On June 7 there was an opinion piece published in El Pais, the most circulated daily newspaper in Spain, written by Rafael Yuste, MD, PhD, and professor of neuroscience at Columbia University, New York, and Dario Gil, PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (MIT) working as Director of IBM Research. In their opinion, all governments need scientists at cabinet-level positions, something like a U.S. Secretary of Science or a Deputy Prime Minister for Science. Knowing what I know about science, I thought they might as well have echoed Plato and said that every government needs a philosopher at a cabinet-level position. Scientists and philosophers do have something in common besides their origin. Over to the right, you will see a bust of Thales, who is credited with being the first philosopher and the first scientist. More on that in some future post.
Back to what Drs. Yuste and Gil had to say. The title of the article is, “Why science should revolutionize the world of politics.” They deal with COVID-19, calling it a crisis that could have been avoided if the technical know-how of scientists (both medical and social) had been applied in time. They acknowledged that social networks and news reports helped spread misinformation, but blamed it on there not being enough good information out there. Their recommendation is a “scientist-in-chief” in each government cabinet to be responsible to see that good information is used and dissimulated. Their idea is also to have scientific advisory councils established for the parliaments, judiciary, and the media. Their concluding thought reads, “If ever mankind needed a wake-up call to recognize the value of scientific readiness and collaboration, it is surely this pandemic.”
My thoughts on reading this article were (1) The world does not need any more bureaucracy, and (2) Science is a floating anchor to depend on in a crisis. Item (1) is a matter of opinion; item (2) has a lot of support in the scientific community. I say “floating anchor” because, like philosophers, scientists rarely agree with each other. The first philosopher thought everything came from water, the second philosopher thought it was something called the Infinite, the third one said it was air, the fourth one said fire. Four philosophers—four theories. Science does not fare much better.
Before we get to why scientists disagree, I want to address what the Drs. Yuste and Gil said about science being able to head off the COVID-19 pandemic. What we have with COVID-19 is a new, highly contagious, rapidly spreading virus. Because it is new, there is no vaccine for it. It being highly contagious and rapidly spreading call for isolation of known infected people from the uninfected population, and because some of the infected are asymptomatic, isolation of people from each other until the virus passes. Those measures are pure common sense, not scientific. The least science can hope to do is to develop an effective vaccine as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, the governments have to balance the risk of many people dying from the virus with loss of business and high unemployment as long as isolation is enforced. That is not a scientific problem but developing a new vaccine is.
An article in the April 3, 2020 New York Times is titled “How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take?” It is a well-written article detailing the process of testing and approval a new drug has to go through. It states that there has never been a coronavirus vaccine for humans before. Research cannot start until the genetic code of the virus is known. For COVID-19 that was in January. The article says, “Our record for developing an entirely new vaccine is at least four years.” The College of Physicians of Philadelphia states vaccine development often takes 10-15 years. That is not surprising considering that less than 10 percent of drug trials are ultimately approved for public use. So, it doesn’t appear that having a cabinet-level scientist would have prevented the COVID-19 crisis. Science takes plodding and testing and years to get something done. On second thought, science would fit in with government work pretty good.
My second thought on the subject article needs some support. I did a Google search about why scientists disagree and Google came up with about 39 million results in .44 seconds. It is as if Google was just waiting for me to ask. Of course, when you are dealing with anything about science you get many different answers. Because this post is already long enough, I will deal with only two.
On October 5, 2018, Scientific America ran a blog post titled “What It Means When Scientists Disagree.” The article asks more questions than it answers and gives this observation, “Beyond sowing confusion, perpetual disagreement can undermine faith in science.” That begs the question: “Does science require faith? What happened to testing and proof?” The article points out that disagreement really come down to preference and opinion. It concludes, “But when a substantial number of scientists fundamentally disagree, we just have to wait.” I am an old man and I cannot wait long.
The second article I will deal with comes from the Office for Science and Society (Separating Sense from Nonsense) at McGill University, Quebec. It is titled “Why Oh Why do Scientists Keep Changing Their Minds?” and it gives nine reasons scientists very rarely give a final answer. I will only list the reasons. They deserve further reading at www.mcgill.ca/oss.
- The world is full of low-quality studies.
- You cannot control every variable.
- Scientists have the freedom that allows them to fudge rigor in research to get the desired result.
- Exploratory research can be sold as solid knowledge.
- Show me the money (corporations fund the research and they expect certain results).
- Some scientists commit fraud.
- Valid findings get distorted by the hype machine.
- Scientific controversies can be manufactured.
- …but there are genuine disagreements (science is hard and the universe is complex).
- The idea that scientists keep changing their minds can sometimes be due to actual disagreements in a field of study.
- Often though, it is the result of poorly done or selectively reported studies, of hype generated in the reporting of results, and sometimes of interest groups creating fake controversies to sow doubt.