Scientist as Gladiator Posted on December 6, 2007 Celia B. Fisher (bio) relates her vision of the superhero scientist.

I always wanted to be a scientist. When I was a child, I thought a scientist was a gladiator that could knock down falseness and discover truths and so I’ve always wanted to be a scientist. And when I first started out, I was a very basic scientist in adult vision and went into visual perception and then moved into developmental perception. And it was a very interesting area of research. I learned about memory. I produced a number of publications in the area. And then I did a post-doc in infant perception.

At the same time, I had a baby and I had a son and so when I was studying the infants in their little infant chairs, I began to think about my own children and I began to think about — what was the experience of that child there, whether if I was a parent, I would have agreed to have my child be in that kind of research.

And that began to move me into a more applied area and also to be more concerned about the relationship between the researcher and the participant. And so what I did was I — after my post-doc I went to Fordham University where I’ve been for twenty-some-odd years and I became head of their developmental program and because of student interest and my own interest, began to develop a program in applied developmental psychology.

And my concern at the time was that developmental psychologists were doing wonderful research, but they were being called upon to speak to public policy, to speak to legal issues, but their research was not applied. It was basic knowledge and I began to be concerned about the relevance and perhaps the negative effects that generalizing basic developmental research to applied settings might do.

So I got called to be on the board, became chair of the [New York State Licensing] board and part of our responsibilities was to adjudicate what psychologists did wrong. And that kind of launched my interest in ethics and I began to see that scientists had really not placed — research psychologists had not placed the same kind of emphasis on ethics and incorporated it into their way of looking at research as practitioners did.

And I’ve had great support from all different agencies in the federal government in terms of pursuing those interests. In addition, I became chair of the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Committee. I had been a member of their ethics committee. I became chair of their ethics code task force and spent five years helping to write the ethics code for the American Psychological Association to revise it. And that taught me a lot as well because what we had to do was we had to approach it like scientists and collect data from all those psychologists out there in terms of what their issues are and I learned about that — a lot about that.

At the same time, I was also asked to be on a number of federal committees. I was on the Secretary of Health and Human Services Advisory Board. And that’s called SAGHARB and I chaired the children’s research committee and we were able to work with OHRP to develop different guidelines. And right now, I’m chair of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Subjects Research Board.

So I’m learning lots about pesticides, but what I’m also learning is that when you’re a scientist, there’s really a way of approaching — when you’re a scientist who’s also a bio-ethicist, there’s a wonderful way of approaching science that understands and respects the need for scientific validity and is able to fit that in a way that protects the rights and welfare of the people that we’re working with.

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