Science Should Push Us Forward, Not Back, to a "New Normal".

Abstract

In a recent Science editorial, Christina Pagel (2022) made the point with her title that “‘Back to Normal’ Is Not Enough.” She was, of course, writing on the COVID-19 pandemic and reflecting on the past 2 years. As I write this, it is 2 years to the day since I left my “normal” work office. I still recall the conversation among several colleagues as we exited the building—that we would see each other in a couple of weeks. The weeks turned to months and the months to years. Among many of Dr. Pagel's points, she noted that evolution has positioned humans to perceive threat in time scales on the order of hours and days, not necessarily in years and decades. She was writing from the point of view of urgent looming threats specific to climate change problems and our collective response to them including complacency and sentiments in some sectors that the problems are not solvable.In this issue, through an invited commentary, Amy Hewitt, John Smith, and Liz Weintraub provide an important voice about threats of a different kind by making the point that “back to normal” for research, policy, and practice in intellectual and developmental disabilities will not be enough. Our approaches—scientific and societal—in supporting and improving the lives of individuals living with intellectual disability and associated conditions need not go back to a normal that was incomplete. From a scientific perspective, certainly there are incomplete technical problems faced by any given research agenda in intellectual disability, particularly those on frontiers (e.g., clinical genomics, implementation science, causal mechanisms) as it relates to measurement, representative recruitment and sampling, etc., but there also collective action problems—the latter often being the more difficult of the two as they require political will related to mobilizing individuals into working groups making the connections among the scientific community and the larger societal practice and policy communities.The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed problems that we—our field—may have implicitly regarded as intractable or just part of the system, part of our normal. Pay close attention to the language and the message of the Invited Commentary. My goal in inviting it was to energize and reinvigorate an imperative that the AAIDD/AJIDD research community use the strength of science to solve the challenges faced by individuals and their families living with intellectual disability; to be inclusive in our research practices; to ask the hard questions and push ourselves to be part of a collective action to answer them—the challenges are not new but COVID-19 reminds us they continue and need to be addressed with intentionality, urgency, and intellectual humility such that a “new normal” should not look like the “old.”