The worst bioethics scandal of the 21st century (to date)
We may have to wait until its own official independent report in June to know for sure whether the American Psychological Association really did collude with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Bush administration to put together a systematic program of torture. But the evidence so far is certainly, ah, suggestive.
It comes most recently from a report by folks Allie Conti at Vice calls “rogue psychologists and mental health experts.” (Peculiar word choice here, “rogue.” These are scientific and medical professionals deeply opposed to torture and any participation in it by scientific and medical professionals.)
The report details emails exchanged between APA officials and the CIA between 2003 and 2006. They show, John Bohannon says at Science Insider, that “The world’s largest professional organization for psychologists has maintained a surprisingly cozy relationship with the defense and intelligence community.”
A side note on torture basics
Torture is morally wrong, forbidden by law in several places, and against the Geneva Convention.
The science shows that torture is also worthless as a method for extracting information. People will say anything under torture, and do.
So the bottom line is that besides being vicious and an offense against humanity, torture is also a really really stupid waste of time, energy, and money.
Yet a baffling dogged belief in its utility persists. I explored all this in a post here at On Science Blogs last December when the Senate Intelligence Committee released its damning report on the CIA torture program. So I won’t summarize the evidence further here.
More on those emails
Bohannon says the report and the emails, dug up by New York Times reporter James Risen, appear to contradict the APA’s previous assertions about its relationship with the CIA and the Bush administration. They were provided to Bohannon by Nathaniel Raymond, a human rights researcher at Harvard University. He told Bohannon in an email: “The APA’s complicity in adapting its ethics to countenance psychologist involvement in researching and monitoring torture is the worst bioethics scandal of the 21st Century to date.”
At Mind Hacks, Vaughan Bell is not so even-handed as Bohannon. The emails, Bell says, reveal that “the US security agencies have been handing out key contracts to high profile psychologists on the basis of shared political sympathies rather than sound scientific evidence. The result has been a series of largely ineffective white elephant security projects that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The Times published the report to accompany Risen’s piece. Most recent blogging seems to be based on Risen’s piece, but The Guardian’s post by Raya Jalabi also links to a PDF of the report and contains a lot of detail from it.
Hubble’s 25th birthday photo shows Westerlund 2, a giant young cluster of about 3000 stars. You can fly through the image to the cluster in 40 seconds at EarthSky.
http://earthsky.org/space/fly-through-hubbles-25th-anniversary-image
The Hubble at 25: a hero’s journey
Begun in expectation of lofty accomplishment, brought low by miscalculation and shame, then cleverly mending the mistake and finding ways around the obstacles, going on to accomplish so much more than had been imagined. That’s the classic hero’s tale, a mainstay narrative for the human psyche. And it’s the true story of a most magnificent human achievement, the Hubble Space Telescope.
The On Science Blogs planned celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 25th birthday a couple weeks ago got postponed because of happenings here on Earth, like the Nepal earthquake and human-caused earthquakes here in the US. So here, a belated birthday tribute to a pretty spectacular success story for Homo sap.
When the Hubble was launched in 1990, its scientists were horror-struck to find that human error had made the telescope nearly blind, yielding only fuzzy views of the universe. More painful still, the mistake was revealed to the whole world at one of those disastrous backfiring press conferences that NASA manages to generate every so often. This one was worse, much worse, even than the revelation of the “arsenic bacteria” of 2010-11. Ian Sample recounts the the Hubble’s horrible but ultimately happy history at the Guardian, and so does Corey Powell at Discover’s Out There. It took astronauts 5 separate Space Shuttle missions to fix the Hubble, but in 1993, they did it.
Photographing the Universe in the future
The Hubble has taken more than a million images. The New York Times has put together a glorious selection, annotated by astronomers. There’s a selection of quite different Hubble images in the slide show at SciAm. Editor Lee Billings calls them “far more humble” than the usual, but together they led to key discoveries about the universe.
Surely the most famous Hubble image is the one called the Pillars of Creation. Joseph Stromberg and Joss Fong have annotated and explained the image at Vox.
The pillars of creation. Credit NASA and European Space Agency
The Hubble will be dead soon. With the Space Shuttle gone it can no longer be repaired. In a few years it will shatter into blistered fragments in the Earth’s atmosphere as it plunges into the ocean.
The Hubble’s successor, much touted, is the James Webb Space Telescope, supposed to look even farther–and further–back toward the Big Bang. Now planned to launch in 2018, it is years behind schedule and of course billions over budget. Hank Campbell’s gloomy assessment is at Science 2.0. Campbell says the Webb is only 75% complete, the easiest 75%. It should, he argues, have been cancelled years ago and the money put to better use.
We can hope, I guess, that the Webb will turn out well after all. That it will become another hero’s tale, another rousing narrative of adversity overcome, a Hubble-like tribute to human accomplishment. But it doesn’t sound promising, does it?
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