Volume V (2022)
graduation, with the ultimate goal of becoming a research physician. I worked in three different
labs at Meharry Medical College while I was a high school student. I enjoyed scientific research,
and I was good at it. I took home first prize in biochemistry at the state science fair in my senior
year for a research project at Meharry that explored the role of interleukin-16 in the natural
immune response of a house mouse (Mus musculus) to leukemia. So, once I arrived at Cornell, it
should be no surprise that I joined the chemistry major as soon as I could. However, I also added
philosophy as a second major. In the fall semester of my sophomore year I took Ancient
philosophy to satisfy a humanities requirement, and I ended up loving Socrates and his relentless
hunt for truth and knowledge. So, I joined. But my goal was still to be a research physician for
almost my entire college career. I even completed the MCAT and did well enough to be invited to
apply to Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine back in my hometown of Nashville, TN. However, my
plan to become a research physician ended after I took a transformative philosophy course in the
spring of my junior year.
The course was PHIL 481: Problems in the Philosophy of Science, taught by the late and great
Richard Boyd. The course was about exploring how and when science fails to achieve objective
knowledge. The main focus of the course was The Bell Curve a nd its critics. The Bell Curve was an
infamous book of social science that came out in 1994 when I was a high school student. I attended
the top public high school in Tennessee at the time. It was a selective and high-achieving academic
magnet high school, like Stuyvesant in New York City. And despite the fact that everyone in that
school was really good at academics, there were obvious (and perplexing) racial gaps among our
PSAT scores. For example, the Black kids tended to score 1-1.5 standard deviations below the
White kids. Just as these PSAT scores were coming out, The Bell Curve had just hit the
bookshelves, and one of the main thesis argued for in the book was that stubborn racial gaps in
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