Freedom of press vs scientific responsibility

November 10, 2014November 10, 2014 Philip Moriartyfreedom of press, media, peer review, public engagement3 Comments

Isabel Palmer

How can the mainstream media balance the arguments surrounding emotionally charged scientific issues between real experts and powerful layman advocates?

Professor Chris Rapley is a scientist who has devoted his career to studying earth sciences and climate. He has been executive director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere, director of the British Antarctic Survey, director of the Science Museum and is currently working on Climate Science at UCL in London.

Lord Nigel Lawson has a degree in PPE from Oxford, and a long, successful political career. He does not, however, have any background in climate science whatsoever. He is also renowned for being a climate change sceptic, saying climate scientists are “alarmist” and “scaremongering”.

The video in the link below shows the two men in a short clip from an episode of the BBC’s Newsnight, debating climate change. Lawson and Rapley were each given equal air time and appear to be given equal credibility too. This seems to be a common occurrence in the media.

Every day on breakfast television and popular news shows, experts in their field are pitted against opinionated members of the public to discuss emotive scientific current affairs (e.g. climate change, vaccination, nuclear power). A recent example of this is the media debate over Ashya King, the child with brain cancer whose parents removed him from hospital in an attempt to get a new form of treatment, Proton Beam Therapy, over conventional radiotherapy.

I don’t want to pass judgement as to whether Mr and Mrs King were in the right or the wrong, but I do want to examine how the story was dealt with. The media leapt on the story and newspapers and television were flooded with opinion pieces from people who knew very little about the science behind either of these treatments stating their views one way or the other even though the oncologists working with the child had publicly stated that they did not believe that Ashya would significantly benefit from Proton therapy.

Freedom of press is a very important value in this country. However, what are the moral implications in giving sceptics the platform with which to spread unfounded beliefs over the evidence provided by real experts? Is it fair, and is it responsible, to give a layman advocate with strong opinions but little to back them up equal credence as a man who has devoted most of his life to researching and working on the issue at hand?

Many people including those in positions of power such as governmental or industrial figureheads form opinions based on how issues are portrayed in the media, so these activists, broadcasting their views with little scientific back up can actually affect how our country is run. We cannot simply ban these people from airing their views, every argument has two sides and people must be allowed to display opposing views. But surely there has to be some balance in allowing debates to be had, and arguments to be made, but still giving weight to those people who can truly be called “experts”.

Is Richard Dawkins Closed-Minded?

November 9, 2014 Philip MoriartyDawkins, peer review, public engagement, religion, scientific methodLeave a comment

Owen Letts

Dawkins has been called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” for his aggressive form of arguing in debate and his avid determination to spread evolution as the only theory, of the creation of life, which anyone should believe in. In a recent review of the first of a two part autobiography of Dawkins’ life, John Gray has taken this view to the extreme; and is more of a slander of Richard Dawkins in general than a book review. A rebuttal article was made and can be seen here, but what I am more interested in is what led to such an article in the first place and also whether Dawkins really is as close-minded as is portrayed.

If you were to read the Wikipedia page of Richard Dawkins you would find some quotes of his that seem intolerable such as “faith is one of the world’s great evils” and if you were to visit the r/atheism subreddit you wouldn’t be wrong for assuming Richard Dawkins is the leader of a cult instead of a scientific writer. An opinion piece that Dawkins wrote for the Guardian gives great insight into how he views religion; particularly when religion conflicts with the current theories of scientific research. He is clearly someone who believes that religion should not exist within education and that science should answer the questions that religion says it does.

Much of the above would definitely appear to make a case that Dawkins is close-minded. Having read slightly deeper into the situation I have found myself doubting that stance. The first piece of evidence I found was that in Dawkins autobiography he was in fact raised Christian and only over the years of his childhood did he decide to turn his back on religion. Also in his book, “The God Delusion”, he formulates his own spectrum of theistic probability. This alone isn’t an argument to say he is open-minded however he has said in interviews and debates that on this spectrum he would consider himself a 6.9 on the scale as he is willing to change his views if evidence of a God(/s) was to arise he would have to accept it as the scientific method dictates.

Even in light of this it is hard to go as far as to say that Richard Dawkins is open-minded. He appears to have grown up with changing his views and believing that objective evidence is the only thing that can confirm his beliefs and that therefore he does not have a “faith” by definition. However because of his disbelief in religions subjective nature he appears unable to see the benefits of religion and can only see the disadvantages. There are many debates involving Richard Dawkins that are freely available however this one made by Al Jazeera English seems to show how Dawkins is a great thinker but has closed his mind to the idea of positive religious benefits for society.

Can science be crowd-funded?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, peer review, public engagement, social mediaLeave a comment

Joe Mason

£1 Billion. That’s the total amount raised by the top two crowd-funding (CF) websites over the last four years. That’s the GDP of a small nation being given to around 100,000 projects by regular people. Government spending on basic research sits at about this amount every year since 2011. That these figures are even close suggests that if science uses CF, we could see some amazing discoveries.

CF works by people buying into someone’s idea for a product. They see the idea on social media and with a few taps they can pledge amounts to back the project. The inventor then receives the money they need to get going and, hopefully, they’ll be successful. I like this because there’s nowhere else where a consumer can be involved so organically with the creation of their product.

By crowds of people paying the cost upfront, with some risk, everyone wins. Companies finance most research but for them there is a need for it to be product oriented. It must
be ultimately sellable. Governments also have agendas. They answer to voters and what voters think should be invested in. This allows for open minded research but it is still restricted to what the public are interested in. Charities are also concerned with public opinion and they have to be seen to be investing in the right things. Charities can’t finance things which aren’t relevant to their cause.
Overall, I think there is little scope for passion, imagination or enthusiasm in today’s scientific community. For sure, scientists love what they do but gone are the days of the explorer, free to chase the stars. Could CF liberate science? Kickstarter has a failure rate of 60% which I think indicates a community not entirely driven by success. This promises research without fear of failure. But why would people CF research?

CF is no altruistic act. People invest for the product or for what the product says about them. If researchers can get people to emotionally buy in to their research then CF could work for them. Making this possible is the fact that everything people do and say on social media is all on some level to project a persona. Companies get exposure by having a brand which people want to align themselves with. Alignment with brands is behind all viral advertising and therefore the success of CF. So if research can be branded compellingly I think people will buy into it because they will want to look however that brand makes them look.

CF is growing. From feature films to AI headsets. Why is this? Partly because people want great products but also because they want to be a part of something. CF won’t solve the problems science has with money. What CF will do is make people care about science. It’ll make science more present on the timelines and news feeds of the world. And if there’s one thing Companies, Governments and Charities pay attention to, it’s what everyone is talking about.

Do Social Media have a role to play in the scientific process?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyimpact, peer review, public engagement, scientific method, social mediaLeave a comment

Christopher Glew

Before the advent of the internet, scientific advances were reported through either journals or, in the case of major research, in tabloid newspapers. But today, in the age of the internet and social media, even the smallest of scientific advances can be shared, ‘Liked’ on Facebook or tweeted about. But does this mean that social media has a role to play in the scientific process?

The role in the scientific process can be viewed in a positive light. Prior to social media, much of the research undertaken by scientists would have been largely inaccessible to the general population. However, in this modern era, where a large proportion of the population use Facebook and Twitter, this research can be more easily accessed. So in this case, the role of social media in the scientific process is good not only for the general population, but for the researchers also, as it allows their work to reach a much wider audience than would have otherwise been possible.

On the flip side of this, social media’s role in the scientific process could be viewed negatively. The impact on scientific research as outlined above could provide issues if such science was disproved later on. One interesting case of this was in a paper which stated a research team were able to see Hydrogen bonds within molecular structures. As this was a large step forward in this area of research, the paper gained a large number of Facebook ‘likes’ and tweet, making the research gain popularity until it was eventually picked up by large media outlets, who reported the information. This would first appear to be good news for the scientific process, as more people are being made aware of the research making both the general population and the scientific community excited.

It is important to note that this research has been since disproved relatively recently, but this has not been so widely publicised or picked up by social media. So the role of social media in the scientific process also has negative connotations, as people amongst the general population may not necessarily understand the research which is being put forward, which in turn puts strain on the belief system within science.

So the question of whether or not social media has a role to play in the scientific process is a clear yes, as it is able to heavily influence which types of research get picked up by the mainstream media. However, the effect that this in turn has on the scientific process can either be positive or negative due to the influence of Facebook ‘likes’ and Tweets; and it’s this question which will need to be answered in the near future.

Scrutinising scrutiny: Is peer review working?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartypeer review, public engagement, scientific methodLeave a comment

Piyumi Athulathmudali

Peer review is essentially the weeding out of the ‘bad’ science from the ‘good’ – in an ideal world. It is also the encouraging of the former into the latter through constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement, often to the author’s dismay…

Nobody likes rejection, but I imagine it can be particularly vexing to see your almost sound, countless hours of work to effectively be deemed inferior to a perfectly fraudulent piece of almost-immediately-obvious junk. We’ve seen even seen it with a less-than-subtle fabrication of gold nanorod ‘chopsticks’ – so crudely fabricated in fact that I find it hard to believe that this wasn’t put out as an attempt to shine light on the shortcomings of peer review. But I think the common expectation we have for the first chronological step in peer review to be capable of policing fraud is an unnecessary one.

Even in the minority of cases surfaced of bad science, or non-science, passing through the apparently not-so-tough barricades of peer review, it’s only the rarer cases where failure hasn’t been spotted so quickly that have the potential to be more troublesome. The longer bad things go unnoticed the greater the chance that irretrievable sums of funding and lengths of hard work will have gone to waste, and in the worst cases, created more bad than good. Part of the problem is that once a paper is published, many take it as assured. Perhaps there has to be a greater distinction between published and generally accepted by the scientific community.

Though not perfect at its job (being a process controlled by humans), it is better than nothing at all. What’s important is whether peer review in its current state is the best approach possible. A question complicated by the variability and lack of transparency in standards/processes.

Reviews can be single blind (the current norm – only the reviewers’ identities hidden), double-blind (both authors’ and reviewers’ identities hidden) or open (all identities known). The common preference for double-blind to single blind makes sense – while not completely eliminating bias, it is a push in that direction. Sure, in cases, the high specialisation around a may hinder the anonymity of authors, but the alternative is no better in this regard.

Recently, post-publication peer review platforms, such as PubPeer, are becoming more widely used, going hand in hand with the movement from print publication to online publication, unrestricted by printing costs. Stating the obvious, here studies are reviewed after publication, voluntarily or by invited reviewers.

I favour a system in which trained reviewers act in the first phase to check the validity of the study, and if appropriate, to check the raw data itself. The second (voluntary) post-publication phase would allow further spotting of errors, and recording of repeated tests. When results have been reproduced, readers can think about giving them real value.

Is peer review working? Its working pretty well I would say, and though not at its optimum, its future seems brighter.

Image credit: Courtesy of James Yang, http://www.jamesyang.com

When should scientists go public with their results?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, impact, peer review, public engagement, scientific method, social mediaLeave a comment

Laura Jane Fox

Scientific research can often be laborious, repetitive and in many cases inconclusive. However, as many researchers will tell you when a moment of insight and clarity arises its hard to hold back from ‘going to the presses’. With only new, ground-breaking science finding its way onto the pages of newspapers and the most prestigious journals, it may seem like a race to tell the world of your findings.

As important as it is to tell the general public about the discovery of a new particle or breakthrough in medicine it is still important to go through the right channels to do so. Scientific publication and peer review should remain a vital part of this process.

In March last year a group of astronomers using telescope Bicep2 claimed to have found evidence of gravitational waves, a giant scientific discovery, they published these results without peer review. It has since come to light that these findings may not be as they appear when astronomers using space telescope Planck tried to reproduce the data, find out more here.

Some may argue science is about discussion and debate, but without scientific rigor and validation we end up with a large pool of wrongly interpreted data that is essentially obsolete.

Francis Bacon, father of the modern scientific method, insisted that we must doubt everything before assuming its truth. This can be a hard task when we like to be right and hate proving ourselves wrong. Failures to confirm a hypothesis are rarely submitted to publication either, these negative conclusions can be as important as positive ones, they can prevent scientists wasting money and time treading down the wrong path.

This problem is caused not just by a need to publish for the sake of our careers but also in being human. Subtle omissions and unconscious misperceptions take place as researchers make sense of their results; as we are more inclined to find fault in our own experiment than in the already published literature. It has become undesirable to repeat experiments to validate the findings of others because publication in esteemed journals is not achieved this way. I find the problem isn’t when to tell the public but how sure we are of what we’re telling them.

Should scientists have to justify their research in terms of its socioeconomic impact?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyeconomics, impact, peer review, public engagementLeave a comment

James Gibson

Ask a scientist, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, no. Ask a politician, and the answer is yes. Ask an engineer, and they’ll laugh that the question is even being asked, and go back to making something useful.

Of course, this is a simplification. Many scientists fully believe that it’s proper for science to offer a return on its investments. There may even be some politicians that make rational, scientific decisions on policy based on available evidence (there’s certainly a calling for it among the Behavioural Insight Team in the Cabinet Office ^[2]), though we see few of them here in the UK. There was, in April 2010, a “Science Party” who stood for election in Bosworth, but nothing much came of it.^[3]

On the whole, especially in the UK, there’s a perception that science has no place in government; the zeitgeist is that science is cold, clinical, detached and incapable of appreciating the human element to the problems we face today. This attitude has led to the current government shrinking the science budget for the first time since 1986.^[3]It’s an easy target, and one that some people won’t miss. So, the rather trivial answer to the question of whether science should justify itself is that it had better shape up and do so anyway if it wants to get its pocket money.

Science, despite what new-age hippies and “Big Pharma” conspiracy theorists say, is generally regarded as having a positive impact on economic growth, regardless of individual experimental outcomes. The question, as is often the case in politics, is whether the return on the investment is a net positive once funding and subsidies have been accounted for. Many scientific , once the recent academic cuts were announced, came out in favour of science, ^[4] and no further real-term cuts have been made.^[5]

Still, the fact remains that the UK scientific spending lags, at 0.65% GDP, behind the G8 and European averages of 0.8%,^[5] putting increasing pressure on scientists in Great Britain to either get funding from private sources, or to squabble for resources within growing fields offering ever-more avenues of interest. Whilst scientists may believe that the pursuit of knowledge is a goal in itself, economic return has, and will continue to be, a carrot-on-a-stick for those who have a more pragmatic view of governmental spending.

Other arguments aim towards pointing out that scientific funding leads to very real benefits. Usually these benefits are medical in nature – who doesn’t love new methods of noticing and battling cancers? – but other applications appear, from 3-D printing to quantum computing. These new technologies appear as if from nowhere, in fields that couldn’t have predicted them even a few years beforehand. Whether this is a sign that we need more funding to spot them sooner, or less to avoid unnecessary dead-ends, really falls down to personal analysis.

[1] http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/04/tories-and-lib-dems-set-out-sc.html

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/62529/TLA-1906126.pdf

[3] http://scienceogram.org/blog/2013/03/uk-science-budget-2010-2015/

[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8052735/Science-funding-cuts-will-cost-UK-economy-billions.html, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23065763, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/bob-ward/science-funding-cuts-british-antarctic-survey_b_1931681.html

[5] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23065763

Can science be crowd-funded?

November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, economics, impact, peer review, public engagement, social mediaLeave a comment

Samuel de Kare Silver

When should scientists go public with their results?

November 9, 2014November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartyimpact, peer review, public engagement, scientific methodLeave a comment

Thomas Earle

It’s September 2011 and the headlines read: “EINSTEIN PROVED WRONG”. CERN’s OPERA experiment results, claiming their neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light, sent a shock wave through international media, arousing a worldwide interest in physics. After careful scrutiny from other researchers, the results were falsified, the theory of special relativity held strong, and in June 2012 OPERA declared their findings incorrect, due to nothing more than loose wiring.

March 2014 and the story is much the same. The BICEP2 cosmologists announced their detection of gravitational waves, and with it, evidence for the theory of cosmic inflation. Celebration ensued. Some hailed it as the most important scientific discovery of the century, many thought (myself included) that the Nobel Prize was on its way to Harvard. Not for long. The champagne bottles were quickly recorked and the revelry brought to a halt, it again transpired that the researchers had made some serious blunders; their ground-breaking discovery now appears to be the consequence of something as uninspiring as space dust.

Underlying both of these mistakes is a serious issue. Ideally, we would like scientists to be able to pursue their goals independently, free from outside control, but sadly this is not the case at all. Experiments of this kind are expensive, and with expense comes institutional influence. Funding is subject to political whim and the need for attention-grabbing results is unavoidable – I suspect that this adds to temptation to ‘go public’ prematurely. It is clear that, despite external pressure, teams need to apply much more scrutiny before ‘major discoveries’ are brought into the public eye.

The big difference nowadays is social media. I think that the scientific community has yet to appreciate that with the arrival of Twitter; ‘speculative findings’ can whip around the world in seconds, becoming ‘established fact’ without any glimpse of peer review. Extra care must obviously be taken during this digital age. Even after their results have been fastidiously prodded and poked, researchers need to be more particular with the wording of any public broadcast. Admittedly, these exaggerations can often be the fault of eager university PR departments, but if papers and statements are carefully written, there can be little room left to sensationalise. We would surely do well to remember Carl Sagan’s famous words, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’.

You might argue that these affairs show the scientific process in action, that we should be proud of the field’s humility in openly admitting its mistakes. When viewed as a collective process over time, science very rarely makes mistakes, despite individual experiments and experimenters sometimes being wrong. Nevertheless, I feel scientists must learn that the internet has changed things; they must take more time before ‘going public’. If not, commentators will continue to ask – what will episodes like this do to the public’s trust in science?

Crowdfunding: A popularity contest or a new way to engage the public in science?

November 3, 2014November 9, 2014 Philip Moriartycrowd-funding, peer reviewLeave a comment

Hannah Thetford

Online crowdfunding has been a way to finance creative projects since ArtistShare launched in 2003, but can it also be used to fund scientific research?

Both uBiome and American Gut have had success in providing analysis of an individual’s microbiomes in exchange for funding, and the NASA Emerging Space Report gives details of various projects that have been successfully funded using online crowdfunding. These examples show that it is certainly possible to use crowdfunding to finance scientific projects, but what sort of projects will get funded?

The public will surely be most interested in backing studies involving cute animals, high-profile diseases or ‘sexy’ science of the sort that is often blown out of proportion by the media. Of course it is important to engage the public in science, but not at the expense of science funding becoming a popularity contest.

However Jai Ranganathan, a conservation biologist and co-founder and director of the SciFund Challenge, believes that this won’t happen. The SciFund Challenge involves outreach training followed by attempts to crowdfund research projects, and Ranganathan says that the most successful scientists were those who could reach out to people and say why their research was exciting: “Whether a project got funded or not really had very little to do with the project subject, it had everything to do with interest for the scientist and them engaging the public with their science”. [From ‘Crowdfunding for medical research picks up pace’, The Lancet]

A crowdfunding campaign helped finance the attempt to re-establish contact with ISEE-3; launched by NASA in 1978 and now the first spacecraft in deep space to be operated by a private-sector organisation. (Artist’s concept of ISEE-3. Image credit NASA)

So crowdfunding rewards good communicators, encouraging scientists to improve their outreach to the public. It also typically produces funding on a shorter time scale than traditional grants, allowing research to get underway much faster – but that shorter time scale is because crowdfunding requires no peer review or other vetting.

Science Donors, an under-development crowdfunding platform that will be dedicated to science, says that “Science projects involving university or professional labs will be verified by Science Donor before donations are funded” but many other platforms carry no such assurance. Donors have no assurance that their money is going to people who are qualified to perform the research they are proposing, and there is nobody to ensure that funds are being used appropriately.

There are definite benefits of crowdfunding; it allows unconventional ideas that are overlooked by traditional grant committees to have a chance at being funded, avoids the politics of peer review affecting which research proposals receive funding and increases the amount of money available to fund research. If these benefits can be maintained whilst ensuring that projects are genuine and worth investment, crowdfunding will hopefully work well as an alternative to traditional funding.

What are your thoughts on using crowdfunding to finance scientific research?