Schrödinger’s placenta: Determining placentas as not/waste
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An estimated 50 million kilograms of human placental material is produced worldwide every year. In countries such as Canada, human placentas are utilized in scientific research concerned with fetal and women’s health, immunology, and cancer, to name a few. Through an empirical study involving interviews with placenta scientists and observations of placental science research laboratories and meetings, this article examines the material and discursive processes through which placentas are rendered materially and ethically available for scientific study. We argue that these processes involve a critical shift in placenta ontology such that placentas exist as waste and not-waste, an indeterminacy that is resolved in a four-phase praxis. The praxis ultimately makes placentas not only available, but also monetarily and morally ‘free of charge’ for scientific purposes. Our analysis reveals that the purported waste-ness of placentas potentiates their amenability to scientific experimentation, and is foundational to scientists’ claims about their moral relationship with broader publics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".