Note: My weekend op-ed.
This year began badly for the reputation of science.
Bad news from the the global warming front. First came the scandal of the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit which revealed systematic manipulation of data and attempts to silence critics of the global warming hypothesis.
Now research by computer expert E. Michael Smith and Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo revealed the National Climatic Data Center, a division of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has been cherry-picking data to support the claim of man-caused global warming.
From the 1960s to 1980s, the NCDC used measurements from about 6,000 stations worldwide for calculating global temperatures. In the 1990s, the number of stations dropped by almost 75 percent to about 1,500. Strangely enough, the stations chosen as a representative sample always seemed to be in warmish places.
Still worried about vaccinating your children?
The British medical journal The Lancet has just issued a full retraction of a study it ran in 1998 linking measles-mumps-rubella vaccines to autism. There was strong evidence against the purported link all along, but in 2004 it was revealed Dr. Andrew Wakefield had been paid to conduct this study on children who were clients of lawyers (surprise! surprise!) preparing a lawsuit.
Britain’s General Medical Council ruled last week Dr. Wakefield had acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly.” He may lose his license. Only then did The Lancet finally cave in and issue a retraction.
In the meantime vaccination rates in Britain plummeted to all-time lows and waves of measles outbreaks followed.
Is this depressing? Want a pill?
A study by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University, the University of New Mexico and the University of Colorado, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that antidepressants drugs were not appreciably better than a placebo for people with mild or moderate depression.
It turns out many studies sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry excluded patients with mild depression, even patients who went to doctors looking for help.
Sometimes you’re not depressed, you’re just unhappy. But you can’t make billions of dollars selling pills for unhappiness
What the heck is going on? Isn’t science, like journalism, supposed to be all about the disinterested pursuit of truth with a capital ‘T’.
Would be nice. But unfortunately a lot of scientific research is agenda-driven. People whose self-image is tied up with being a world-saver don’t want to hear the world gets along just fine without them.
Furthermore, modern research can be very expensive and scientists have to eat like everyone else.
A pharmaceutical company definitely wants to know if their product is going to kill people whose relatives might sue them. They don’t want to hear their product probably won’t do much at all for people shelling out money for a pill to make the pain of living go away.
A lot of research is government funded, and politicians who campaign on promises to “do something about…” don’t want to hear what they want to do is likely to do more harm than good.
Tort lawyers want to hear harm was caused by somebody with deep pockets. Their clients want to believe their misfortune makes sense and was somebody’s fault, rather than a random accident in an uncaring universe.
Scientists don’t like ugly facts that poke holes in their beautiful theories. Nobody does.
Now that you’re really depressed and wanting a pill that’ll really do some good, let me point out something.
What all these scandals have in common is, they were eventually revealed. Though often in the face of pretty formidable opposition after considerable harm was done.
And it is my strong impression it’s getting harder to hide scientific fakery and easier to expose it via the Internet.
Scientists are human like the rest of us, but the scientific methods and protocols still work and are still our best hope of keeping science honest.