthropology Today shortly afterwards.

Now that we have blown up the Death Star, however, the Empire is striking back.  Ricki Lewis, the author of a major textbook on human genetics, and thus with the potential to miseducate thousands of students in human genetics, now says that Teri Markow did not actually study schizophrenia, the investigation and report commissioned on behalf of ASU and the Havasupai was a smear job, and the charges against her were entirely false.

So we are compelled to revisit the case once more.  Think of Teri Markow as Alex Rodriguez, and yourself as Bud Selig.

Ricki Lewis carried out a literature search and discovered that Teri Markow never published on the genetics of Havasupai schizophrenia.  From this, she concludes that Markow never actually studied it.

Like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the narrative that the geneticist sought schizophrenia genes in Havasupai DNA became established fact with the repeating. Soon the accounts of the case began quoting and citing each other, as if the original documents that held the truth didn’t even exist.

The trail of original documents is actually rather interesting.  The most significant document is the one produced by Arizona State's investigation at the end of 2003, known as the Hart Report.  Ricki Lewis dismisses it, because she has additional secret information:   

I’ve got more background than went into the blog, and based on it, I wouldn’t trust the Hart report.

Be that as it may, the Hart report was based on extensive interviews and paper trails, and was as comprehensive as could be expected, to the satisfaction of both the Havasupai and the university.  It discusses lots of other original documents, such as consent forms.  In fact, it tells us that in an interview with Markow in 2003, "Markow had indicated, during the course of the interview, that she had lost or misplaced the file containing the informed consents from 1991 on ...".  The dog ate my consent forms.

Another original document is a story that appeared in Phoenix Magazine in 2008 by Jana Bommersbach, which says,

Markow maintains to this day that she had permission to test for things other than diabetes and that her “proof” is the consent forms signed by some of the Havasupai who donated blood. She insists the project had two focuses: diabetes and schizophrenia.

So in 2008, Markow was saying that schizophrenia had been a research focus of hers, and in 2013 she is saying that it wasn't?  Or more precisely, in 2013 Markow is enlisting a shill in the genetics blogosphere to deny that schizophrenia in the Havasupai had ever been a research focus of hers?

Further, the Hart Report says:

Dr. Markow was funded by NlMH and NARSAD to study the role of genetic factors in schizophrenia, a psychiatric disorder "which occurs at a significantly greater rate among the Havasupai (7%) than in any other population (1 %). Interestingly, all cases of schizophrenia occur in lineages tracing back to a single man (a shaman or medicine man) who lived in the 1880's."

NIMH is the National Institutes of Mental Health, not a cartoon.   NARSAD is the National Alliance for the Research of Schizophrenia and Depression, now called the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation.  In other words, among the original documents are funded grant proposals for research on schizophrenia.

The NARSAD grant for 1990-1991 was a big one, but unfortunately, the dog ate that, too.  According to the Hart report,

Information was hard to obtain on this grant. It is our understanding that it was funded in the amount of $92,880.00 and provided funds for the blood collection, processing and analysis that led to the genetics studies undertaken at Arizona State University (and elsewhere)....

Dr. Markow submitted the letter of intent for this grant, which requested funds to "initiate a major research program on the etiology of schizophrenia in a unique patient population in Arizona," the Havasupai. ... She proposed conducting the research in two stages. The first stage was to involve the collection of data, and it was for this stage that she was asking NARSAD, the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, for funding. She indicated that support for the second, more extensive stage would be sought from NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health. We have uncovered no evidence to establish that this letter of intent, or other documentation associated with this grant proposal, was presented to the Havasupai.

The NIMH grant was for "Genetic Analysis of the Dopamine Receptor Gene Family" and provided funding for Markow from 1992 through 1995.  The Hart report says,

the two primary goals of the project were, first, to determine the amount of genetic variation present in the dopamine receptor gene family in the Havasupai and, second, to statistically analyze the data to determine if any genetic variation was associated with the development of schizophrenia.

Unfortunately, the dog ate that grant proposal as well.  Teri Markow had a very hungry dog.

So what of this bizarre blog post by this textbook author?  The research didn't get very far, and didn't come up with anything publishable, which is why Ricki Lewis did not find any publications on it.  But how on earth can anyone claim that there was no research?  When she asks rhetorically, "Why did articles twist events to seem as if she had intended all along to study schizophrenia?" the obvious answer is that because Markow had indeed been interested in studying schizophrenia, and had received grants to do it.

So I pointed that out to Ricki Lewis, and she responded:  "just because you are funded from a certain source with a disease name in its title does not mean that you are or are intending to do research on that particular disease."   

Read that again, slowly.  A major science textbook author is telling human genetics students that they can apply for cancer funding from, say, the National Cancer Institute, and get it, while not actually having any interest in cancer or performing any research relevant to cancer.  I think she's wrong.  In fact, I think the National Cancer Institute would consider that fraudulent.

Teri Markow herself jumped in, but didn't say, "No, we did not study schizophrenia" - which was presumably the point under contention.  Instead, she said blah blah blah:

First of all, the consent forms speak for themselves with respect to the breadth of studies. However, without sufficient and appropriate genetic variants, association studies of any disease are not possible. The first step therefore, with our funding, was to seek genetic variability that could be useful in studies of disease. While we did not find sufficient variability with the techniques available at that time to perform association studies, we at least were able to provide people with feedback about their health status with respect to diabetes, because the test for this is simple. Had there been sufficient variability for stringent association studies for any disorder, we could have proceeded. 

However, even if there had been the requisite variability, stringent diagnostic testing for schizophrenia would require a major effort, including lengthy interviews, that never could have gone undetected by the participants. This fact, plus the fact that I have never published a paper on schizophrenia in the Havasupai, answer your question quite definitively.

This is from someone who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money to study the genetics of schizophrenia in the Havasupai, but came up with nothing publishable.  But whether they came up with anything publishable is not the issue, this issue was whether research was carried out on the topic, without the knowledge or consent of the Havasupai.  The latter clause has not been challenged; the Havasupai were not aware that their blood was being used for any studies other than diabetes.

Those of us of a certain age can remember the "non-denial denial" from Richard Nixon's office in the old days of Watergate. 

So I tried again: "What I am hearing is that Dr. Markow sought and received funding from an agency that focuses on schizophrenia, without any intention of actually studying schizophrenia, and ultimately performing no science related to that illness."  Neither Ricki Lewis nor Teri Markow responded to that.  I suspect that if Markow publicly agreed with it, she might be incriminating herself.

Teri Markow seems to have had little difficulty in obtaining research grants or faculty positions subsequent to the Havasupai case, and now studies Drosophila.  She is probably very nice, and I've never thought that she did anything worse than what was common practice at the time.  It was the common practice that was being challenged.

One of my favorite examples of that practice is from a puff piece that Time Magazine ran on the HGDP, in which Luca Cavalli-Sforza was trying to show himself off as a swashbuckler.  And as S. J. Perelman once said, no man ever buckled a better swash.

On one occasion, when Cavalli-Sforza was taking blood from schoolchildren in a rural region of the Central African Republic, he was confronted by an angry farmer brandishing an ax.  Recalls the scientist, “I remember him saying, ‘If you take the blood of the children, I’ll take yours.’ He was worried that we might want to do some magic with the blood."  (Time Magazine, 16 January 1995)

When people come after you with an ax, that is usually a clue that you have not received their voluntary informed consent.  That is why there is no HGDP anymore, and why Teri Markow now works on flies.

Bioethics serves to make scientists responsible social actors, especially if they don't want to be responsible social actors.  Time was, that a scientist could do anything they wanted to anyone they wanted, for any reason they wanted.  Now they can't.  The lesson we learned around the middle of the last century is that the progress of science is great, but when it bumps up against human rights, human rights wins, hands down.  That's a good lesson for genetics students to learn. 

And what is the author/blogger Ricki Lewis's stake in all this?  Why bother to revisit a dead issue, and mount such a preposterous defense of Markow's work?  Maybe she's one of those people still fighting the Science Wars, who thinks that bioethics is just a set of obstacles to scientific research.  She does seem to hold some unusual views about science: "Science has nothing to do with belief, it is about data and evidence."  Actually, science has a lot to do with belief; for example, if you believe that you can do science on people without their consent, then you don't get to do the science.