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Harley Quinn has become an important and popular character in the DC Universe, especially for representations of women scientists in comics and the associated cinematic and TV adaptations. Understandably, much of the analysis of this character has tended to focus on her relationship with the Joker and the gender-based dimensions of this dynamic. However, to distill her identity to these dimensions would be unnecessarily, even unfairly, reductionist, and would narrow our understandings of a rich and complex character. By focussing on her identity as a scientist, this article offers a different analytical lens through which to understand Harley Quinn. Drawing primarily from Stjepan Šejić's Harleen (2020), with supporting insights from appearances in other DC comics, we examine the ways in which her scientific training and aspirations shape her transformation from Harleen Quinzel to Harley Quinn. Specifically, we demonstrate how symmetry, as an orienting concept, is useful for analysing how scientific logics and practices inform and enable this transformation. In doing so, we hope to both enrich understandings of Harley Quinn and foreground science as a potentially useful broader lens through which to understand other significant themes and characters in the DC Universe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, institutions of scientific and medical ethics developed out of histories that continue to shape their principles and scope of concerns. Many have identified that the movement of practitioners identifying as community-based biologists (or any of several overlapping labels) presents challenges for institutionalized ethics. Community-based biology has been the subject of ethical controversies, but it has also taken proactive measures to establish ethics of its own. We argue that the challenges that community-based biology poses for establishment, institutionalized ethics are just as significant as their challenges to establishment science more generally, and that the two are inextricable. We also assert that these challenges are more profound than either existing literature suggests or that efforts to establish ethics within community-based biology so far are equipped to address. Drawing on our experiences as social scientists working with the Open Insulin Project and community-based biology more broadly, we demonstrate several ways that community-based biology efforts problematize established approaches to institutionalized research ethics. We describe how, at the same time, efforts to institutionalize ethics in community-based biology risk reproducing features of institutionalized ethics seemingly at odds with the critiques community-based biology itself embodies. Through a series of three empirically grounded provocations, we argue that community-based biology should evolve in tandem with a community bioethics that more consciously engages critiques of institutionalized ethics and embraces the diversity and pluralism of community-based biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]