Category Archives: Quick Thoughts

When I was in college, a friend told me something that sounded too good to be true: I could get paid forty dollars for a blood test. And if I didn’t have a history of a certain symptom, they would pay me forty dollars every month for the next two years in exchange for more blood tests. They were in the last year of signing up subjects for a clinical trial (something I’d read about in my biochemistry classes) on a common, as-of-yet uncured disease for which a bigger pharmaceutical company had developed a vaccine. There were no abnormal reactions worse than those of a flu shot, and I might get the placebo, making the whole thing even more of a walk in the park. The first nurse I talked to assured me that during the trial, anyone contracting the disease would receive immediate and free treatment for as long as it was required, even if they had been on the placebo.

If the above sounds like your dream job, you can be a guinea pig, joining the ranks of many familiar faces from Western popular culture. Medical test subject was the entry-level occupation in the first version of The Sims, and is featured a few times on the Simpsons. When Bart gets expelled, he imagines a future testing dangerous food additives; the “2-4-dexoxypropaniramine” in Nature’s Goodness, a new diet soft drink, mutates him into a hulking beast (whereupon the lead scientist remarks “pleasing taste, slight monsterism”). In a different episode, Homer signs up to be a guinea pig at the “Screaming Monkey Research Lab” where he goes blind from a diet pill.

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You may notice that this article appears in a new section called “quick thoughts.” The aim of this section is to raise an issue for comment in more detail than the weekly roundup does, but in a more succinct format than our longer 1000 word posts. We hope that this section will turn the spotlight onto those that choose to comment, rather than the author of the post.

There has been a lot of talk around my department about curriculum changes, and it has me thinking about the ideal HPS curriculum. I surfed around the web a bit looking at various departmental websites. My program, as well as some others, seems to be oriented towards science undergrads who have decided to enter the humanities. The more recent entering classes in my program have not fit this description, as it seems more and more students are coming from the humanities instead of the sciences. Science, no matter what the field, takes an immense amount of time to learn. It seems that there are not as many accommodations made for the humanities student wanting to learn science as there are for the science student wanting to enter the humanities – there is just not a push to train humanities students in the sciences. Where is a humanities graduate student going to get the time to train him or herself in science? This seems to be a problem with the HPS curriculum.

From what I hear this problem is endemic in history and philosophy of science. We all want to know more science and math; yet, we also want to graduate without taking on more debt than is necessary. Maybe I am just blowing the whole thing out of proportion. However, I bet those of us who enter the field from the humanities rather than the sciences feel more constrained within the field.

I hear about this problem in different fields of study as well. At the Canadian Science Policy Conference that I recently attended, many speakers pointed out the need for government representatives to have a knowledge of how science works. At the Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a researcher’s survey data demonstrated that the most requested resource by public school science teachers in one Canadian province was not money or lab equipment, but rather “knowledge of science.” I am sure this problem also appears for those looking to work at the intersection between science and business, policy, or communications. It feels as if those in HPS need to be full time science students in addition to being full time humanities students. In a way there are obvious answers to this problem for the humanities grad student: either learn the material as you complete your degree, or take time off for intensive study and return to your degree later. But both of these options are easier said than done, especially if one is trying to avoid student debt.

Have any of our readers successfully navigated this problem and have advice? Are there programs that could help a humanities student further embrace his/her love of science and math? Should one just let these topics pass him/her by and concentrate on problems of a non-technical nature? Or should HPS departments be more attune to this desire?