A week ago!
This week!
This is my take:
A precocious little
kid did a science fair experiment for her school. It received attention because
it is on a dangerous invasive and because a child did the work. She likely got
the idea for the experimental design from her father, who probably got the idea
from colleagues.
Because people are interested in the
topic and it was such a slow news week (besides the three airplane crashes,
Israel/Palestine conflict etc.) this thing went viral. Anyway, who wouldn’t
cheer for a young girl who discovered something cool, novel, and useful at the
tender age of 12. But just as quickly as some were there to praise our new
rising star, so too were they there to take her down just as quickly. Unfortunately,
in this case the star/victim is a little girl with an interest in
science. The media just made her an example of the climate for scientists today
and women in science in general. The media’s interpretation of science is at
fault here too. The headline that made me flinch the most was “Did [used her
name] steal a marine biologist’s study for her 6th grade science
project?” What a despicable thing to use a child’s real name in such a negative heading. Shameful.
The timeline from Christie Wilcox
above is the best thing to read out there from this "story." Shame on the
reporters who wrote this girl's name in their stories and made it sound like she
“plagiarized” another person’s work. She did not copy someone else’s work, the
worst case is if she didn’t mention the work done before her as much as she could/should
have. This is a child people. At least
keep her name out of this. Maybe she made a mistake in remembering how she came
up with this project certainly it was influenced by the work of one of her
father’s colleagues and perhaps in reading all of this wonderful press she
started to rethink where these ideas originated. When talking to the press we
often build narratives from our scientific work, we all stood on someone else’s
shoulders and on the works of those that came before us. What happened here was
a little scientific progress by a child that turned into a wider cultural regression.
I understand the concerns of Zachary
Jud, the PhD student who feels his work was slighted. He deserves credit for his work, but here is the thing - people are talking about his original work
because of this little girl. The original work is already published and already
got a little press, it is great that people are talking about this project
again. This little kid has brought a lot of attention to it. Did she
intentionally leave the original research out of the story to make her science
fair research sound even better? I don’t think so. Even if she did, she’s only
13 now and kids make mistakes sometimes, but especially when talking to the
media. If you are a scientist that has ever been asked “How did you come up
with this project?” you know that it can be a very tough question to answer
succinctly and you sometimes leave out details about all the influences you had
in the past that got you to that point. Now imagine answering questions like
that when you were 13 with an adult asking you the questions.
If
you want to blame someone here blame the adults, blame the media, but don’t
blame a little girl who just was trying to do a little science she was interested
in.
