IRHS Origin Story

The History of Our Team and Class

by Melisa Osborne

Our course and our approach to teaching this material on the history of racism in biology was generated during a dark time – Spring of 2020.  The intersecting events of the COVID lockdown and the Black Lives Matter summer underscored race-based inequities in US society and their cost in human lives.  In the context of these events, I became a student of the origins of racialized hierarchies within biology, genetics, and genomics.  In this context it became clear to me that some of the worst ethical violations perpetrated by science and medicine – forced sterilizations, the Tuskegee incident, Nazi science experiments – were enabled by racial hierarchies and the devaluing of specific racial groups as less than human or unfit.

In this frame of mind, I drew up the initial syllabus and topic list for Institutional Racism in Health and Science.  It was through the support of Barkha that this class came to be listed in my home program of Bioinformatics, and later her department, Biology.  During this process, we learned that Felicity was at the same time drawing up her own ideas for a certificate program regarding education for equity and democracy in BU Wheelock.  With Felicity’s experience and the inclusion of her colleague TJ, our syllabus grew to include topics relevant to science education and experiential learning.  Our team was further rounded out by the addition of Theresa, a tropical fish ecologist, and Adam, with his experience in bioinformatics and human genomics.  Mae Rose Gott, also a bioinformatician, was added in her role as our regular teaching assistant in 2022.  The interdisciplinary connections we forged in building this class would never have been possible without the remote zoom environment of the COVID pandemic.  It is through the deep conversations across our fields of focus that the class itself grew to not only incorporate the history of biological racism but to also include the critical reading of scientific writing through a lens for detecting racial bias.

We are indebted to many individuals who have supported and shaped the conversations about this class and the instrument we use for learning about bias in texts.  Notably, Kathryn Spilios for connecting Barkha and I with TJ and Felicity; Michele Markstein for her talk at BU in Fall 2020 that brought in Theresa; and the Graduate Program in Bioinformatics for letting me speak about the course idea, thus connecting me with Adam and Mae Rose.  We also need to thank Fred Wasserman, who has been our biggest cheerleader and occasional team member; Daniel Segre and his lab, Chris Schmitt, and Karen Warkentin for early support in the Biology department; and most recently Angela Seliga, Chip Celenza, and Vincent Stevens for their undeterred championship of our work at BU.

Figure: Establishment of a team tradition – the first group debriefing after Michele Markstein’s talk, 2020.