The Downside of Education

Saturday, May 7, 2011
This week's topic in my Research Methods class is "Ethics in Research." As part of the weekly readings, I watched a talk given by Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble, an expert on the role of race in American medicine. She spoke about the legacy of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and how it has negatively affected both research and outcomes in all areas of health for African Americans due to the complicity of the federal government in human experimentation.

Here's the trouble with being an educated human: instead of being ignorant about how the world works, and thus having some hope that you're misinformed about how much we suck as a community, or a nation, or a species, education provides confirmation of our suckage. Irrefutable proof that our moral compass sometimes points directly to the Tootsie Roll center of the galaxy, a black hole of scum and villainy, with not much hope of redemption.

Explain to me again why I spend so much time and effort on this? Oh...that's right.

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