Episode 32

The Received Wisdom - Shobita Parthasarathy

The Politics of Expertise and Retelling the Story of Racism in the Pulse Oximeter ft. Amy Moran-Thomas

March 19, 2023

TRANSCRIPT

This month, Jack and Shobita talk about the challenges of ensuring that AI and gene editing reflect human values, and reflect on what the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio tells us about the politics of knowledge. And they chat with Amy Moran-Thomas, Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT, about her clarion call to address the racial biases embedded in the pulse oximeter, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in August 2020.

Study Questions:

1. What are the benefits and risks of sickle cell disease becoming one of the first approved treatments using somatic cell gene editing?

2. How did early concerns about racial bias in the pulse oximeter get dismissed?

3. How did the idea that the pulse oximeter had embedded racial bias go from something that was dismissed, to something that is commonly known? In particular, what are the social and political dynamics that affected this process?

4. How have the definitions of expertise in this case (e.g., who sits on FDA panels) affected how we understand the problem with the pulse oximeter? How could it be understood differently? What kinds of expertise are missing in policymaking related to the pulse oximeter?

5. What is the problem with framing the pulse oximeter issue as a skin color problem and not a device problem?

6. What does Moran-Thomas's experience with the pulse oximeter story tell us about how research (especially in the social sciences and humanities) can have impact?

Related links:

• Amy Moran-Thomas (2020). "How a Popular Medical Device Encodes Racial Bias." Boston Review. August 5.

• Amy Moran-Thomas (2021). "Oximeters used to be designed for equity. What happened?" WIRED. June 4.

• Amy Moran-Thomas (2019). Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. University of California Press.

• Kadija Ferryman (n.d.) "Framing Inequity in Health Technology: The Digital Divide, Data Bias, and Racialization." SSRC: JustTech.

• Andrea Ballestero and Yesmar Oyarzun (2022). "Devices: A location for feminist analytics and praxis." Feminist Anthropology. 3(2): 227-233.

• Yesmar Oyarzun, Juliann Bi, Eddie Jackson (n.d.) Undertones.