Many more kinds of people, all in different ethical relationships with one another, occupy the space of an exercise physiologist’s “field.” As a result, working in a far more socially heterogeneous space than their walled-off, keyed-in laboratories, exercise physiologists in the field distribute the ethical responsibility for human subjects’ research to actors outside the scientist-subject relationship. This is not to say that scientists in the field deny any responsibility for the well-being of their human subjects, only that scientists may consider that responsibility shared across a more diverse array of actors, from sporting event directors and coaches, who solicit athletes’ consent to participate in competition or training and who provide physical or emotional care to athletes, to others who use, share, or maintain the space of the field site, to the subjects themselves. (Sure, Neil fell during Andrew’s field study, but both Andrew and Neil attrib- uted the fall to a wet spot in the park and Neil’s attempt to take the turn too quickly.) The social heterogeneity of the field enables the ethical rela- tionship between the scientist and subject to be much more diffuse, at
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times even invisible. While Neil knew he was being studied by Andrew, in other field studies the subject does not even know the scientist is there.
I now take you into the “not-lab” of the Comrades Marathon. The Comrades Marathon is an 89-km (56 mile) race between the cities of Pietermaritzburg and Durban in the KwaZulu Natal province of South Africa. Initiated in 1921 as a living tribute to soldiers who died in World War I, the Comrades Marathon attracts participants from all over the world. For many South African runners, the race is something of a pil- grimage, with women and non-white men first officially allowed to par- ticipate in 1975. All participants who finish the race within a cut-off time (12 hours) earn a nationally recognized medal. Each year, teams of South African exercise physiologists travel to the Comrades Marathon to study participants’ performances and to track various factors that might lead to or prevent fatigue. I had been documenting one team’s laboratory studies when the opportunity arose to accompany a physiologist, whom I will call Kara, on her field study of hydration. Kara’s goal was to document the serum sodium levels of fatigued (collapsed) runners as they received intravenous (IV) fluids. Over a span of about ten hours on race day, Kara’s field study unfolded in the Comrades medical tent, a space roughly 50–60 meters × 25 meters enclosed by parachute material (Fig. 3).
Located at the end of the race in Pietermaritzburg, by the end of the day this field site appeared more like a military clinic than a road race.
Messy, indeed.
Kara spent a great deal of time and effort during the day coordinating her field research with the activities of many kinds of people who had as much or more claim to the space as she did. In fact, there were so many different kinds of people that they wore different color T-shirts. Green meant “runner” (not in the athlete sense of the word, but in the “gofer”
sense of the word); yellow, doctor; gray, specialist; blue, nurses, sisters, or anyone who could take blood samples and blood pressure; orange, stretcher-bearers; yellow with black trim, massage therapists; red, physio- therapists. Kara’s research team did not have its own color, though they all wore a shirt with the logo of their institution. Other people occupying the tent over the course of the day included a drug enforcement officer, grocery store clerks who “checked in” the athletes, high school volunteers, and family members looking for missing runners.
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Social heterogeneity is a distinguishing feature of field science. STS scholars have noted the ways in which twentieth-century high-altitude physiologists collaborated with alpinists, royalty, artists, soldiers, and guides (Heggie 2016b, p. 815); wildlife ecologists integrated their work with the lives of local farmers and hunters (Kohler 2002); primatologists navigated amongst the activities of tourists and backpackers, hunters, people who needed wood, other scientists, local field assistants, local administrators, park wardens and managers, and journalists (Rees 2006);
and scientists conducting agricultural field trials articulated their experi- ments with inspectors from the county agricultural commissioner’s office,
Fig. 3 The empty tent (Photo by A. Johnson) A. Johnson
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migrant workers, Immigration and Naturalization Service agents, and thieves (Henke 2000).8 STS scholarship on field science reveals how, in the words of historian Lynette Schumaker, “scientists in the field develop methods in response to political, social, cultural, and material conditions, which include the preexisting practices of others who share the field”
(1996, p. 258). Adding to these studies of non-human sciences, this eth- nographic account of exercise physiology field studies reveals the effect social heterogeneity has on scientist-subject relations.
First, as described above, exercise physiologists rely upon “the field” to elicit fatigue “naturally,” allowing scientists to move to the shadows or the sidelines of the human performance. In a sea of other people, the scien- tists no longer occupy center stage, no longer need to dominate the research encounter. Second, the social heterogeneity of “the field”
demands that exercise physiologists modify the ways they care for their research subjects and their data. Medical anthropologist Adriana Petryna has documented and critiqued flexible and therefore suspect applications of international ethics standards in global pharmaceutical research. She has showed how ethics are “used variably and tactically by all actors in a chain of interests involved in human subjects research” (2006, p. 53). In exercise physiology field studies, ethics are distributed across different relationships, often removing the scientist from the view of the subject.
The consequence of this mechanism of invisibility, distributed ethics, is that, even though the athlete may sign different forms of consent (or waivers of liability) for different actors in the field, the athlete may not be aware of his or her participation in the exercise physiologist’s specific study.
Several moments from Kara’s field study exemplify how, in navigating socially heterogeneous spaces in the field, scientists distribute the ethical responsibility for the care of their research subjects and data and in so doing make their own presence less evident to their subjects. About 10 a.m. (over four hours after the start of the race), while still waiting for collapsed runners to be brought into the tent, Kara reviewed her protocol with the head doctor. Kara and the doctor agreed to abandon her pro- posed rehydration protocol and instead to ask the medical personnel to administer a liter of fluid, tracked over time and, if necessary, another liter. Kara emphasized that what she really needed were the athletes’
blood sodium values over time (which would require the doctors to take
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discharge blood samples). The medical director assented. They agreed that each person on her team would partner with a particular doctor and area of the tent. Finally, when Kara began describing her process for get- ting informed consent from individual collapsed runners, the medical director steadfastly refused, asserting, “This is a privileged area” and reminding her that she is “not doing anything.” Kara explained that she needed informed consent to publish the data. He shrugged, “Nonsense,”
offering to take full responsibility if any runners objected to having the amalgamated data published down the road. Kara acquiesced, partially distributing the research ethics of both care and consent through this medical authority.9
Throughout the day, Kara’s team of physiologists maintained control over the athlete’s blood, for the most part unbeknownst to the runners themselves, by working with and through other people who occupied the field site. By 2:30 in the afternoon, the orange-shirted stretcher-bearers (mostly high school rugby players) entered the tent regularly, carrying collapsed runners. Over the next four hours, the medical tent buzzed with activity. The gray-shirted specialists roamed. Kara’s team of physi- ologists occasionally chatted with their runner-subjects, checked clip- boards, and walked blood samples over to the folks at the radiometer.
By 6 p.m., over 12 hours since the race itself began, the scientists and others in the tent were still working, the tent full and busy (Fig. 4). With the sun setting and temperature plummeting, people layered on sweaters and coats. The runner-subjects laid on cots under wool blankets, making friends with the runners lying to their right and left, sometimes holding hands and telling each other it will be okay—another example of distrib- uted care. When Kara offered to go to the hospital to follow up on three cases of hyponatremia, the medical director did not think this was appro- priate and went alone. In total, 237 cases of collapse—maximum perfor- mances that “actually happened”—were seen in the medical tent that day, and Kara went on to publish the results from her field study in a peer- reviewed article about the relationship between serum sodium values, IV fluid administration, and recovery in collapsed runners. Kara remains one of the world experts on the physiology of hydration and fatigue.
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What does an ethnographic perspective on Kara’s field study reveal about how the place of science affects knowledge production or about differences between the lab and the field at the level of practice? All field scientists—regardless of their object of study, regardless of whether they are interested in bobwhite quail in Wisconsin, celery in California, sex workers in Chicago, or blood sodium values in Pietermaritzburg—navi- gate the social heterogeneity of their field sites. They work to understand a local culture, negotiate with others, and gain trust. Indeed, at the level of practice, Kara’s field study required different skills of her than in the laboratory: She had to talk to different kinds of people, smile, help others out, sit back and be patient, compromise, strategize, and vigilantly watch over the actions of people who were not her research subjects. In fact, her research subjects hardly knew she was there.
Fig. 4 The full tent, with different color T-shirts indicating different kinds of actors. The figures under gray blankets are fatigued (collapsed) runners (Photo by A. Johnson)
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