“If you want to know the end, look at the beginning,” the African proverb says.

What do 19th-century Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis and today’s DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in medicine in the USA have in common? Both represent pivotal moments when outdated, expert-driven practices clashed with more inclusive, patient-centered approaches.

This is an eye-opening personal essay tracing a 200-year history of harmful, expert-centric practices and how they face the life-saving global shift towards patient empowerment in the 21st century. Over the next few weeks, I will share the first three chapters of this thought-provoking journey, piece by piece, like a breathtaking saga.

The first chapter will delve into the overlooked intersection of expert-centric perception, ego, science’s race theory, eugenics, and European colonization—seen from a human—and patient-centric perspective. We’ll explore how human- and patient-centric paradigm shifts have struggled to find acceptance while innovations that prioritize expertise over humanity have been embraced more easily.

Chapter 1: The making of the expert-centric perception of humanity in the West.

Our dramatic story starts in the nineteenth century, often called the golden age of the physician-scientist in the West, because of shifts in medical practices and the birth of evidence-based medicine. Doctors grew to perceive human bodies as machines, diseases as mechanical errors to correct, and patients as an extension of their increasingly popular art. Indeed, physicians began to focus on collecting and interpreting data, a practice that continues to be a cornerstone of modern Western medicine. The era saw the first international scientific conference (in Chemistry) on September 3, 1860, in Germany (Karlsruhe), the then-leader in the ever-competitive Western science. More importantly, the Western separation between science and the humanities, and so humanity, began.

The year is 1847. Ignaz Semmelweis, a 29-year-old Hungarian physician, crunches data from Vienna’s General Hospital’s maternity department. To his surprise, he discovers that women in the ward staffed with all male doctors and medical students died almost five times more after giving birth than in the clinic entirely run by midwives.

After one of Semmelweis’ colleagues fell ill and died, the bewildered physician performed an autopsy and discovered his fellow died from the same disease as the women the latter treated. The difference between the treating physicians and midwives was the first ones did autopsies. Semmelweis hypothesized that something got transferred from the cadavers to the patients, building on Renaissance Italian physician Girolamo Fracastoro’s 1546 theory that transferable invisible particles caused epidemic diseases. So, Semmelweis asked doctors to wash their hands and instruments with chlorine on top of soap to remove the cadaverous particles’ smell. As a result, women’s mortality decreased dramatically.

Convinced his groundbreaking theory and simple solution could save countless humans and not just women, Semmelweis shared the results of his studies with the scientific community. However, the budding Hungarian physician met a shocking fate: the field rejected his lifesaving idea. Medical practitioners didn’t like that Semmelweis’ new theory focused on experts causing disease. Besides, the miasma theory of Greek physicians Hippocrates (460-370 BCE) and Galen (129-216 CE) hypothesized that “bad air” caused deadly fevers. Despite Girolamo Fracastoro’s trailblazing concept of contaminant germs (spores) in the 16th European Renaissance, it was the most popular belief. The scientific community concluded Semmelweis didn’t present enough facts to refute their long-held belief. Despite the surprising rejection, the determined scientist extended the scope of his research to cleaning the physicians’ materials, hurting his reluctant peers’ pride.

Experts chose to save and care for their egos over patients’ lives, leaving a trail of orphans and widows to fend for themselves in destitute Europe blackened by industrialization’s toxic fumes that Hugo’s “Les Misérables” and Dicken’s “Oliver Twist” illustrated so well. Indeed, patients aren’t just individuals; they are a constellation. A whole universe is impacted as much as they are.

Semmelweis lost his job. Amid the Atlantic Revolutions, whose nationalism shaped today’s Western identity, the anti-Hungarian sentiment in Austria against Hungary’s independence and civil rights didn’t help Semmelweise’s young career. Austrian obstetrician Carl Braun, a miasma theory advocate, and Semmelweis’s academic nemesis got promoted. The physicians in Vienna’s General Hospital’s maternity department stopped washing their hands and instruments; the high mortality rate resumed, and their pride was saved.

Undeterred, Semmelweis continued to spread his life-saving theory. His relentless efforts continued to face staunch resistance from the Western science establishment. After years of encountering his colleagues’ rigid behavior, his mental health declined, leading to his confinement in a Viennese “insane asylum” where he was likely beaten, as per then-acceptable patient treatment, and developed a gangrenous wound.

Tragically, in 1865, at the age of 47, he died with his theory from sepsis, the same illness he had sought to save countless women from. Humanity would have to wait for French Chemist and pharmacist Louis Pasteur, German physician and microbiologist Robert Koch, and British surgeon and medical scientist Joseph Lister to further document and push the germ theory in 1861. The latter gained the scientific community’s acceptance around 1885. Experts finally conceded to washing their hands and instruments to avoid harming patients: the era brought the concepts of sanitization and hygiene. The simple hygienic protocol also became the first-line standard for curbing epidemics, which is still valid today.

When Semmelweis presented his paradigm-shifting concept, he encountered what I’d call Western science’s magical thinking: the harmful projection of Western scientists’ cultural beliefs and egocentric perceptions into science. This magical thinking birthed the concept of race in the 18th century during the Western Enlightenment. Highly educated experts used Western science’s binary logic, discriminatory approach, and Eurocentric perceptions to define me, a woman of African descent with dark skin, as the lowest human division and the highest animal one. I was rendered impure, sinful, stupid, ugly, undesirable—everything contrary to White European academics’ positive self-perception, according to their simplistic binary logic. All other races that science created fell in between.

Thus, race theory marks when science’s binary logic merged with cultural binary thinking and dehumanization, at least from humanity’s perspective. In the Eurocentric perception, it was progress.

The nineteenth century, the golden age of the physician-scientist, welcomed the schism between science and the humanities: Western science officially outsourced its humanity to another discipline. The period also marked the rise of nationalism and the modern European diaspora’s identity. It was a worrying intersection of realities, at least seen from humankind’s perspective. Meanwhile, in the Eurocentric perception, it was the inevitable progress of Civilization with a Capital C.

From this reality intersection, Europe expanded its brutal colonization of humanity’s reality to transform it into Europe 2.0, believing European culture was the ultimate best humanity could receive. Science’s racial theory helped the privileged European ruling class justify the genocide, enslavement, and savage exploitation of perceived inferior races—meaning most of humanity. Meanwhile, technological progress facilitated the brutal exploitation of global resources and their exponential accumulation in the newly formed West.

Like any Western science concept, scientific racism has evolved from the 17^th century, when it was the mainstream thought, until today, when it lures in academia’s darkest corners, waiting for suitable conditions to pop up. French physician and world explorer François Bernier was the first to develop a comprehensive classification of humanity in his 1684 work, Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races l’habitant (New Earth division by the different species or races inhabiting it). Swedish physician, biologist, and naturalist Carl Linnaeus and German physician, anthropologist, and naturalist Johann Blumenbach redefined the concept of race in 1735 and 1779. While Western science fell out with scientific racism after the Holocaust’s Nazi experiments, it resurfaced during the Civil Rights and Decolonization Movement in the sixties. The cornerstone of scientific racism, Mankind Quarterly, was founded in 1960 and is still active today.

Sometimes, uncritical publications make the headlines, like in 1994 when two Harvard-educated European American experts, one psychologist, and a political scientist published “The Bell Curve.” They argued that the statistical assessment of US students showed that Black students had, on average, 15 points less than White students in the Intellectual Quotient (IQ), a tool developed in 1905 by French psychologist Alfred Binet on Europeans based on European binary logic. As the book reignited binary logic’s “nurture vs. nature” old dilemma, the Havard-educated European American scientists concluded that African Americans needed more educational resources to close the perceived gap. Other European American academics educated in similar exclusive universities counter-argued that African Americans were a lost cause. Most statisticians decried the scientific study’s flawed statistical methods.

Meanwhile, diverse humanities scholars highlighted that IQ tests are often content with problem-solving approaches that are more familiar to individuals from the Western middle. They were biased against non-European descendants and other cultures, as Yale and Sandford alumnus European American psychologist Robert Stenberg pointed out in his discerning work. For those academics, context mattered as in my ancestral African multidimensional rationality.

Indeed, Western science often forgot that it worked with a Eurocentric perception that flattened reality to one dimension. I was then a humble teenage scientific student in an underprivileged Parisian suburb. In my young multicultural perception, the heated debate was another uninspiring European binary logic’s self-made problem that determined which sole reality was right. I saw an additional dimension where the study assessed how seasoned African American students were to the bland European culture and how deeply their ancestral multidimensional culture was colonized. On the Atlantic’s overlooked other side, I wondered how many American academics of African descent perceived it that way, somewhere in the darkest corner of an underfunded State university.

While Western science debunked the racial theory, today’s modern medical research still refers to race because it has become a deeply rooted social construct, and scientists are society’s members. So, researchers often mistakenly used race as a discriminative proxy of ethnicity, meaning ancestry and related genetics, to develop innovative targeted treatments adapted to individual needs. Increasingly, academics also accurately use race to address overlooked systemic health inequities. Still, as a pharma regulatory scientist and writer on science decoloniality, my leaden heart pounds, and my multicultural mind sharpens whenever I review data that include scientific racism’s damned legacy, scanning for possible overlooked haunting ghosts. The more uniform the scientist’s global teams are, the less educated they are on the humanities, decoloniality, and humanity’s authentic natural diversity, and the more my perceptive ears catch eerie echoes from a forgotten past.

Many before us have addressed the blatant injustice of European colonization that left long-lasting traumas. There are extensive accounts of numerous slave revolts, indigenous wars, and writings like Mark Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a 1905 pamphlet against the Belgian King’s brutal exploitation of Congo, my ancestral land. Meanwhile, many others fled as far as they could, as my Kongo family did after one of us, a child, was caught, enslaved, and shipped to the Americas eight generations ago in the late 18^th century. Since then, no children have been born in the same place as their parents. Sometimes, I joke that we are still runaway non-slaves: the darkest humor can be the best medicine in the darkest hour.

In multidimensional rationality, the 19th century is dehumanizing for humanity while perceived as enlightened by European standards. In this context, British naturalist, geologist, and biologist Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859 and confirmed I and other African descendants were at humankind’s deepest bottom. Then, Darwin’s second cousin, British statistician, psychologist, anthropologist, and world explorer Francis Galton, conceptualized modern eugenics in 1883, two years before the Western scientific community accepted Semmelweis’ germ theory and physicians finally washed their hands and instruments to protect patients.

Eugenics was Western science’s establishment’s perceived next sanitization progress, eradicating perceived dysfunctional humans to facilitate an interpretative natural selection of the perceived best humankind. It was one of the educated responses that addressed the worrying growing slums that Western science-based industrialization generated and that Dickens and Hugo humanely described. So, science’s European binary logic of validation and invalidation and discriminative approach furthered division within the so-called European White race. To improve humankind, Western science experts set themselves, an educated ultra-minority, as a standard of purity to remove perceived wrong humans and reproduce the perceived right ones.

Thus, the definition of normality became a wealthy, cis-heterosexual, slender, able-bodied, disease-free, educated White European male with steadfast Christian morality, rationality, meaning, unwavering European binary logic, also called humanity’s rationality or common sense, discriminative intelligence, and unbreakable emotional restraint. Ruling elites and academics considered this egocentric standard the natural order, as the eugenics’ deep-rooted tree illustrates. The infamous image showing every Western knowledge discipline says, “Like a tree, eugenics draws its materials from many sources and organizes them into a harmonious entity.”

So, in this self-absorbed definition of humankind and European binary logic, the purity standard’s moral failures weren’t natural: they didn’t represent who the valid standard was. Meanwhile, for non-standards like me and most humankind, moral failures were proof of our innate dysfunction, confirming our invalid existences were nature’s error. This perception became the bed on which today’s modern Western science was developed and informed policies eliminating the perceived non-conformed by captivity, segregation, exile, or death to ensure humanity’s purity and uniformity to the perceived best standard.

Indeed, the 19^th-century scientific discriminative approach based on European binary logic, also called humanity’s rationality, became so popular that it spread to other disciplines. Statistics and data began to define Western reality and humankind because of European colonization of humanity’s reality to become our rationalized existence today. Meanwhile, in the early 20^th century, eugenics became an international multidisciplinary movement that informed political science and perceived rational governmental decisions.

Britain hosted the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912 in London, with Major Leonard Darwin as president and Winston Churchill as one of the co-presidents. Among other prominent participants were British ex-Prime Minister Lord Balfour and Chemistry Nobel Prize recipient Sir William Ramsay, literacy hostess and patron of the arts, socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell, and European American Harvard President emeritus Charles William Eliot. Many of Galton’s fellow statisticians participated, as most of those who defined today’s statistics were eugenicists, like British Karl Pearson and Ronald Fischer. The brilliant trio established statisticians as objective data referees with little-challenged methods still used today in medical research, my chosen field of work. Their contribution to science echoed loudly in the 1994 publication, “The Bell Curve,” asserting US African descendant students’ inferior intellectual capacities. This underscores the importance of critically examining the context of statistical data.

Britain hosted the first International Eugenics Congress in 1912 in London, with Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, and future Britain’s Prime Minister and Literature Nobel Prize recipient Winston Churchill as one of the co-presidents. Amongst other prominent diverse participants were British ex-Prime Minister Lord Balfour and Chemistry Nobel Prize recipient Sir William Ramsay, literacy hostess and patron of the arts, socialite Lady Ottoline Morrell, and European American Harvard President emeritus Charles William Eliot, amongst many others.

Besides, many of Galton’s fellow statisticians participated, as most of those who defined today’s statistics were eugenicists, like British Karl Pearson and Ronald Fischer. The brilliant trio established statisticians as objective data referees with little-challenged methods still used today in medical research, my chosen field of work. Their contribution to science echoed loud and clear in the 1994 publication, “The Bell Curve,” asserting US African descendant students’ inferior intellectual capacities. This underscores the importance of critically examining the context of statistical data. This is why medical science research doesn’t ask plumbing engineers to review statistical data of clogged artery studies. Yet, many uniform teams of European descendant scientists don’t see the issue with reviewing statistical data of psychology’s research on African descendants and other cultures that Europe colonized.

Like today’s medical conferences, experts presented and discussed the latest innovations while networking and exchanging ideas in the first International Eugenics Congress. Infamous biased studies like European American psychologist and segregationist Henry H. Goddard’s “The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness, 1912.” The study became scientific references to prove “inherited social degeneration” in poor European descendants and, by Eurocentric projection, humanity. They were the basis of policies to eliminate disability, poverty, ethnic diversity, and other perceived undesirable traits through forced sterilization and campaigns encouraging the perceived fittest humans, meaning the closest to Western science’s self-absorbed standard, to reproduce and socially inbreed.

Eugenics’ reproductive context empowered wealthy women of European descent to control who belonged to womanhood and what good children were, as their male counterparts decided who belonged to humanity and what good humans were.  The standard for humankind’s women was to become self-effacing White European wives and able-bodied, dutiful, self-sacrificing mothers.

While liberating themselves, early feminists, like Swedish diplomat feminist and Peace Nobel recipient Alva Myrdal, the Canadian socialites the Famous Five, Margaret Sanger, the founder of US Planned Parenthood (known as American Birth Control League then), and many privileged others, had a documented history of harming women that statisticians marginalized.  Many advocated for birth control and forced sterilization of “degenerate” women’s fertility, which was seen as contaminating a perfect Western society and improvable humanity.

Desirable women’s children were described as pure, innocent, vulnerable beings and future productive individuals with pristine legacies. They had to be protected at all costs. Later, they had growing pains when they acted out in adolescence and mental health issues when they committed despicable crimes in adulthood, all requiring understanding and empathy. Meanwhile, “degenerate” women’s children had fewer adolescent growing pains and mental issues in adulthood. Their failures were only proof of their innate inadequacy. They needed to be erased from society. This biased perception echoed in my childhood in the nineties when I saw my poor, diverse community’s former playdates jailed while, for the same misdemeanor and blank state, my wealthy uniform university’s schoolmates received a slap on their vulnerable wrists.

Many early Western feminists supported harmful policies, taking poor and Indigenous children away and raising them in unfit institutions and families, instilling pure Eurocentric values. There, the orphans learned to worship pure European Whiteness and hate and forget their own culture and social class, as my then-seven-year-old Kongo mother experienced when the fifties’ French colonial system sent her away from her family to grow up in a French-run catholic boarding school in Congo.

Besides, Western physicians helped “unfortunate” parents who birthed children with disability by letting the undesirable offspring die at birth or be institutionalized when they survived. Scientists did everything possible to help the “unfit” children to normalize them, like the ableist visible speech for people with deafness developed in 1867 by Scottish Melville Graham, the father of scientist, inventor, and co-founder of the National Geographic Society Alexander Graham Bell.

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight, but no vision,” former eugenicist and American writer Helen Keller said, as the truly disabled were those who had “eyes of ignorance.”  Eugenics is the haunting ghost that blinds traditional Western feminism to the extensive reality spreading beyond a 200-year-old scientific Western standard. The harmful science still echoes in my childhood in the eighties in France, when I accompanied my mother to our diverse, disfranchised neighborhood’s mother and child protection clinic. The colorful reproductive health campaign poster warned us, “One child, it’s okay. Two, it’s still okay. Three, it’s enough already!”

Today’s standard feminism liberates its full-bodied reality, promotes the right to birth control, and refuses to be an accessory to male reproduction. Meanwhile, non-standard feminism focuses on the right to give birth. Countless people with disabilities, living in poverty, or those with darker skin, mostly women, have reported unwanted sterilization until 2024. I witnessed so many horror stories in my community. So I suffered from exhausting bleeding uterine benign tumors after I moved to the Netherlands, it took me ten years to entrust the Dutch physicians with my womb. Indeed, the runaway non-slave in me gets off the starting blocks whenever I meet doctors of European descent who know nothing little about humanity beyond themselves and claim they can help all humans.

While many non-standards face Western magical thinking, Western feminism’s traditional European binary logic would instead debate if transwomen belong to womanhood. It’s what Western rationality often does, debating on preserving a dehumanizing status quo: are African descendants humans? Is it ok to enslave them? Are other humans equal to European descendants? Are women equal to men? Are LGBT+ and people with disabilities equal to abled-bodied and minded cis-heterosexual people? Do they all deserve equal treatment and pay as the scientific human standard? Shall patient subjective experience be included in objective science? Shall patients’ work advancing medical research be paid? I don’t have a problem with patriarchy but with this sole restrictive cultural logic.

Therefore, I refuse to identify with mainstream Western feminism and accept its Eurocentric limitations. I was raised in ancestral African matriarchal and Dharmic Asian cultures, despite the colonial self-righteous efforts to erase them. So, I have a multicultural way of processing reality beyond right or wrong: anybody curious enough can meet me there, as enlightened Muslim Iran poet Rumi declaimed 800 years ago.

In my enriching multidimensional logic, there exists an uncomfortable dimension where the self-righteousness, unspeakable actions, and dehumanizing standardization of eugenics proponents have engineered today’s Western middle class. Known as the law-abiding people, good and useful citizens, normal or mainstream, this class is perceived as still innocent, pure, and vulnerable, needing protection from any concerns, much like good children.

In this infantilizing context, eugenics contributed to the European colonization’s perceived life-saving mission of “Think local; act global.” The globalization of the middle class supported the transformation of humanity into Europe 2.0, also known as industrialization. It enabled a minority to amass immense wealth through a demand-and-supply economy based on standardized mass production and purposeless economic growth. This growth depended on the multiplication and unquenchable consumption of the law-abiding good people. It fostered the deadly idea that this unsustainable economic model and limited European binary-logic-based technology are reliable hallmarks of humanity’s development.

Eugenics’ ghost echoes when Western economists worry about the perceived population overgrowth in non-Western countries and the perceived population decline in the West. Through a step further in European discriminative binary logic, some even decry the decreasing birth rate of the perceived superior European descendants within the West.

Eugenics-designed reality became the global normality, a challenging status quo to defend at all costs under the penalty of losing a sense of identity. Indeed, in the West, oppression isn’t guarded by Iron Curtains, preventing people from seeing humanity’s reality. It’s guarded by the inertia of self-righteous adults who roam feeling pure, innocent, unconcerned, and free.

In Western medical science, Eurocentric inertia has been held by magical thinking. In the early 20^th century, the racially segregated USA competed to dethrone Germany’s leadership in science to define humanity’s normality and reality. After WWI devastated Europe, New York’s American Museum of Natural History held the next two International Eugenics Congresses in 1921 and 1932. As the cream of stock birthed perceived innovations by inbreeding ideas about so-called racial hygiene, American Canadian British scientist Alexander Graham Bell was president of the second conference. 

Other influential participants were Banker and philanthropist J.P. Morgan Jr, a Harvard alumnus who sponsored the creation of the American Eugenics Society. Influential eugenicist Harvard alumnus Charles Davenport led the latter. He was also leader of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, and statistician economist and progressive social campaigner Yale alumnus Irving Fisher. Yet, US President Herbert Hoover, a Stanford alumnus, was the most prominent American participant.

Indeed, many American politicians were eugenicists, such as US Presidents Woodrow Wilson, who was a Princeton alumnus, and Theodore Roosevelt, who was a Harvard and Columbia alumnus. Both Wilson and Roosevelt were Peace Nobel Prize recipients. Besides, Roosevelt created the mighty Food and Drug Administration with Harvard alumnus Harvey Wiley, a chemist obsessed with food and drug purity.

From Europe, representing France, my birth country, was anthropology Professor Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge, one of the conference’s key speakers about racial hygiene. His infamous work inspired Hitler and the Nazis. At the end of the third and last International Eugenics Congress, the uniform congregation unanimously elected Davenport’s sensational successor to helm the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations: psychiatrist, geneticist, and soon-to-be infamous Nazi Swiss German Ernst Rüdin. Germany succeeded in keeping the leadership in science and was about to purify its territory from perceived infecting non-standards. Fifty years after Britain conceptualized the procedure aimed to purify humankind, the world was about to witness the harm of uncritical medical science. When I think Semmelweis only wanted physicians to wash their hands…

In 1924, British Christian theologian, philosopher, and writer G.K. Chesterton said about the Eurocentric Western culture, “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” As per European binary logic, an invalidated reality was replaced by a perceived valid one. 

After WWII, the law-abiding good people of the so-called civilized world confronted the horrors of eugenics in Germany. Millions of Jews, Soviets, Roma, LGBTQ+ individuals, people with disabilities, dissidents, and other non-standards deemed unfit to reproduce were tortured and killed in an attempt to create a “perfect” reality. The Doctor’s Trial in Nuremberg (1946-1947), led by the segregated USA, exposed the terrifying Nazi experiments rooted in delusional thinking and the same intellectual rigidity that once wore out Semmelweis’ sanity.

A dim light bulb went on. In the inbred intellectual reality eugenics left, the defendant was the police, the prosecutor, the jury, the judge, and the court reporter. Elites couldn’t condemn their peers without incriminating themselves. So, many indicted eugenicists, like Ernest Rüdin, argued that they didn’t do more than their American peers.

The segregated USA only convicted 17 physicians. As for the thousands of other experts involved in eugenics, their horrifying actions were only an unfortunate error of judgment; they didn’t represent who they were. These uncritical experts acknowledged their mistakes. They labeled racism and eugenics as pseudo-science (false science), pulling the first global academic Shaggy: “It wasn’t me!” The uncomfortable past was buried in a cultural subconscious along with the non-standard experiences: this binary logic’s invalidation was called scientific learning. Scientists continued roaming, feeling pure, innocent, unconcerned, and free, allowing future generations to sing along while progressing to another reality they perceived valid.  That’s how we still make science today: shoot innovation first, ask questions later, and let the humanities deal with the causalities.

Indeed, post-WWII, as the segregated USA took the lead in science, most eugenicists pursued successful careers in a new echo chamber. Medical science continued to be designed by and for European descendants, its magical thinking claiming its applicability to all humanity. Universities closed their eugenics departments, rebranding them as genetics. This allowed eugenicists to educate the next generation of scientists, including American James Watson and British Francis Crick, who were proponents of eugenics. They famously received a Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for their groundbreaking DNA discovery in 1962. Meanwhile, unethical experiments on perceived inferior humans continued, as my parents witnessed in the fifties in the colonized French Congo, where physicians used our family and friends as lab animals.

In Dharmic Asian philosophy, the intersection of ignorance and arrogance, also known as ego, is the worst hindrance to learning and progress. To my utter dismay, many innocent, pure, unconcerned, and free peers don’t learn or sometimes forget about eugenics, even if it is still deeply rooted in Western knowledge and genetics precursor.  Indeed, the educational system’s binary logic asked us to choose between Science, with a Capital S, and the less-valued humanities to define humanity’s reality, and science history belongs to the latter. Even when they learned it, it’s not articulated like this enlightening decolonized story because, until the 2020s, Western historical narratives were an unacknowledged tool to boost national pride and egos.

So, today, when I see some law-abiding, concerned peers taking the lead in finding innovative gene therapy to help patients by eradicating disability caused by genetic disease, my non-standard hair stands on end.

We have different histories with Western science. One is the highly biased court reporter’s uncritical, inbred version, and the other is the subjective patient’s self-aware account. Efforts for diversity and inclusion in medical science, which many support, as I do, are like a long-due necessary therapy against centuries of reality blindness. Decolonizing Western science help to unearth, analyze, and address deeply rooted harmful behaviors to help humankind recover from a deadly old medicine called eugenics that turned out to be pure poison.

For people with non-standard humanity like me, meaning most humans, diversity and inclusion are often questions of life or death in medical science. My bones shake almost to death when I think about all those lives left to be cared for by the minds of uncleaned minds today, as Semmelweis did facing the many lives left in uncleaned hands in time 200 years ago.

Most patients depend on makers the critical thinking, humility, and authentic knowledge of humanity of concerned healthcare professionals and decision-makers. We count upon them to stop worshipping Western expertise as if they were humankind’s omniscient Gods. So, we rely on their profound ability to self-reflect on the rest of our story in the following chapters, while most only started learning about the first.