[Sci-tech-public] [STS Prizes and Awards] Announcement of Winning Papers, 2025-26 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize

[Willamina Hadley]

Sent on behalf of Eden Medina, MIT STS department head:

Dear STS Community,

Each year MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society offers the Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize<https://sts-program.mit.edu/benjamin-siegel-writing-prize/> to the MIT students submitting the best written work on issues in science, technology, and society. The Prize was established in 1990 by family and friends to honor the memory of Benjamin Siegel, S.B. 1938, Ph.D. The prize is open to students at MIT from any department or school. In 2026, the Prize will be divided into two divisions, an Undergraduate Division and a Graduate Division, with the undergraduate winner receiving a $500 prize and the graduate winner receiving a $2,000 prize. This year's committee is composed of Robin Scheffler, Ishani Saraf, and Oliver Rollins.

MIT's STS Program is pleased to announce that it has awarded the 2025-26 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize, Undergraduate Division, to Elizabeth Wright, for their essay "From Fact Denial to Solution Denial: The Social Causes and Consequences of Economic Denialism."

Elizabeth Wright provides a nuanced interpretation of the political position of scientific knowledge in modern society. While a commonplace progressive understanding of research is that it constitutes a social good, Elizabeth Wright argues that this does not capture how the advance of scientific knowledge impacts different interest groups in society. The adverse impacts of developing knowledge of climate change and enforcing regulations on different industries has given rise to a phenomenon known as "economic denalism"-- denial which is less about accepting or rejecting the tenants of science than it is about anticipating and seeking to stymie its uses for policy. If the arc of science and policy in the twentieth century was one of building communities of trusted experts, the economic denialism that coalesced  later int the twentieth century was its inverse image- assembling its own infrastructure of communities and experts with an eye towards eroding trust in science and undermining its norms of argumentation and proof. Elizabeth Wright does not seek to condemn "economic dentalism" as antiscience, but in tracing how it has been used in climate change suggests that its force is not only about  raising epistemic questions about science but in reestablishing the idea that science and society are linked-in its suggestion that particular forms of science make a particular form of society, and that consensus on science cannot operate absent consensus on the kind of society that policymakers seek to create. This form of "adaptive resistance" provides an instructive example of how scientists can  understand the role of their research and its role in creating a better world  in the complex and contentious terrain of modern American politics.

               - Siegel Prize Committee Members

We are equally pleased to announce that we have awarded the 2025-26 Benjamin Siegel Writing Prize, Graduate Division, to Odinaka Kingsley Eze, for their essay "A Rapid Course to Death": Cerebrospinal Meningitis and Epidemic Seasonality in Northern Nigeria,1905-1939."

For the graduate prize, Odinaka Kingsley Eze has written a lucid and deeply researched exploration of responses to outbreaks of Cerebro-Spinal Meningitis (CSM) in Northern Nigeria during the twentieth century- unlike the control of other diseases through public health efforts, CSM remained stubbornly persistent. Odinaka Kingsley Eze shows that this reflects the interplay of the biological basis of the disease as a rapid, fatal, and environmentally-mediated condition with the colonial and post-colonial structures of public health and biomedical research in Nigeria. Successive outbreaks of CSM occurred and retreated more rapidly than British and then Nigerian public health authorities could respond- the narrative of "seasonality" draped over all these outbreaks forestalled more vigorous investigation of the disease and its potential therapies. Chronic lack of investment in public health infrastructure, including promising indigenous therapies for CSM,  allowed the disease to persist- rooting its causes in the social conditions of Northern Nigeria. Anticolonial activists saw the inability of the British to control CSM outbreaks as a mark of the failure of the colonial system. However, the tension between social and biomedical understandings of public health was a point of striking continuity during Nigeria's transition from colony to nation in the 1960s. The "cyclical" interpretation of outbreaks left little room for further investment, only observation. By the 1990s, an especially large CSM outbreak produced conditions for a widely-condemned clinical trial of a new CSM treatment that was given by Pfizer without consent to 200 children, resulting in the death of 12. Indeed, the failure of public health systems to deal with CSM across the twentieth century provides a new appreciation of the origins of widespread vaccine skepticism around the region- as long as these systems were seen as merely reacting to outbreaks rather than seeking their root causes or investing in the care of the afflicted the roots of medical authority remained shallow indeed.

               - Siegel Prize Committee Members

Congratulations to Elizabeth Wright and Odinaka Kingsley Eze for their prize-winning essays, and my thanks to Robin Scheffler, Ishani Saraf, and Oliver Rollins for serving as the faculty representatives on this year's STS Committee on Prizes and Awards.

Eden Medina
Head, Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Professor of Science, Technology, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
eden at mit.edu<mailto:eden at mit.edu>

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