Last week I read a fascinating book by Charles Bosk - " What Would You Do? Juggling Bioethics and Ethnography ." Bosk's first book - " Forgive and Remember: managing medical failure " - a brilliant field study of surgical training, made him famous when the first edition was published in 1979. I can't evaluate his skills as an ethnographic field worker, but he's a terrific writer. In a chapter on "Irony, Ethnography, and Informed Consent," Bosk reports the intense distress a genetic counselor experienced on seeing how he'd written about her and reflects on the nature of informed consent in ethnographic research. The ethnographer is not doing an experiment for which the risks and benefits can (and should) be described clearly to those who are being asked to participate. But he describes how ethnography characteristically seeks to "debunk" (his word) conventional social constructions, and he comments that ethnographers often write wi...