Slow Science

Can science be trusted?

Short answer: oftentimes yes, but not always.

Science is a social human activity and far from infallible. Its theoretical perspectives, methods, analysis and reporting, funding, and institutions take on the characteristics of the sociopolitical, cultural, and economic contexts in which it is conducted. Through the modern industrial period, science has become very "industrialized." As the evolutionary biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin reminds us,

"the entire body of modern science rests on Descartes's metaphor of the world as a machine." (The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment)

This machine metaphor has strongly influenced science on multiple levels. Most modern science has operated according to the assumption that reality does indeed function like a vast machine, and science itself has taken on many such characteristics. Namely, with some exceptions, it has been conducted through large hierarchical institutions (government and research universities); it has focused on questions and applications having primarily to do with industrial economics and material development; it has been theoretically, methodologically, and analytically reductionistic; and it has relied on a vast array of technological devices to facilitate research.

While this paradigm of science has produced a wealth of very practical and profitable knowledge and innovation, it is increasingly sacrificing quality for quantity. Anyone familiar with academia these days knows about the culture of "publish or perish." This refers to the reality of most academic scientists and scholars, who must publish research in peer-reviewed journals and/or academic press books at a relatively high frequency rate, or they will risk losing funding, their status, their position, or their relevance. This has churned out literally millions of research papers (high quantity), but much of this research is of low to moderate quality.

* transition to next section; claim: slow down science, make it more human/living

"Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are about twice as likely to published as negative findings. This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. …this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. And to me, this is research misconduct."

~ Ben Goldacre, Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford

"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor."

~ Marcia Angell, MD, first woman editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard

"I worry that we've missed the bigger point of what's going on right now with the science of respiratory protection, and right now I can't tell you, and it's not just on masks alone, but I can't tell you how bad the medical literature has gotten. You know, when we're all done with [the COVID pandemic], I hope that there's a number of medical editors that are fired from their jobs, because I can tell you, the amount of junk, plain science junk that's coming out right now, is a real challenge."

~ Michael Osterholm, MPH, PhD, Director of the Center for Infectious Disease, Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota

"The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it's disgraceful."

~ Arnold Relman, MD, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine