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I had this happen to me in high school. My project won my local fair, at which point I went on to the state. At that point, someone pointed out that I was missi
by URSpider94 11y ago
I had this happen to me in high school. My project won my local fair, at which point I went on to the state. At that point, someone pointed out that I was missing a tremendous amount of paperwork, and I had to go seek, ahem, creative ways to get it done post-facto. My project went on to finish high enough in the state fair that I got to go to the national event.
The issue here is that ISEF, Intel and other organizations that sponsor national science fairs don't want a PR disaster when it turns out that the winning project violates standards for institutional review and consent. That would be a major scandal and PR black eye. The only way to avoid this is by having every participant at every level complete the appropriate pre-clearance for the experiments.
As with any experiment, doing any kind of work with animals (even house pets) is subject to strict scrutiny, and any work done on humans, even siblings, even yourself, is subject to the highest level of review. As others have said, this is a fact of life in science, and learning about informed consent sooner rather than later is actually a valuable lesson.
- eli 11y agoAnd to be fair, institutional reviews and consent exist for good reason. Not so long ago it was acceptable to conduct psychological or even medical tests on uninformed participants, sometimes with terrible results. There are legitimate arguments beyond just "for PR"
- URSpider94 11y agoSure, I didn't mean to imply that there's not a good reason to have these rules. However, I think it's fair to argue that the driving force to get consent forms for one's friends and family (or even for oneself) for a one-off middle school science fair project is not to protect them from predation by overly aggressive researchers ...
- eli 11y agoI guess a disagree. It's really hard to effectively enforce a policy where "obviously safe" experiments don't need any at all review. You'd need some kind of review to determine if they need a review...
- thaumasiotes 11y agoIt is still acceptable to conduct psychological experiments on uninformed participants; everyone in the world does it every day. It is only "unacceptable" if you call yourself a psychologist while you're doing it, and subsequently try to publish a paper about it in one of the standard journals of the field. Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage. It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional review. The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.
- zyxley 11y agoThe beekeeper reminds me of a Schlock Mercenary quote: "A Sergeant in motion outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. An ordnance technician at a dead run outranks everybody."
- analog31 11y agoIn my view, a potential solution is to ditch the national sponsorship if possible. Who really needs a state championship for the school champions, and a national championship for the state champions? In my experience with my kids, those things are a tremendous time and money sink, and are many steps removed from the original creative effort.