Good and Evil: Stories about the science of gray areas
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2018
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, we bring you two stories about the science of morality. Or morality in science. Either way you want to look at it.
Part 1: Political scientist Ethan Hollander interviews a Nazi war criminal.
Part 2: As a graduate student, Cather Simpson was excited to present her work -- but then her adviser lies about it.
Ethan J. Hollander is a professor of political science at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He is also the author of Hegemony and the Holocaust: State Power and Jewish Survival in Occupied Europe. Hollander’s published scholarship also includes research on democratization in Eastern Europe and on the Arab Spring. At Wabash, Dr. Hollander teaches courses on the Politics of the Middle East, Ethnic Conflict and Genocide, European Politics, and Research Methods and Statistics. He is a native of Miami Beach, and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 2006.
Note: Ethan's story was produced as part of The Story Collider's partnership with Springer Nature. Find out more at beforetheabstract.com.
When Cather Simpson graduated from high-school in the USA, she was certain she was going to become a neurosurgeon. She was very, very wrong. In her first year at uni, she got discovered scientific research and got completely hooked. She is now a Professor of Physics and Chemical Sciences at the University of Auckland, where she runs a super-fun laser lab called the Photon Factory. The Photon Factory uses exotic pulsed lasers to enable all New Zealand scientists accomplish their goals, from improving products for industry to helping school students with science fair projects. Working with the Photon Factory’s 25+ extraordinary physicists, chemists and engineers, Cather gets to study everything from how molecules convert light into more useful forms of energy to how to sort sperm by sex for the dairy industry. When she’s not enjoying the pleasure and satisfaction from using lasers to solve the knotty problems presented by Mother Nature, she’s doing puzzles with her partner Tom and being “Schrodinger’s Mom” – simultaneously the world’s best and worst mother – to two lovely teenage boys.
Note: Cather's story was produced as part of our partnership with SCANZ, Science Communicators Assocaition of New Zealand. Find out more at www.scanz.co.nz.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientist the... |
| 0:06.0 | I felt... |
| 0:07.0 | It felt... |
| 0:08.0 | I was so... |
| 0:09.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:19.0 | Hey guys, welcome to the Story Collider, where we present true personal stories about science. |
| 0:26.3 | I'm your host, Aaron Barker. |
| 0:28.4 | This week, we're presenting stories about the science of morality, or morality in science. |
| 0:33.7 | However you want to look at it. |
| 0:35.1 | Our first story is from Ethan Hollander. |
| 0:36.9 | It was recorded in September 2017 at the Rickshaw stop in San Francisco |
| 0:41.3 | as part of a show produced in partnership with Springer Nature's Springer Storyteller Program |
| 0:46.1 | and held in conjunction with the American Political Science Association's annual meeting. |
| 0:51.4 | The theme that night was, of course, political science. |
| 0:59.8 | So in 2004, I interviewed a Nazi war criminal. His name was Maurice Papin, and he was convicted |
| 1:06.3 | of crimes against humanity for being accomplished to the Nazis in German occupied France during World War II. |
| 1:12.6 | And just to get this out of the way, yes, I'm Jewish. Yes, we did have members of our family who were Holocaust survivors, and yes, this led to some very interesting family dynamics. |
| 1:22.6 | I remember telling my parents that I'd gotten this interview with Maurice Papon and my mother said, |
| 1:28.8 | you're going to interview a Nazi war criminal. |
... |
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