User:Samafo/sandbox

Hello everyone! I'm not quite the expert at this, but reading about sandboxes gave me the impression that this is where I should test my editing skills before going out into the real world and possibly making a fool of myself. I recommend checking out the Cheatsheet page because it wraps up the editing manners quite nicely. - Samafo

Follow Up
putting two equal signs before and after a phrase will make it into a subheading. Cool stuff!

11/21/13
Changed the heading on Emily Martin's page to "Writings" opposed to "Books", so that we may include her article on the Egg and the Sperm.

The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles
An article that Emily Martin wrote provides insight into how metaphors that are used to teach biological concepts reflect the social constructed "definitions of male and female". She focuses on fertilization and how words such as "debris", "sheds", and "dying" opposed to "amazing", "produce", and "remarkable" insinuate that as "female biological processes" are inferior to male biological processes, so then must women be "less worthy than men".

11/30/13
edited and added to "the egg and the sperm" description; added Freedman's article to the citations; added a link to ZP3 wiki page

In the 1991 article, The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles, Emily Martin approaches scientific literature from the perspective of an anthropologist. She analyzes the metaphors that are used to teach biological concepts and makes the claim that these metaphors reflect the socially constructed "definitions of male and female". She focuses on analogies made in fertilization with the roles that the egg and sperm play, and points how words such as "debris", "sheds", and "dying" as opposed to "amazing", "produce", and "remarkable" insinuate that as "female biological processes" are inferior to male biological processes, so then must women be "less worthy than men".

In new research being conducted, the take on the egg and sperm are beginning to differ slightly. Martin begins with research from John Hopkins University on the motility of the sperm’s tail. John Hopkin’s research found that the sperm’s tail is actually very weak than previously assumed, abandoning the image of a “torpedo”-like sperm. The typical analogies are upheld in research done by Gerald Schatten and Helen Schatten, but Martin then draws attention to the discovery by Paul Wassarman, the protein molecule found on the egg’s coat. ZP3, as the molecule is properly called, is acknowledged to play an active role in fertilization, but is contradictorily called the “egg-binding protein” despite it having sperm-binding characteristics.

These studies simultaneously show scientists making an effort to change the previous analogies. But, in the attempt to shift the passive imagery of females, scientists have gone to the opposite extreme to depict the egg as a “dangerous”, “spider woman” and the sperm as the “victim”, in concordance with another Western culture gender stereotype. Martin poses the idea of having gender neutral analogies to be used instead.

When traditional metaphors are actively used, they project the image of the cellular level to the social level, making it “seem so natural as to be beyond alteration.”  These interpretations become “self-reinforcing” and can skew observations. One way is as researcher Scott Gilbert describes: “if you don’t have an interpretation of fertilization that allows you to look at the eggs as active, you won’t look for the molecules that can prove it.” The way that scientists choose to view their studies “guides [them] to ask certain questions and to not ask certain others.” A solution to these negative images is not to just increase the number of females in biology, but rather to expose that these inaccurate metaphors are there.

Key Terms: Guide, influence, shape, affect, direct, mold, predispose, illusions, poses, suggests, propose, insinuate, gesture to, hint at

12/2/13
adding to "Anthropology of science and feminism

Martin began researching the analogies used in science education starting in 1982. Pregnant with her second child, Martin noticed a pattern in her expecting parents' class how the woman's body and its parts were described and referred to "as if these things weren't a part of us." Martin began with interviews with women regarding their perspective on female reproductive issues and compiled her research of interviews into a book called The Woman in the Body (1987) testing link. Martin began to expand on her research by interviewing scientists and including the topic of male reproductive processes. All of these topics were encompassed under fertilization and elaborated on in Martin's article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles (1991).

12/6/13
''This is late with regards to the project due date, but during the presentations I noticed that a lot of students did norplant, but not Maragaret Sanger's and Pincus' Enovid pill. What I hoped to see on these pages was the controversial method of testing the pill and the motives behind it. I had to navigate between a handful of pages Birth control, Informed consent, Combined oral contraceptive pill, Mestranol/norethynodrel aka Enovid, and Margaret Sanger. It amazed me how unconnected they all are, especially the Enovid and Sanger page, and how none of them addressed the experimentation in Puerto Rico.''

Gregory Goodwin Pincus: Underneath Research, hyperlinked enovid to its page Margaret Sanger: Underneath Planned parenthood era, Added the bolded and hyperlinked: In the early 1950s, Sanger encouraged philanthropist Katharine McCormick to provide funding for biologist Gregory Pincus to develop the birth control pill which was eventually sold under the name Enovid. Birth control: added the bolded and hyperlinked- Gregory Pincus and John Rock with help from the Planned Parenthood Federation of America developed the first birth control pills in the 1950s, such as Enovid, which became publicly available in the 1960s. Enovid:

The making of Enovid
The first oral contraceptive pill to be placed on the market, Enovid was the product of Margaret Sanger’s vision to provide women a means to separate their sexuality from reproduction. Through her work as a nurse with immigrant wives in New York, Sanger saw frequent cases of women inducing botched abortions in order to avoid another unwanted pregnancy. Sanger then vowed to develop a pill that would give women more control over their body. Sanger’s best known breakthrough occurred years later when she partnered with Gregory Pincus, a biologist, to develop an oral contraceptive pill. With the financial support of Katharine McCormick, the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration and sold in the US market.

Margaret Sanger’s motives to developing the Pill
Though recognized as an iconic figure in women’s rights, skeptics of Margaret Sanger question her motives for developing the Pill. Sanger was commonly accused by opponents of having an eugenic agenda for the Pill with concerns over population control. The implementation of Planned Parenthood clinics in impoverished cities targeting minority women and teenagers along with the controversial drug testing in Puerto Rico only fueled these allegations.

Drug testing Enovid in Puerto Rico
Pincus first tested the contraceptive pill on a small number of 12 women in Boston in partnership with Dr. John Rock. To combat legal issues surrounding oral contraceptive study trials, Pincus and Rock disguised their studies under fertility research. As was acceptable at the time, the Boston trials were conducted on psychiatric patients with the consent of the relatives. Now, Pincus still needed to conduct a large-scale trial to garner FDA approval for the Pill. With the Puerto Rican government’s support for population control, Pincus concluded that the 3rd world country was the ideal place to conduct their drug trials. Already having 67 contraceptive clinics in place serving a large constant number of Puerto Rican women, Pincus saw the opportunity to prove that if “poor, uneducated women of Puerto Rico could follow the Pill,” then any woman could. The results of the trials in Puerto Rico concluded that the Pill was effective in keeping the women from getting pregnant.

The trials in Puerto Rico bring up sensitive issues in the making of the Pill. The women who participated in the studies were not completely informed in what exactly they were partaking in. The experimenters violated informed consent protocols leaving the subjects to think they were taking safe drugs. Counter to that assumption, the initial dosage the Pill contained was an unnecessarily high dose of 10 milligrams of progesterone and 0.15 milligrams of estrogen. This caused very uncomfortable side-effects in the women such as “nausea, bloating, weight gain and depression.” Pincus and Rock ignored these side-effects and went ahead with proposing the Pill to the FDA.

Serious side-effects
Later when the Pill had been actively used in the US, more serious side-effects were reported, the most common being blood clots and strokes. The most serious cases resulted in death.

12/8/13
It's late in the game, but just some last updates that I hope to stay up.

Take down
All of the previous content added to the Enovid page was taken down by Lynn4. It was deemed inaccurate and violating NPOV. Though I may agree with the NPOV violation, I think to erase all of it as inaccurate is questionable. Lynn4 directed me to the history page on oral contraceptives, but I do not think that encompasses all that happened, including what some argue as the unethical conduct of experimentation that was done on the Puerto Rican women. Hopefully Lynn4 and I will be able to talk further on the Talk page and compromise on an effective way to add the content onto the page. If Lynn4 doesn't respond on the Talk page, then I will see if a further [refined] post will agree with her.

Patriarch page
I noticed on the patriarch page that though the "biologist perspective" is referred to at times, there is not much explaining it. To provide a passage that can be built off of, I added the following to Biological vs social theories.

''As a common standard of differentiation between genders, advocates for a patriarchal society like to focus on the influences that hormones have over biological systems. Hormones have been declared as the “key to the sexual universe” because they are present in all animals and are the driving force in two critical developmental stages: sex-determinism in the fetus, and puberty in the teenage individual. Playing a critical role in the development of the brain and behavior, testosterone and estrogen have been labeled the “male-hormone” and “female-hormone” respectively as a result of the impact they have when masculinizing or feminizing an individual.''

Peer Editing
12/1/13: edited Midgeholland H. J. Mozans. Mostly grammatical errors, but added more links throughout the article also 12/1/13: edited Aschultheiss ISNA. minor typos of "INSA" (changed to "ISNA") on the ISNA page. Also corrected some grammatical errors seen on the same page