American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship

Thursday, October 27th, 2022

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West, James Lee suggests:

It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies — especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior — no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviour recently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.

Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.

Comments

  1. Keynes says:

    The NIH structure is more than ripe for special interests. Willful poverty through indentured servitude is the easiest way to label the employment process. Expecting new hires to live on stipends. With a STEM degree that is worth 3 times more as a new hire in industry. Interesting to find out that aspiring scientists are being paid less that minimum wage to work “Prestige” positions and live in a crap hole like DC. Not even on the GS scale. So we can see that the NIH is a haven for trust fund kids and the kind of fool that thinks a NIH title is worth making 24k in one of the most expensive cities on Earth. A Liberal rookery in action

  2. Bob Sykes says:

    It’s not just the NIH. The entire US science establishment, schools, agencies, professional societies, and publications has succumbed to wokeism. All science is being heavily censored.

    The cancer starts in the school hiring and admission policies. At every college and university in the US, a candidate must sign an affidavit that they support progressive/woke policies, and they must provide evidence, including references, that they have done so in the past. It is pretty common for colleges of education to require affidavits from their students in order to graduate.

    Lysenkoism wrecked Soviet biology for a generation. It will be worse here, because all science (and mathematics) will be destroyed.

  3. Bomag says:

    What Bob Sykes said.

    It started slow and ramped up: mention in the intro that science should serve the public. Sure, nothing wrong with that. Mention the historical standing of indigenous people. Okay, kind of unrelated, but it’s just one line. Then, like the doctor who realized he was a whore for the pharmaceutical companies, you wake up one day in a container headed for Thailand.

    In genetics, one bright spot is plant and animal science, where gains have been made helped by various protocols mapping genes to performance. These could be flipped to human studies. I imagine it’s not on the Woke radar, for various reasons, like wanting to eat.

  4. Bomag says:

    The delicate thing here is race and intelligence. James Lee protests that research not involving race is throttled, but the gatekeepers don’t want to go anywhere near that slope.

    It’s been a sticky issue forever, I suppose. The Dred Scott decision waded in. After Herrnstein’s IQ article in 1970, some Harvard faculty took out a full page ad in the campus newspaper announcing that there is no link between genes and intelligence. Astonishing. How did they know? Can we get their data? In Chomsky’s rebuttal to Herrnstein, he counseled against this tactic, suggesting that when we quit being a racist society, we can naturally discuss and map these matters. Rather naive in hindsight.

  5. Michael van der Riet says:

    Geneticists censored: in the sunset of my life I see the dawn of the Unenlightenment. My grandchildren may not live to see the end of it.

  6. Adar says:

    “when we quit being a racist society, we can naturally discuss and map these matters.”

    And of course USA can NEVER become a non-racist society. It is a genetical disorder without redemption.

  7. TWS says:

    Codominium science police.

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