Ethics in retrospect: Biomedical research, colonial violence, and Iñupiat sovereignty in the Alaskan Arctic
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kaare Rodahl, a scientist with the US Air Force's Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory, spent much of the 1950s traveling to villages in the Alaskan Arctic to conduct research on cold acclimatization. Four decades later, it was discovered that during one such study, he had administered radioactive isotopes of iodine-131 to over one hundred Alaska Native research subjects without their knowledge or consent. This news broke just as Alaska Native communities were attempting to recover from a series of revelations surrounding other instances of Cold War radiation exposure. In response, two major federal investigations attempted to determine whether Rodahl had adhered to ethical regulations and whether his actions could be expected to have a lasting health impact on former research subjects. The National Research Council, framing the study as a singular event in the Cold War past, found that research subjects had been 'wronged, but not harmed'. The North Slope Borough, a powerful Alaska Native municipal government, countered this finding with their own investigation, which identified both the study and the subsequent federal inquiries as facets of the still-unfolding process of American settler colonialism in Alaska. In doing so, the North Slope Borough contested the authority of federal agencies to set the terms by which ethics could be retrospectively judged. This article argues that exploring how competing ethical regimes represent the relationship between violence and time can help us better understand how institutionalized bioethics reproduces settler colonial power relations.
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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 | 0.032 | 0.031 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.098 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".