CAN WE STILL RELY ON SCIENCE DONE BY SEXUAL HARASSERS?

Adam Rogers in Wired:

The scientific community has been contending with its own habitual harassers. (Amid the Weinstein scandal, the news section of the journal Science broke the story of field geologists in Antarctica alleging abuse by their boss. As the planetary scientist Carolyn Porco tweeted: Imagine the implications of an abuser and his target confined on a long-duration space mission.)

This isn’t like art. Science’s results and conclusions are nominally objective; failures in the humanity of the humans who found them aren’t supposed to have any bearing. Yet they do.

Nazi “research” turned out to be barely-disguised torture; it was easy to condemn the people who did it and consign to history the crappy outcomes they collected. The racist abuses of the Tuskegee experiments and consent problems with human radiation exposure experiments of the post-World War II era yielded data of questionable use, but led to reform, to rethinking the treatment of human scientific subjects.

But what about, for example, exoplanets? Geoff Marcy, a pre-eminent astronomer at UC Berkeley, pioneered techniques for finding planets outside Earth’s solar system. He also, it seems, sexually harassed students without repercussion for decades.

More here.