"The only reason Veronica was able to carry out her experiment was that I had the flexibility to spend hours struggling through paperwork, and because I had a social network of scientists I’ve developed as a science writer. This was an exercise in privilege."
No, it was an exercise in barriers. Everybody [1] has enough "privilege" to do this experiment, by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair" elements, with little more than a slightly-interested science teacher. They just aren't allowed to do it by the science fair. Being able to speak with "actual" scientists about counting bacteria is at most a slight bonus; it is not necessary to the process, learning about it by reading would be a fine education on its own, and even failing at the process would be educational in its own way, as the author describes in his own experiences. (Science fairs have a major role to play in the pernicious idea that science is only "successful" when it obtains the positive result the experimenter was looking for... but that's a separate rant.)
This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs. If "privilege" issues were as easy as just removing some regulation, we probably wouldn't be talking about it so much.
[1]: Everyone plausibly within the scope of this article, anyhow, which is places that have science fairs at all. That would be a separate issue.
Really? All I saw was an "ordinary" world positively ruled by irrational, anti-intellectual fear coupled with an automatic, even pathological denial of permission by the uninformed that can only be surmounted by awesome levels of societal privilege.
This is the path to the dark side. And by the dark side, I mean living amidst the ruins trying to find someone to blame for where it all went wrong.
Somewhere between "We choose to go to the moon" and "if you see something, say something" we traded all of our hope for fear. That sucks.
>...by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair" elements
I don't think the author or anyone else disagrees... the article was specifically about science fairs, not science projects generally. It's right in the title. And reiterated in the portion of the text where the author juxtaposes their childhood experience with their child's experience.
> This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs.
It's both (which gets to the heart of what I consider the most compelling arguments for decreased regulation). Whenever there are bureaucratic barriers, knowing the right sorts of people works wonders. You might even say it's a privilege...
Just to confirm, uremog is getting my point. No, it really isn't an advantage. It would be an advantage if one were doing an experiment that required access to a particular strain of cells or really specialized equipment or specialized knowledge, but this particular experiment is none of the above. And even to the extent that it may help, the science fair is a time to not use it! A great deal of the point of such activities is to show how anybody can use the scientific methods to learn things. If you take your student to a high-tech lab to do their high-tech experiment on high-tech equipment, you're just further reinforcing the idea that Science is a Thing done by Scientists and I Can't Do It Myself.
If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they took the time.
> If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they took the time.
I thought the point of this article was that Veronica was specifically told she couldn't do this experiment as you describe:
We also learned that this experiment was so potentially dangerous that Veronica
would have to carry it out under the supervision of a trained expert, who would
first have to submit a detailed risk assessment.
That she wanted to do it the simple way, but the school said, "No, you're not allowed to. We're too afraid"
I am being critical of that. The more I think through this, the stronger I come to the conclusion that this whole thing is of negative value, actively subverting the only goals that matter, and it might as well be shut down. This whole thing is a useless farce.
As long as we're discussing privilege, the correct use of privilege would be to tell the school to just go to hell, run the experiment anyhow with the probably $10 of equipment you need, and submit something to the actual science fair as perfunctory as possible that will let you pass (leaning on your "privilege" to pass). And skip the visits to the microbiologists, because that proves the wrong point. You should be doing this on your own.
It's not trivial for a middle-schooler to make an incubator and I'm sure this girl got advice from microbiologists that would have taken her much longer to gather on her own. They had all the equipment she would need right there (sterile loop, agar plates, bunsen burner, lab grade ethanol). Plus, she probably had a bunch of equipment to make it easier (test tubes, tube shaker, that light she's using to examine the plates). So really she had a huge advantage over someone doing it on their own.
> It's not trivial for a middle-schooler to make an incubator
You don't actually need an incubator. Bacteria won't grow as fast at room temperature, but for the kind of experiment she was doing that should not be a problem.
Nevertheless, it is actually pretty easy to make an incubator. Google for "homemade bacterial incubator" and you'll find many sites offering instructions. A typical design uses an aquarium tank, an incandescent lamp, a dimmer, and a thermometer. This should be well within the capability of any middle schooler.
If the kid is up for doing a little programming, they could even toss in an Arduino and use a dimmer that can be controlled by it and automate keeping the temperature constant.
The rest of the things needed, like Petri dishes, agar, and such are available from Amazon. There are even kits specifically aimed at people who want to grow bacteria for science fair projects.
Yes you do need an incubator. Bacteria aren't a simple chemical reaction that just runs more slowly at room temperature. Many bacteria that live in your mouth will not grow at all at room temperature.
I'm not saying someone couldn't hack together this experiment. I'm saying a middle-schooler who can walk into a lab and prepare everything in an afternoon under professional supervision is at an advantage compared to a middle-schooler who has to gather all this equipment and knowledge over the course of weeks and months (which will still be inferior from a non-didactic point of view) without the support of their parents when it comes to performing a valid scientific experiment.
Again, let me point out that this is more evidence of just how deeply ingrained the idea that Science is Something You Can't Do is ingrained in the culture.
The physical requirements for science are easy to get. Specific experiments may be hard, but that's a characteristic of the experiments, not "science". The hard part is all in the attitude, learning to look for reasons why you are wrong instead of right. It is not in the physical gear and it's not in following a particular checkbox procedure thoughtlessly. (If I could, I'd remove "The Scientific Process" from the curriculum. It's a misnomer, literally starting from the word "The".) It is a grave failure of the education system that so many people come out of it thinking otherwise.
You're not understanding the argument. Can a person with no instruction and a kazoo and a person with years of training and a Stradivarius both make music? Sure. But the second one is going to win the prize at the county fair.
The county fair does not have the goal of convincing everybody that they can do music, so the metaphor fails.
Science fairs have the goal of showing everybody they can do science. This is the only sensible goal, because as a mechanism for actually doing science they are worthless. If they fail that goal, they are worthless. Once again, this is a place where people confuse the mechanisms for the goals, a problem our society is having a lot of problems with lately. If the science fair is run in a way that extra super hard convinces people you need "real scientists" and lab coats and training and specialized equipment, it is of negative value and the optimal thing to do is just shut it down.
This science fair should be shut down. It is doing harm and no good.
But the argument was that giving someone a kazoo was not enough to get them interested in music, you must also give them a violin and an instructor or they will lose interest.
While I think the parent underestimates the impact stated, I also think the point was that the experiment can be done at home by nearly anyone with the will, science fair or not, privilege or not.
My kids' school, to some degree, solved this with "Creativity Fairs".
You want to design and sew a dress? Cool.
You want to scale up Thor's hammer from action figure size to your size? Cool.
You want to recreate Fallingwater in SketchUp? Cool.
There were even a few more traditionally science-y projects.
As long as it doesn't include food or live animals - you're cool.
My niece's school did that too. It was unexpected but absolutely enjoyable. They had the older grades build fake companies around made up science-y products. The aim was to get people to "buy" the product by pitching it. To be honest, some of the products reminded me of some startups mentioned in HN. One kid even had a food delivery service with drones...
My niece's grade go to build rovers and satellites. She built hers to something between voyager and sputnik. It even had "engines" that would light up (LEDs). Really fun event without the pressure of trying to look smart.
It's pretty notorious that science fairs are a venue for "achievement laundering", particularly when you see how many winners are professor's kids, upper upper middle class or otherwise privileged.
The U.S. is starting to get as bad as Heian Japan -- where the obsession of aristocrats on maintaining their privilege meant making a mockery of the Confucian institutions they imported from China.
Sounds like classic meritocracy for me: the awards go to those classes who can afford the merits.
I'm also interested in knowing more about Heian era Japan -- my knowledge is limited to reading about the Heian Self Defense Force in Urusei Yatsura and that's probably dodgy.
For what is is worth, women played an early role in Japanese literature, probably because men thought there wasn't any status to be had writing fiction. Funny enough, many Japanese comic creators such as Rumiko Takahashi and Naoko Takeuchi are women too, but nobody in the U.S. compares to male creators such as Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, etc.
> The biggest privilege these kids have is that their parents care about their education. Money does not provide much of an advantage.
Since when did school quality and neighborhood income stop correlating? When did private schools become free? When did after school tutoring and test prep programs become free to attend and provide free transport to and on demand?
All of these things take money, and all of them a positively correlated with achievement, and quite out of reach of poor people.
I wasn't trying to say that private schools are always better, but they do provide an escape hatch if you live in a place with a crappy assigned public school. An escape hatch that is only available if you have the ability to pay, and perhaps pay a lot. I haven't done a lot of shopping for private schools, but BASIS Silicon Valley is $25,000 per student per year. That's a lot. Two kids cost $46,000 per year. That's insane.
What is "achievement laundering"? I have never heard that phrase before. Do you mean the entrenched elite gaming the system to give advantages to their offspring?
That was my impression of Science Fair as a kid - all the good projects were done by the parents, sometimes directly and sometimes using micromanagement.
Which, come to think of it, is due to the drastically increased utility of the "achievement" in the hands of the child.
Something which would be unexceptional from the professional adult professional is laundered into an impressive or even newsworthy item when (supposedly) done by a child.
I had this happen to me in high school. My project won my local fair, at which point I went on to the state. At that point, someone pointed out that I was missing a tremendous amount of paperwork, and I had to go seek, ahem, creative ways to get it done post-facto. My project went on to finish high enough in the state fair that I got to go to the national event.
The issue here is that ISEF, Intel and other organizations that sponsor national science fairs don't want a PR disaster when it turns out that the winning project violates standards for institutional review and consent. That would be a major scandal and PR black eye. The only way to avoid this is by having every participant at every level complete the appropriate pre-clearance for the experiments.
As with any experiment, doing any kind of work with animals (even house pets) is subject to strict scrutiny, and any work done on humans, even siblings, even yourself, is subject to the highest level of review. As others have said, this is a fact of life in science, and learning about informed consent sooner rather than later is actually a valuable lesson.
In my view, a potential solution is to ditch the national sponsorship if possible. Who really needs a state championship for the school champions, and a national championship for the state champions? In my experience with my kids, those things are a tremendous time and money sink, and are many steps removed from the original creative effort.
And to be fair, institutional reviews and consent exist for good reason. Not so long ago it was acceptable to conduct psychological or even medical tests on uninformed participants, sometimes with terrible results.
There are legitimate arguments beyond just "for PR"
It is still acceptable to conduct psychological experiments on uninformed participants; everyone in the world does it every day. It is only "unacceptable" if you call yourself a psychologist while you're doing it, and subsequently try to publish a paper about it in one of the standard journals of the field.
Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage.
It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional review.
The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.
The beekeeper reminds me of a Schlock Mercenary quote: "A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody."
Sure, I didn't mean to imply that there's not a good reason to have these rules. However, I think it's fair to argue that the driving force to get consent forms for one's friends and family (or even for oneself) for a one-off middle school science fair project is not to protect them from predation by overly aggressive researchers ...
I guess a disagree. It's really hard to effectively enforce a policy where "obviously safe" experiments don't need any at all review. You'd need some kind of review to determine if they need a review...
Science fair paperwork pretty much parallels university level lab research paperwork. Anything biological requires an assessment of the level of lab required, it requires that the lab be correctly supervised, etc, etc. The old days where a kid could do about anything are long gone. Certainly some attention to safety is appropriate. But the article is correct in that no kid could deal with the mountain of paperwork required all by themselves. And the penalty for missing a piece of the paperwork is severe -- no entry for you.
In fact, it has given rise to a cottage industry of science fair mentors-for-hire. If you can find a highly enough motivated high school teacher to manage the paperwork, and can find a lab that has the correct rating for whatever you are doing, then great for you. Otherwise, there are a few places that can provide lab space and a mentor at an hourly fee, not to mention experience in getting the mountain of paperwork correct. It is good to have money to rub on the problem -- I'm sure a lot of kids get left behind because of that.
My daughter did an electronics project -- and the paperwork was still daunting, even though we could check "N/A" to all the biohazzard management sections, lab-has-eyewash, mentor qualified to handle animal tissues, etc. We still had to submit schematics and test plan material -- which is OK I guess because it is probably worthwhile to see if the project involves a direct connection to 220V AC mains before things get out of hand.
In the end though, one of the biggest problems with science fairs is getting enough qualified judges. The kids pour countless hours into the project, and hope for a 5-10 minute visit from 4 judges. If you are lucky, the judge might actually have a clue about your area of science or technology. Then the judging team tries to figure out some winners. One of the best ways anyone here on HN could help is to volunteer an afternoon per year to be a judge. Fairs are always short of qualified judges. Heck, they are short of judges that can fog a mirror. The best thing you can do for these kids is give them your time to encourage them and hopefully nudge the system towards a rational result.
That's absurd. Surely these are some kind of national science fairs or something, not ones held by local middle schools?
My school's science fair just required the teacher to sign off on it that it wasn't dangerous. My experiment involved running electricity through water (to turn rust back into metal), and no one cared.
Nope. For my kid's elementary school science fair, the classmates that were doing nothing more than collecting survey answers from volunteers had to file a separate human experimentation waiver form for each of their respondents.
After the informational meeting, I told my kid, point blank, "No people. No animals. Plants. How about a nice experiment involving plants?"
Ridiculous. One experiment I did in elementary school had something to do with rocks. Another was seeing how drinks (juice, pop, etc.) ruin teeth (I had a lot of spare baby teeth at that time), and another where I spoon-fed baby food to people to see how they reacted to the taste while blindfolded, nose plugged, etc.
All that without paperwork, and I'm not even very old -- I'm only in my early 20s.
This was for Santa Clara County which feeds ISEF, Cal State SF, and ISWEEEP. ISEF is the driver of most forms, and everyone follows along so that the path to ISEF is smooth.
> Science fair paperwork pretty much parallels university level lab research paperwork
Is this primarily the case in the US, or did I just manage to avoid it during my school days? I performed experiments that were probably no safer than those described here[0], and the only hurdle I had to pass was satisfying my teacher that it was safe enough (which boiled down to an informal a) you've thought about the risks, and b) aren't reckless; no actual paperwork)
[0] e.g. giving 16/17 year old unsupervised access to a 5kV power supply. The current used wasn't dangerous (pretty unpleasant to be shocked by though!), but it would destroy equipment easily (we went through 10+ multimetres, even though they were allegedly rated for that voltage) and the spark would set fire things pretty easily (paper, leaves, etc.)
It doesn't. The experiment could have been done by the dad and his daughter on their own without a single form. Its when the school and their lawyers get involved. The cynic in me wants to point out that the paperwork exercise might be the part that best prepares the young student for an actual career in science or engineering.
Safety regs aren't written for the expected case, they're written for the worst reasonable case. I can easily see how an experiment that involves bacteria cultures could cause problems. What if his daughter's immune system was fighting off strep throat at the time the samples were taken? How can we be sure that her samples don't present a threat to the judges and other people around her experiment? And that's just an example of a merely annoying infectious agent. She could easily have been carrying small quantities of something much more dangerous - a danger that is clearly amplified by growing them in a culture.
There are industry-standard protocols for performing this kind of work, and the school has a clear responsibility to ensure they are followed.
Oh, for christ's sake. Every day of school at whatever school that kid goes to, I guarantee that at least 2% of the population is sick. We aren't going to keep the world safe from strep throat by applying biohazard paperwork to science fairs.
You've missed the point: Growing bacterial colonies in a culture is inherently riskier than day-to-day contact with sick people.
I've worked in high-energy or high-risk systems nearly all of my career. There is such a thing as managed risk. The school didn't tell the family that they couldn't do the experiment. Instead, they owned up to the fact that the school didn't know how to manage this particular situation's risks correctly, and instead deferred to someone who did. That's a totally rational and reasonable response.
Growing bacterial colonies of botulism might be inherently riskier than day-to-day contact with sick people. Growing bacterial colonies of what's on your toothbrush just ain't.
Growing bacteria in agar is something that was completely de rigueur in elementary school when I was in elementary school in the 1980s. If this is a high-risk activity, I'm sure you'll have no problem finding some account of it every having done any damage in the conservatively hundreds of thousands of times it was done.
>Growing bacterial colonies of botulism might be inherently riskier than day-to-day contact with sick people. Growing bacterial colonies of what's on your toothbrush just ain't.
The difference between petri dishes with what was often a specified bacteria/mold and the bacteria from a person's mouth should be self-evident.
As brandmeyer pointed out, the girl may have had bacteria while showing no sign of having an illness (example given was strep throat). Having a small amount of the bacteria and then raising a colony of it could pose some risk of getting others sick.
The idea that research involving bacteria could go dreadfully wrong.
Imagine if she had somehow fostered a deadly pathogen on her toothbrush and through a mistake outside of her level of expertise managed to contaminate something/herself.
The mentorship of a professional was probably for safety reasons. Safely handling bacteria, avoiding contamination, etc. Which is partially why a risk assessment had to be filed (what are the chances of a deadly pathogen being raised in the samples?). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I understood the situation.
I don't believe safety regulations should be waived for minors because "reasons" or "fostering an interest in science". Even if that makes life unfair.
> Imagine if she had somehow fostered a deadly pathogen on her toothbrush and through a mistake outside of her level of expertise managed to contaminate something/herself.
The idea was to try to kill bacteria in the toothbrush after she used it. By definition, she was already "infected". Does she need a waiver every time she is going to brush her teeth? Because I guarantee the toothbrush is not routinely subjected to that level of sterilization.
The only argument I can think of is that she could be creating bacteria more resistant to whatever was that she was trying to use to disinfect. But if that's a problem, then we should all focus on banning antibacterial soap first.
I remember in some biology class lab, we were not allowed to get our petri dish out the incubator by ourselves. The lab technician had to verify them before handling them to us. She had to dispose of one because it had a dangerous colony on it.
My science fair experiment was literally building a cannon. I lit hairspray on fire and shot potatoes at a wall and don't even remember signing a waiver.
I'm sorry but.. safety procedures (and training), paperwork and thorough tracking of substances are a huge part of actual experimental science. Yes it may be discouraging that a young child can't just go and do the experiment they want unhindered but that's not how safety works. Even mundane non-cleanroom handling isn't allowed until the right safety training is taken (yearly basis).
P.S. Yes I'm aware a number of these chemicals can be picked up locally at Home Depot etc. to be "played" with at will, but this doesn't negate how public-funded experimental research is done.
It's completely true! I'm probably pretty good at programming because my father had connections to a gov't lab and got me an internship. I also really wanted to get good at math... had my parents or myself known that most math professors/grad students will talk to anyone about anything within their subject for as long as they'll listen, they might've driven me to the local college and brought me to some prof's office. Nobody I knew had any idea of that though! So yes it's privilege to have all these connections... but even knowing you can just walk in and ask is a privilege. Privilege is really subtle.
Alternatively, my family was fairly fundamentally religious. I was taught at an early age to distrust science and math. I eventually fell in love with programming, but that wasn't until my 20s. It's taken a lot of hard work to retrain my childhood teachings.
My experience as a judge: (1) Young kids are more fun than older ones. Grade 6 kids have interesting ideas and explore them. Grade 12 kids work in their parent's labs. (2) We were told to pick the top female for a special award. I was thinking about this when another judge (a female) pointed out that there were almost no boys in the competition. Context: Canada, 10 years ago.
Are you suggesting that's "affirmative action" taken too far? (Is it the principle idea to expect roughly equal boys/girls, or more or less proportionate participation re: characteristics of eligible students?)
I can understand your comment about younger adolescents vs older ones. 12 year olds can be more genuinely curious and less "looking for an angle" than their older, near-college-age contemporaries. That's not universal by any means, among all kids curiosity is a trait we ought to encourage, not squelch.
First, ensure that schools have enthusiastic and supportive teachers that are willing to stay back after school to work with kids on their science projects.
Second, remove the barrier to entry. That is, get rid of assessment and acceptance into science fairs being based on verbose entry forms. Have preliminary rounds where all students get the joy and buzz of representing at a science fair.
In Ireland the traditional science fair has been the BT Young Scientist Exhibition. This competition garners the most money and media attention. Every year thousands of applications are submitted. These applications are quickly narrowed down to approximately five hundred which are allowed to represent at the fair. The way I see it, every year this fair is losing more future scientists and technologists than it is creating. What kid will be interested in following and pursuing science after they're discouraged by a rejected application form?
A new science fair in Ireland that we now have is SciFest. This competition is in a much more encouraging format. All students no matter what project they have get the opportunity to present their projects to judges in preliminary rounds before the winners are brought through to the next round. This is a much more inclusive format.
Somewhat related:
Something that I've noticed when helping extremely bright kids in science fairs: If they're motivated, and there's a pair of them who are friends, then I'm essentially useless and getting in the way. That's happened multiple times (getting to the semi-finals/finals of Google, Siemens, etc.) with pairs.
When they're alone then it doesn't workout so well.
> There will be kids showing off homemade spacecraft, Ebola test kits, and environmentally safe batteries.
Homemade spacecraft - okay we've all had fantasies of doing this and depending on how far you've gone with it the primary material starts off with sofa cushions or cardboard. The sky is limit (no pun intended) for ideas on it. Environmentally safe batteries- okay there's a lot of room for this one too (potatoes come to mind).
Not sure about the last one though. How does a child develop an Ebola test kit?!
"Dad can you get me some Ebola ... it's for a science fair project!"
Elisa tests aren't that difficult to make, assuming you've got access to a lab somewhere. Since it tests the body's immune response, you just need someone who recovered from ebola.
If you think about it, earth is a solar powered hot dog cooker. In fact almost everything is solar powered! Even nuclear fission, which uses unstable isotopes produced during supernovae.
This story template gets old. Yes, life is tough as a kid with a poor single parent.
Blah, blah. A guy with no arms will have a tough time eating with chopsticks. Equally irrelevant.
Clearly performing a "risk assessment" for an experiment involving washing a toothbrush with lemon juice and vinegar is an incredibly ridiculous display of bureaucratic insanity. I wonder if you need to sign a liability waiver for eating French fries with ketchup? (it contains vinegar, and stains!)
The "privilege" narrative is overplayed to begin with, and in this context it is absurd next to the elephant in the room.
While I don't agree that "the 'privilege' narrative is overplayed," you're right to point out that this article started with the barrier of a form that then magically evaporated midway through the article. Presumably they signed it, otherwise the child wouldn't have been able to compete in the fair. So the argument of privilege kind of falls apart with respect to the form.
But the argument that the kids with the most connections to real labs and real scientists win, is pretty solid. That totally jives with my experience judging regional science fairs. The top kid in each division was inevitably a professor's kid that did the experiments in the university lab. (e.g. "I then used the gas chromatograph...")
No, every one else is not a wanker who would send their daughter to a Yale lab to have to learn science and think that should be normal else the world falls apart.
