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    Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
    Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
    Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
    Audiobook10 hours

    Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

    Written by Alice Dreger

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    A powerful defense of intellectual freedom told through the ordeals of contemporary scientists attacked for exploring controversial ideas, by a noted science historian and medical activist

    An investigation of some of the most contentious debates of our time, Galileo's Middle Finger describes Alice Dreger's experiences on the front lines of scientific controversy, where for two decades she has worked as an advocate for victims of unethical research while also defending the right of scientists to pursue challenging research into human identities.

    Dreger's own attempts to reconcile academic freedom with the pursuit of justice grew out of her research into the treatment of people born intersex (formerly called hermaphrodites). The shocking history of surgical mutilation and ethical abuses conducted in the name of “normalizing” intersex children moved her to become a patient rights' activist. By bringing evidence to physicians and the public, she helped change the medical system.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAscent Audio
    Release dateApr 1, 2015
    ISBN9781469061481
    Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

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    Reviews for Galileo's Middle Finger

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    • 5/5
      Ethics in science. What a concept. Factual research is ........ helpful.I very much wish the majority of my fellow citizens would read this book.
    • 4/5
      Kind of an odd book. Learned a lot of interesting stuff. She tries to be fair to those she criticizes but I'm not always convinced. I mostly liked her writing but periodically there would be a clumsy cliche that bugged me ("Hello!"). But the basic issue she talks about is really important: what happens when a quest for truth collides with a quest for justice.
    • 5/5
      this provocative and refreshing book presents the very important problem of politically progressive activists challenging and even bullying scientists whose findings are unwelcome. Dreger is the perfect author since she has a background as an activist (fighting for rights of intersex infants and their families) and also as a critic of activists ( attacking a scientist who found that some trans women were motivated by sexual arousal at the idea of themselves as women, not because they feel "trapped in the wrong body"). Dreger has a delightful prose style, as well. A book club with this book would be truly important and also difficult.
    • 4/5
      As someone who works in academia and sometimes sees the kind of controversies discussed in this book from afar, Alice Dreger's work to pin down the truth is like a breath of fresh air. She's absolutely right that research which touches on sex, identity, and speaking for marginalized groups can become fraught with emotions and theories which have little to do with scientific evidence. It's also a lesson important for the world we live in today, with an internet ecosystem that has little to do with facts and almost no patience for the hard work of investigating scientific processes. This is a book that really makes you think about science, truth, and what we know and don't know. It's a book I hope more people read and think about deeply.
    • 3/5
      Interesting, for sure, but after a while it just started to feel endless.
    • 4/5
      What is the role of the committed researcher who studies controversial topics or groups who’ve been historically oppressed? Dreger’s book, focusing on sexuality/gender, argues that the best course is always to tell the truth and be damned, and that social movements need to be more accepting of research as long as it is conducted in good faith and not doing harm to the subjects, even if they fear harm to the general cause. Dreger’s a sharp writer with a background in these controversies: she started out doing research on the historical treatment of intersex bodies, but became an activist when she found out that treatment of intersex babies was no better and often worse than it had been historically. She describes partial success in getting doctors to understand that, though there are certain conditions that require surgical intervention to improve health, cosmetic/gender-assigning surgery on young children--on the grounds that the alternative is social stigma--should be avoided. Then she spends a while defending a Northwestern professor’s research on transgender women; he came under fire for (1) saying some dumb things and allowing a really dumb, exploitative cover for his book, and (2) maintaining that one category of transgender women identifies as such because they receive sexual pleasure from understanding/imagining themselves as women. If that’s where the science takes you, she says, then you have to say that, even if it risks feeding into a narrative of sexual deviance against which transgender people are quite rightly fighting. She cuts him a lot of slack for being well-meaning in the dumb things he said, and I’m pretty sure that it’s not okay to sleep with the subjects of your books unless (at the very minimum) you disclose that even if they aren’t in any way vulnerable to your power. (He refuses to say whether he slept with one of his subjects because he says it shouldn’t matter; this strikes me as bullshit, though it doesn’t invalidate all his research.) Finally she recounts her experience on the other side—trying to halt a doctor’s use of an unapproved treatment on fetuses at risk of being intersex, which was designed to prevent girls from having externally male genitalia and also to prevent them from being lesbians. She finds that the institutions that are supposed to protect vulnerable patients aren’t doing their job, because the doctor is able to say she’s not doing “research,” even as she gets grants to research outcomes in these patients. It’s an engaging but crotchety book, and hard to take larger lessons from.
    • 3/5
      I thought this was a fascinating and well-written book, but it wasn't the book I had hoped for. The author starts with a story of medical abuse. She then briefly talks to several researchers who were attacked for their work and end with another story about medical abuse based on poor science. Neither the beginning nor the ending story were particularly interesting to me, because they seem so clear cut. There wasn't any question of what needed to be done to resolve the science and the activism. I do think these stories were very worthwhile. The way intersex children were and sometimes still are being treated is shocking and we must be aware of it in order to change it. And individual scientists who were targets of personal smear campaigns because of their work certainly deserve a platform from which to spread the true story.

      I also understood why the author would focus on issues relating to gender, sexuality, and identity; this is her field of study. I don't think this meant the story had to be as purely anecdotal as it was. I loved the author's enthusiasm for using science to find the truth and then build an ethical system based on the facts instead of nice, simplistic stories. I only wish I'd seen some of that here. For example, I'm very curious about the number of scientists experiencing personal attacks because of their work and how many of them are in different fields. For example, I would guess that scientists have been personally attacked for controversial research in genetic engineering (a topic I work on) as well. This wasn't a bad book, but in retrospect, I think the stock description did it an injustice. Had this been billed as a memoir about the author's science activism, I probably wouldn't have been disappointed when she failed to more generally address the interaction of science and activism. As long as you go into this with more accurate expectations, it's a book I'd recommend.This review was originally posted on Doing Dewey.