First off: We speak to biologist and science blogger, Danielle N. Lee, who was called an “urban whore,” by the editor of Biology-online.org after she turned down an email request to guest-blog for free. Danielle, a zoologist at Oklahoma State University (OKU) maintains the blog called “The Urban Scientist” on the Scientific American website. We’ll get her reactions to the controversy; and, we’ll also discuss her mission as a black woman, to diversify the science field. The burning question: How does a black girl from the hood become a biologist, and how can we get more kids in under-served communities involved and interested in the sciences?

Next up: We go international! In this segment we speak with Canadian blogger, Telisha Ng, the publisher of the website Goddess Intellect. We’ll discuss this weeks controversy involving Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, and his crack smoking scandal. We’ll attempt to get to the bottom of North America’s newest drug haven, Toronto, Canada.

Finally: We speak to “The Janitor” — our resident legal expert — of the blog The Urban Politico about the latest political news in the wake of this week’s elections. We’ll also take a close look at CNN’s Don Lemon, and his defense and partial endorsement of the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policy. The burning question: Should minorities across the country consider sacrificing “political correctness” for safety as Don Lemon suggests?

Listen to the episode below:

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Danielle Lee is another one of its well-known scientific writers. Lee, a biologist who studies animal behavior, mammals and the ways organisms interact with their environment, earned a doctoral degree in biology from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, was named Young Professional of the Year by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis, and her urban science blog was named as a finalist for the 2011 Black Weblog Award in the best science and technology category. When not blogging, Lee works for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. By all accounts Lee is well-known and well-respected in scientific circles, but in the last two days her name has become synonymous with the terms “urban whore.” That’s because an editor at Biology-online allegedly called her that after Lee refused to blog for his website for free. “Are you an urban scientist or an urban whore,” he wrote.

You can click here for the back story; this isn’t about the ongoing battle overpaying writers for the work either. Instead, allDigitocracy wants to focus on Scientific American’s response and how it unnecessarily involved itself in another publication’s controversy.

Suffice it to say Lee was outraged by the editor’s name calling, as any professional writer woman would be, and she used her platform at Scientific American – as bloggers often do – to write about how it felt to be completely dismissed as an accomplished scientist and to have her work reduced so vulgarly. The subject matter is not new to Lee; she often blogs about diversity and gender issues for Scientific American, so it should have come to no surprise to editors when she blogged about this issue. Unfortunately readers can no longer see Lee’s post at Scientific American because the editor-in-chief, Mariette DiChristina, had it removed. DiChristina later took to Twitter to halfheartedly explain her decision:

That’s when things really got ugly. Besides the ethical considerations of journalists removing whole stories from websites without warning or fuller explanation, Scientific American apparently failed to take into consideration how readers would react, especially those who had already seen the post. Not only was the initial story picked up by the ever popular Buzz Feed, the website specializing in viral content, also implicated Scientific American’s complicity in the controversy. Scientists around the globe are now protesting the magazine, taking to Twitter and other social media platforms to demand that their content also be removed from the site, stating their refusal to now use Scientific American’s materials in the classroom, and are dropping subscriptions. And they are calling on colleagues to take similar actions. On top of that, other bloggers have now picked up on the fact that there exists a business connection between Scientific American and Biology Online, the outfit that set off this firestorm to begin with.

“… Biology-online is part of the Scientific American Partnership Network, and prominent readers are now asking if this relationship led to the removal of Dr. Lee’s post from her SciAm blog. As you know this form of censorship will not stand with SciAm’s readers.  Scientific American’s editors will be compelled to comment publicly on why the post was removed, and this situation poses a threat to their reputation as well,” writes David Wescott, a public affairs professional who blogs about science, environmentalism, and feminism at It’s Not A Lecture.

The oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States should have known better, even more so (one would think) since its editor is a woman. If nothing else editors should explain its relationship with Biology-online and the editor who is accused of calling Lee out of her name. One would also think that editors at Scientific American would be empathetic about scientists getting riled when their work is not respected, but something tells me that Einstein never had to worry about being called a “whore,” let alone an urban one.

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