The Suborning of Science

Modern Science Takes On The Garb of the Alchemist

The Scientist magazine carried an article in its most recent edition entitled "Promises, Promises." No, it was not bemoaning the verbal legerdemain of a febrile politician on the hustings. It was commenting on the growing tendency of the science establishment to misdirect, mislead, exaggerate and otherwise sensationalise scientific work. In other words, scientists are increasingly sounding more and more like the hucksters and charlatans amongst the alchemists of medieval Europe.

The article by Stuart Blackman explores why this has come to be the case. We reproduce the highlights:

At its most enthusiastic, science has always been prone to promise rather more, and sooner, than it has managed to deliver. It can sometimes feel as if cures for diseases are forever 10 years off, while nuclear fusion seems to have been 50 years away from practical reality for about half a century now. It might be easy to look back and laugh at claims that eugenics would spell the end for not only heritable diseases, but also of social problems such as vagrancy and crime, but a 1989 Science editorial’s claim during the run-up to the human genome project that the new genetics could help reduce homelessness by tackling mental illness1 is perhaps fresh enough to make biologists’ toes curl with embarrassment.

Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas Malthus’s eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Why does modern science have a tendency to over-promise and exaggerate. After all, at the forefront of research and scientific breakthrough normally the field is clouded with unknowns and yet to be verified implications. Normally breakthroughs are initially surrounded with a thousand qualifications. This is to be expected. But no longer, it seems.

Sir Ian Wilmut, leader of the Roslin Institute team that cloned Dolly the sheep, says that a “soundbite” media culture that demands uncomplicated, definitive, and sensational statements plays a significant role. “It’s [the media] who put the most pressure on scientists to make predictions,” he says. And in a radio or TV interview that allows perhaps only 10 or 20 seconds for an answer, “it’s very easy then to inadvertently mislead.”

But it might also pay scientists—financially and politically—to go along with such demands, and to indulge in what Joan Haran, Cesagen Research Fellow at Cardiff University, UK, diplomatically calls “discursive overbidding,” whereby they talk up the potential value of work for which they seek the support of funds, changes in legislation or public approval.

“Since the late 20th century, scientists no longer quite have that quality that we used to speak of as scientists being disinterested. They are now very interested,” says Hilary Rose, professor emerita of the sociology of science at the University of Bradford, UK and Gresham College London. “Many clearly manage to rise above this, but the basic culture of science has changed.”

Previously rigour and integrity were hallmarks of the professional scientist. Disinterested research following the facts and data as they emerged was the order of the day. But no longer it seems. Firstly, there is the influence of money.

Various developments such as the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act in the United States, and the rise of the spin-out companies from universities, mean that research has become more intrinsically bound up with the commercial world. Many biotech companies are now led by financial directors rather than scientific directors, says Nik Brown, co-director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit, University of York, UK. The past decade has seen a rise in the number of financial experts appointed to influential positions in biotech companies, for instance. And since the end of the Cold War, he says, the central role of science has become less about security and more about economy, with science and technology becoming central to many nations’ economic strategy.

It’s a changing role for science that finds formal expression in the scientific funding process, says Brian Wynne, professor of science studies at Lancaster University, UK. “Every research proposal these days, whichever field you’re in, has got to include a statement on the impact your research is going to have. And that isn’t just intellectual impact; it’s also economic impact. And that is basically requiring scientists to make promises, and to exaggerate those promises.”

Then there are the career interests of scientists who seek funding, tenure, and a prestigious career.

Central too is the desperate competition to get funded and published, which forces scientists to emphasize the potential impact of their work, introducing further temptation to exaggerate.

Then, there is the increasing pressure placed on scientists by politicians who want definitive certainties (even though there may be no evidence for them) so that they can have something hard, fast, and concrete (the facts!) to whip up political support for costly or unpopular measures. In almost all cases the politicians are of the pro-big-government, liberal wings who are looking for some significant expansion of government power and authority over society and the economy.

Moreover, at a time when the pressures on scientists to “rhetorically overbid” is increasing, politics is becoming more reliant on science to provide predictions to guide policy.

“There are probably more issues than there were where there is political concern about issues—often global issues—which have a scientific content,” says Sir Martin Rees, astronomer and president of the United Kingdom’s Royal Society. “Climate change is one. Pandemics are another. These are both issues where the science is uncertain, but it’s better to listen to the best scientists than to the man in the street.”

But according to Dan Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, a consequence of this reliance on science is that politicians are able to “fob off responsibility to scientists” when making difficult policy decisions. That politicians are looking to science for certainty regarding complex political issues is illustrated by an address to the Copenhagen Climate Conference earlier this year by the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who appealed to scientific delegates for simple, unambiguous accounts of the science. “[Don’t] provide us with too many moving targets, because it is already a very, very complicated process,” he said. “I need fixed targets and certain figures, and not too many considerations on uncertainty and risk and things like that.” Such demands, says Sarewitz, can tempt scientists into providing simplistic and unqualified extrapolations from the current state of knowledge to possible future scenarios.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the liberal-academic-media complex has an awful lot to answer for. The longer this goes on, the more science will be seen as a modern form of alchemy: science in support of wishful thinking. The upshot will be to the detriment of everyone.