Reviews of Scientific Characters

Recipient of the 2011 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Public Address from the National Communication Association

“articulate, engaging, and insightful . . . By deconstructing the persona of the scientific and nonscientific characters and their reactions, Keränen builds a thoughtful text that invokes questions concerning the ethics and current structuring of the clinical trial system. The reader will appreciate her careful and structured handling of the events, the characters, and the ethics surrounding Datagate.” (read full review)

—Nicole Parker, 
New York Journal of Books

"The way that Keränen untangles the literature on ethos, persona, and voice is unique, compelling, and invaluable. Her application of that approach to the story of 'Datagate' tells rhetoricians of science, scientists, policymakers, and laypeople a great deal about our current 'collective wishes and anxieties about biomedical science.' A well-written, strongly argued study."

—Leah Ceccarelli,
author of Shaping Science with Rhetoric: The Cases of Dobzhansky, Schrodinger, and Wilson

 

"Scientific Characters does a great service to those who hold open the possibility that what occurred was in fact not a monumental tragedy or the fall from grace of a respected researcher but rather what happens daily as flawed human beings with multiple agendas conduct studies with much at stake. Although some investigators will be frustrated, and some patients will be disheartened, we applaud the reality that, by God’s grace, research moves on and we learn things in spite of ourselves. Scientific Characters captures all of those complexities. I hope the public will understand that this is the way it is, that what happened to Bernard Fisher is not all that rare, and that political agendas in the biomedical research arena are not always pure."

—Victor G. Vogel, M.D.,
editor of Management of Patients at High Risk for Breast Cancer