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Really? All I saw was an "ordinary" world positively ruled by irrational, anti-intellectual fear coupled with an automatic, even pathological denial of permission by the uninformed that can only be surmounted by awesome levels of societal privilege.

This is the path to the dark side. And by the dark side, I mean living amidst the ruins trying to find someone to blame for where it all went wrong.

Somewhere between "We choose to go to the moon" and "if you see something, say something" we traded all of our hope for fear. That sucks.

>Somewhere between "We choose to go to the moon" and "if you see something, say something" we traded all of our hope for fear. That sucks.

That is the most succulent summary of the state of things I have ever read.

>...by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair" elements

I don't think the author or anyone else disagrees... the article was specifically about science fairs, not science projects generally. It's right in the title. And reiterated in the portion of the text where the author juxtaposes their childhood experience with their child's experience.

> This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs.

It's both (which gets to the heart of what I consider the most compelling arguments for decreased regulation). Whenever there are bureaucratic barriers, knowing the right sorts of people works wonders. You might even say it's a privilege...

Being coached by professional microbiologists in a working lab is not really an advantage?

While I think the parent underestimates the impact stated, I also think the point was that the experiment can be done at home by nearly anyone with the will, science fair or not, privilege or not.

Just to confirm, uremog is getting my point. No, it really isn't an advantage. It would be an advantage if one were doing an experiment that required access to a particular strain of cells or really specialized equipment or specialized knowledge, but this particular experiment is none of the above. And even to the extent that it may help, the science fair is a time to not use it! A great deal of the point of such activities is to show how anybody can use the scientific methods to learn things. If you take your student to a high-tech lab to do their high-tech experiment on high-tech equipment, you're just further reinforcing the idea that Science is a Thing done by Scientists and I Can't Do It Myself.

If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they took the time.

It's not trivial for a middle-schooler to make an incubator and I'm sure this girl got advice from microbiologists that would have taken her much longer to gather on her own. They had all the equipment she would need right there (sterile loop, agar plates, bunsen burner, lab grade ethanol). Plus, she probably had a bunch of equipment to make it easier (test tubes, tube shaker, that light she's using to examine the plates). So really she had a huge advantage over someone doing it on their own.

> It's not trivial for a middle-schooler to make an incubator

You don't actually need an incubator. Bacteria won't grow as fast at room temperature, but for the kind of experiment she was doing that should not be a problem.

Nevertheless, it is actually pretty easy to make an incubator. Google for "homemade bacterial incubator" and you'll find many sites offering instructions. A typical design uses an aquarium tank, an incandescent lamp, a dimmer, and a thermometer. This should be well within the capability of any middle schooler.

If the kid is up for doing a little programming, they could even toss in an Arduino and use a dimmer that can be controlled by it and automate keeping the temperature constant.

The rest of the things needed, like Petri dishes, agar, and such are available from Amazon. There are even kits specifically aimed at people who want to grow bacteria for science fair projects.

Again, let me point out that this is more evidence of just how deeply ingrained the idea that Science is Something You Can't Do is ingrained in the culture.

The physical requirements for science are easy to get. Specific experiments may be hard, but that's a characteristic of the experiments, not "science". The hard part is all in the attitude, learning to look for reasons why you are wrong instead of right. It is not in the physical gear and it's not in following a particular checkbox procedure thoughtlessly. (If I could, I'd remove "The Scientific Process" from the curriculum. It's a misnomer, literally starting from the word "The".) It is a grave failure of the education system that so many people come out of it thinking otherwise.

You're not understanding the argument. Can a person with no instruction and a kazoo and a person with years of training and a Stradivarius both make music? Sure. But the second one is going to win the prize at the county fair.

But the argument was that giving someone a kazoo was not enough to get them interested in music, you must also give them a violin and an instructor or they will lose interest.

The county fair does not have the goal of convincing everybody that they can do music, so the metaphor fails.

Science fairs have the goal of showing everybody they can do science. This is the only sensible goal, because as a mechanism for actually doing science they are worthless. If they fail that goal, they are worthless. Once again, this is a place where people confuse the mechanisms for the goals, a problem our society is having a lot of problems with lately. If the science fair is run in a way that extra super hard convinces people you need "real scientists" and lab coats and training and specialized equipment, it is of negative value and the optimal thing to do is just shut it down.

This science fair should be shut down. It is doing harm and no good.

Yes you do need an incubator. Bacteria aren't a simple chemical reaction that just runs more slowly at room temperature. Many bacteria that live in your mouth will not grow at all at room temperature.

I'm not saying someone couldn't hack together this experiment. I'm saying a middle-schooler who can walk into a lab and prepare everything in an afternoon under professional supervision is at an advantage compared to a middle-schooler who has to gather all this equipment and knowledge over the course of weeks and months (which will still be inferior from a non-didactic point of view) without the support of their parents when it comes to performing a valid scientific experiment.

> If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they took the time.

I thought the point of this article was that Veronica was specifically told she couldn't do this experiment as you describe:

    We also learned that this experiment was so potentially dangerous that Veronica
    would have to carry it out under the supervision of a trained expert, who would
    first have to submit a detailed risk assessment.

That she wanted to do it the simple way, but the school said, "No, you're not allowed to. We're too afraid"

I feel like I'm confusing something somewhere.

I am being critical of that. The more I think through this, the stronger I come to the conclusion that this whole thing is of negative value, actively subverting the only goals that matter, and it might as well be shut down. This whole thing is a useless farce.

As long as we're discussing privilege, the correct use of privilege would be to tell the school to just go to hell, run the experiment anyhow with the probably $10 of equipment you need, and submit something to the actual science fair as perfunctory as possible that will let you pass (leaning on your "privilege" to pass). And skip the visits to the microbiologists, because that proves the wrong point. You should be doing this on your own.