Quotes About Research

Physicians, patients, and ethicists must also understand that acknowledging abuse and encouraging African Americans to participate in research are compatible goals. History and today's deplorable African American health profile tell us clearly that black Americans need both more research and more vigilance.

Enslavement could not have existed and certainly could not have persisted without medical science. However, physicians were also dependent upon slavery, both for economic security and for the enslaved "clinical material" that fed the American medical research and medical training that bolstered physicians' professional advancement.

In fact, researchers who exploit African Americans were the norm for much of our nation's history, when black patients were commonly regarded as fit subjects for nonconsensual, nontherapeutic research. This book explores the many reasons that blacks are so vulnerable, but ultimately it is because American medical researchers remain a racially homogeneous group, and I show how the racial homogeneity of American medical researchers lies at the very heart of the problem.

Why Research Issues Still Matter Why do centuries of mutual distrust over medical research matter today? What does the sad history of exploitative experimentation augur for black health?

American university research centers have historically been located in inner-city areas, and accordingly, a disproportionate number of these abuses have involved experiments with African Americans.

Geography, tradition, and culture intersect to make blacks likely research subjects for new technologies, but race and economics tend to place them outside the marketplace for these same technologies when they are perfected.

The vaccine debate encapsulates more than a scientific disagreement; it also reflects the lingering iatrophobia from the exploitative abuse of African American children. This abuse has had a chilling effect on lifesaving research because parents are withholding their permission from positive as well as abusive research. History has shown them how difficult it is to distinguish between the two.

Ever since I was little my mother had told me, if you don't know something, go to the library and look it up.

Is that not what consumer research is for—to find out before the fact what is going to happen? The answer is that Detroit never really researched customers' wants. It only researched their preferences between the kinds of things it had already decided to offer them. For Detroit is mainly product oriented, not customer oriented.

In short, a customer feedback program should be viewed not as "market research" but as an operating management tool.

But fiction is not, as many nonwriters seem to think, a random grab bag of made-up whimsies, as undisciplined and unreasoned as a dream. Nor is it simply reporting with the names changed. It is an amalgam of experience, education, reading, insight, analysis, conversations, observation, and conscious research.

Through the misguided notion that writing about flying was easy, I had McCone become a pilot. When I learned that research in books wasn't enough, I forced myself to take lessons.

I did a lot of my writing as though I was an academic, doing some piece of research as perfectly as possible.

I do like the research part of writing, I must admit.

I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.

My writing process is a mix of research, personal experiences, washing the dishes, raising kids while thinking - then writing.

My writing process hasn't changed - it's is the same whether I'm working on a Y.A. novel or, as now, a new novel for adults. A lot of reading, a lot of research if the subject warrants it, a lot of sticky notes and scraps of paper - and get to work.

But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.

I was stunned to find out there had never been a serious, scholarly biography ever written on Rosa Parks.

I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

When I do period work, I really like to read about the period as much as I like to look at pictures because sometimes the written word is much better at conveying what their lives were really like and how much they had and where their clothes came from. Because, a lot of time, people dressed in their Sunday best to pose for a picture.

There is nothing wrong with good accounting, except that it does not necessarily lead to good science.

It could be - and it has been argued, in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don't like it - that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.

And so, you can do hundreds and hundreds of studies showing a general factor and just so long as you restrict your populations, your testing materials and the kinds of situations you look at, you can keep finding the same wrong thing again and again.