US Geneticist Discusses North Korea Trip With Dennis Rodman 101
sciencehabit writes "If you happened to catch any of the news coverage of Dennis Rodman's trip to North Korea last week, you might have spotted in the big man's entourage a white guy with an Amish-style beard, as in clean-shaven cheeks and no mustache. That's Joseph Terwilliger, 48, a statistical geneticist who splits his time at Columbia University and the University of Helsinki. He's now visited North Korea three times with the basketball star. He sat down with Science Magazine for a Q and A about how he got involved with Rodman and whether the trips are helping--or hurting--U.S. relations with the country."
Re:Nazi regime (Score:4, Informative)
Beside "both are really nasty regimes," the comparison isn't particularly apt. The NK regime is highly internally repressive (to a level only dreamt of by Nazi security forces), but also extremely isolationist (compared to the aggressive expansion and conquest used by Hitler to secure internal support for his programs). Visiting this crazy fat asshole is more like visiting Kim Jong-Il in 2010; the NK dynasty represents its own unique variety of crazy.
Re:sorry but.. (Score:5, Informative)
I think it is a bit different. He's interested in N. Korea because human experimentation has been happening, and sees an opportunity to get data that would be otherwise unavailable, even unethical. His acquiring the data however, is not the cause of that unethical treatment and if he abandoned his studies, that treatment would continue unabated.
In a similar way, medical scientists study the effects of people's habits, for example, what happens to people who smoke, who run, who work in coal mines, who eat only vegetables, etc. etc. The scientists aren't the ones inducing people to engage in any particular behavior, but they see an opportunity to gather data by looking at various groupings. So while it would be one thing to set up an apparatus that made a person breathe coal dust for a decade, it is another thing altogether to acquire data from people who for some other reason unrelated to the scientist or the study, breathed coal dust for a decade.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)