Molecular biologist Henry Miller and statistician S. Stanley Young have written an article at the Genetic Literacy Project on why trust in science is at an all time low. The Project’s motto is “Science Not Ideology” — a tall aspiration in theses times.

To be honest, going in, I braced myself for the usual stuff: Politicians don’t fund science enough; the public is full of ignorant hillbillies who believe evangelists, not scientists; most reporters flunked science so they can’t explain why people should trust the science! or else the planet is doomed… and so forth.

Well, I am glad to be wrong. Miller and Young’s article is a serious look at the current scandals in science around data manipulation that rightly result in doubt among reasonable people.

That’s reassuring. We can’t fix a trust problem if we are blaming everybody but the people whose behavior creates a basis for lack of trust.

They cite a Pew study last November which found that “Among both Democrats and Republicans, trust in scientists is lower than before the pandemic”:

Overall, 57% of Americans say science has had a mostly positive effect on society. This share is down 8 percentage points since November 2021 and down 16 points since before the start of the coronavirus outbreak.

When it comes to the standing of scientists, 73% of U.S. adults have a great deal or fair amount of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests. But trust in scientists is 14 points lower than it was at the early stages of the pandemic.

The share expressing the strongest level of trust in scientists – saying they have a great deal of confidence in them – has fallen from 39% in 2020 to 23% today.

Brian Kennedy and Alec Tyson, “Americans’ Trust in Scientists, Positive Views of Science Continue to Decline” Pew Research Centre, November 14, 2023

They comment,

Almost five years ago, we wrote about the unreliability of much of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, especially in biomedicine and agriculture. Since then, according to a recent news article in the journal Nature that quantified the problem, the problem is far bigger than even the pessimists had posited. Corruption is rife. Just last week, the journal Science related that even publishers of prominent scientific journals feel they are “under siege.”: “A spokesperson for Elsevier said every week its editors are offered cash in return for accepting manuscripts. Sabina Alam, director of publishing ethics and integrity at Taylor & Francis, said bribery attempts have also been directed at journal editors there and are ‘a very real area of concern.’”

Henry Miller, S. Stanley Young , “Part I — Viewpoint: Why is trust in scientific research at an all time low?” Genetic Literacy Project, January 29, 2024

A mobster would blush… he wouldn’t dare be so forthright about his goals, not in public anyway.

Miller and Young also note the many problems that damage science credibility apart from outright financial corruption. These include the fact that

● researchers making “landmark claims” couldn’t even replicate their own work.

● P-hacking is common: “Scientists try one statistical or data manipulation after another until they get a small p-value that qualifies as ‘statistical significance,’ although the finding is the result of chance, not reality.”

● The file drawer effect: “Understandably, editors and referees are biased against papers that report negative results; they greatly prefer positive, statistically significant results. Researchers know this and often do not even submit negative studies … Once enough nominally positive, confirmatory papers appear, the claim becomes canonized, making it even more difficult to publish an article that reports a contrary result. This distressing tendency happens in the media as well, which amplifies the misinformation.”

About that file drawer effect – not to carry a torch for media here but, in fairness – media can’t easily report on what never gets published in the literature!

Did the COVID panic contribute to a loss of trust in science?

What Miller and Young don’t address in this article (perhaps they will later) is the effect that the government response to COVID-19 may have had on public trust in science.

Think of it: Truth one week was discredited the next (masks vs. no masks,) for example. The entirely reasonable lab leak hypothesis re the origin of COVID was discredited as a conspiracy theory for what, increasingly, sound like purely political reasons. Prominent scientists were tarred as making false statements simply because, for science-based reasons, they disagreed with government policy. Then there was Anthony Fauci asserting “I represent science” …

Many people who have never heard of p-hacking will remember some of these episodes. Thus, any reckoning of why the public trusts science less now needs to address these issues, along with government eagerness to just forget or ignore them.