Galileo gives the bird

That could soon change for East Lansing’s Dreger, 49, a historian of medicine and science. She has written a book on the darker side of scientific research, scholarship and activism that threatens to push her into the national spotlight. The title, “Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists and the Search for Justice in Science,” reflects Dreger’s wry, often ironic sense of humor. The idea for the title came from her experience seeing the famed astronomer’s actual skeletal middle finger on display at a shrine in Florence, Italy.

Dreger’s reason for writing the book was to examine, in a scientific way, a number of famous scientists and how their research, although evidence based, was publicly discredited. With the recent rise of climate change deniers, anti-vaccination advocates and anti-evolution creationists, it’s easy to see how she would be drawn to the subject.

One of the first cases that she writes about involves the 2003 findings of J. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University sex researcher. In his book, “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” Bailey suggested something previously unthinkable in transgender politics.

“Bailey had pushed a theory these activists didn’t like,” Dreger writes. She cites Bailey’s book, which suggested a division of male-tofemale transgender individuals into two types in which both gender and sexual orientation matter: those who identify as female and are attracted exclusively to men, and those who identify as female and are sexually aroused by being perceived as female. In the latter cases, natal men “found themselves sexually aroused by the idea of being or becoming women. The simple idea of becoming a woman causes sexual excitement.” This type of sexual orientation has been termed "autogynephilia" by Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard.

This idea didn’t sit well with transgender activists, who saw a division between “real” transgender individuals and others who are merely aroused by the idea of it.

Starting with Bailey’s controversial case, Dreger dramatically illustrates how the science of legitimate researchers is often attacked, belittled and damned by activists who do not find the work politically correct.

Dreger is no stranger to controversial research. She is a nationally recognized patients’ rights advocate and medical researcher in the areas of transgender research and activism, and teaches medical ethics and bioethics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine (commuting from East Lansing, where she lives with her husband and son). During her Ph.D. studies at Indiana University, she studied hermaphrodites in the Victorian era and published the book “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex.” She later studied the complex issue of intersex, a condition where individuals are born with sexually ambiguous anatomy, and became a national activist against intersex surgery.

Most chapters are intrinsically interesting, especially in an era when science and scientists is under fire from politicians and political activists on both the left and the right. When the tables are dramatically turned on Dreger, however, the book really soars.

When Dreger began looking into a drug regimen that was being used “off label” to treat pregnant women whose fetuses are at risk of being born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia (or CAH, a condition which often leads to sexually ambiguous anatomy), she is pulled into a swirling debate that not only challenges her personal integrity, but threatens her entire career as a bioethicist.

Her investigation leads her to look closely at a New Jersey doctor who seems to be running a modern medicine show, using the drug Dexamethasone to treat CAH in utero. She finds that the patients were not given full disclosure, were used inappropriately as research subjects and the researcher misrepresented the facts to federal funding sources.

“It showed me researchers can play the system,” she said. “All the safety nets failed and other protective systems were not in place.”

As Dreger ramps up the inquiry, she finds herself in the complex position of not only criticizing another researcher’s work, but coming under an organized attack from that researcher’s supporters — supporters who have a lot to lose in this battle.

I would not be fair to readers to tell what happens to Dreger, but suffice it say these chapters read like a medical thriller.

Dreger hopes that her book will be read by scientists and used as a textbook, but she also thinks it should be read by activists everywhere — sort of a modern day version of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.”

“Evidence is really an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy,” Dreger writes. “If you want justice you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.”