Harvard Finds a Cure

MITHRIDATES
So Eric Holder thinks we're a nation of cowards when it comes to race and George Bush doesn't care about Black puppets, but where do the rest of us stand? To find out I took one of Project Implicit's association tests. And like the vast majority of people who take the test I was found to have a preference for white people. Could it be true? After my liberal upbringing, living in a predominantly black neighborhood for several years, and voting for a black President? Hell, I even picked a black dog.

So are we all racists deep down? Maybe so. Who knows, really? But here are a few alternative explanations. Before I give anything away, take the test here. There are tons of them, but take the one on race. It's definitely worth doing.

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First explanation: The test takes the form of a game in which we try to sort black, white, good, and bad into the right categories. It takes some getting used to and, not surprisingly, I think I got a lot better at it after a few minutes of playing. The first time I played they gave me good/black and bad/white and I didn't do very well; the next time they gave me good/white and bad/black and I did better. They concluded that I was better at assigning good to white than good to black and that I have an implicit preference for white people.

But hold on a second. Maybe I'm not racist and just got better at the game. What if they gave everyone the test in the same order. Could they be that stupid? So I did the whole thing again and they gave them to me in the reverse order. They still concluded I had a preference, but only slight this time. At least they appear to be randomizing the order. This may lead to valid conclusions about the group, but not any one individual.

But it does raise an issue about the "cure" as described in wired.

After being trained to distinguish between similar black male faces, Caucasian test subjects showed greater racial tolerance on a test designed to to measure unconscious bias.

Hmmmm. Or maybe they just got better at the game like I did . . . Sounds a bit fishy.

Second explanation: The way I took the test was to think "black-good" and "white-bad" and sort as best I could. This reminded me of a speaker we had at my lefty-minded, New England prep school who told us about self-esteem among black kids by noting how the Thesaurus was filled with negative words related to "black" and positive words related to "white". As in black mark, Black Monday, black magic; and white knight, white wedding, whitewash. Or note the antonyms for "white" on thesaurus.com: black, dark, dirty.

This is a big problem with the researchers' conclusion. They take the synonyms of "black" — bleak, atrocious, horrible, sinister, nasty, foul, threatening — and test to see how good we are at associating them with "white". All our lives we've seen and heard negative associations with the word black and positive ones with the word white. It would only be natural for someone who didn't care one way or the other about black people or white people to perform the way most people did on the test. This could certainly be problematic for the self-esteem problem described above, but it certainly causes us to doubt the assumption of preference for white people over black people.

Third explanation: Well, let's just hope it's the first or second . . .

New Funding for NIH!

PHUTATORIUS
While conservatives continue to root through the stimulus bill in search of causes for outrage (can't they just watch MTV?), and while we're on the subject of funded research, it's worth noting that the Senate version of the bill proposes $6.5 billion in research grants through the National Institutes of Health.
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This is huge. NIH funding had petered out over the last decade, just when the potential economic and public health gains of having a vibrant, dynamic biotech industry were becoming more pronounced.

It's not wholly unreasonable to argue that someone other than the government could be funding scientific research, if the payoffs are so tangible and considerable. The thing is, many of the big breakthroughs come in basic, not applied, research, and they're a long time in coming. Companies aren't going to take on the expense of big, basic research labs. Universities will — and do. And as a result, we have biotechnology, we have Google — we have the dynamic that transformed our economy from the backdated manufacturing model of the late '70s to the thriving tech-savvy machine that powered us through the '90s and early Oughts (before bankers killed it dead).

On a list of What Makes America Great, funded research has to make the Top Five. I know that doesn't sit well with conservative orthodoxy: not only are we talking about government spending, but it goes to "university elites" who work on projects that may not promise an obvious, immediate payoff. But government grants are exactly the sort of "investment" that pays off in spades. And in the short term, with every single NIH grant creating or supporting seven jobs, and while hundreds of researchers sit on the sidelines with worthy projects delayed by nothing but lack of funding, a grants boost ought to be a no-brainer.

It's so easy to come down hard on Congress for its failings. Let's give a big cheer to the Senate for getting something right.

Embryonic Step Forward

MITHRIDATES
While we debate the merits of the stimulus package and which group of partisans is more partisan, let's not overlook certain obvious and clear benefits of replacing Bush with Obama. Under Bush, the U.S. government refused to fund embryonic stem cell research, "one of the world's most promising medical technologies," according to The Economist.
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Obama has yet to make this official, but word is out that an executive order lifting the ban is forthcoming. This is not only a no-brainer for the advancement of medical science, but for the long-term competitiveness of the United States — a topic which will be a focus of this blog (or at least this writer). As The Economist puts it, "American academics will no longer have to watch enviously from the sidelines as their colleagues in Australia, Britain, China, the Czech Republic, Israel, Singapore, and South Korea push ahead." The United States has been at the forefront of medical research for a century, and it must be a top priority of any American administration to maintain — and improve upon — this position.

Bush apologists will point out that the Administration only withheld funding and did not ban any research practices, that for that matter not all stem-cell research was subject to the funding ban, that embryonic stem cells pose risks, that stem-cell research is is unproven at this point, and that opening up funding for one type of research will no doubt reduce funding for others. All true, but let's acknowledge here that the best way to push science forward is to let scientists pursue the most promising paths forward without government getting in the way. Moreover, because the funding ban required researchers to compartmentalize all grant expenditures away from stem-cell research — for example, stem-cell researchers could not use devices or materials bought with grant money for other purposes — the restriction added a layer of bureaucracy that made even privately-funded stem-cell research a costly and burdensome proposition.

To be fair, one of John McCain's signature maverick positions was to oppose Bush on his ban, and Obama overstated the difference between his and McCain's positions. But who knows if a President McCain would have had to appease the Palin crowd on this one?

Anyway, we're still waiting for the order, but this is a step forward. Hopefully tough financial times will not cause the new President to balk in his stated support of science and that he'll recognize how critical maintaining our lead in scientific research is to our long-term competitiveness. There is no country in the world that can innovate the way America can — at least for now — but other countries are eager to catch up. As India, China, and others begin to develop better institutions of higher education and promote technology centers, the incentive for those countries' leading minds to stay home will grow. The United States must do everything it can to continue to attract the brightest scientists and innovators from around the world — it's the surest way to maintain our long-term scientific and economic leadership.

PHUTATORIUS
This is one of the great disasters of the Bush Administration. Not only did he cut off the funding by executive fiat — he subsequently vetoed a funding bill that had substantial bipartisan support.

(Remarkably, Bush defended his veto by stating that "Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical — and it is not the only option before us." This from the man who threw thousands of lives and billions of dollars behind the proposition of elective, preemptive war.)

There was talk that Obama might duck the issue and simply defer the matter to Congress, with the expectation that they could muster another bill like the one Bush vetoed. Let's hope he doesn't go that route. Bush invoked executive authority to turn off the funding faucet; Obama is at the very least empowered to turn it back on.