t's now widely understood that dissident views on any topic, even a scientific
one, are no longer permissible. Anyone who expresses them, like Howard Bauchner,
the former Editor-in-Chief of JAMA, is forced out. Bauchner was thrown out
because JAMA posted the following tweet describing a podcast in which doctors
planned to discuss the issue and what to to about it:
No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast from the great @DrKatzNYCHH and @ehlJAMA!
This tweet sounds pretty innocuous—surely no sane physician considers himself racist—but Bauchner was forced to apologize, saying that he didn't write or even see the tweet, or create the podcast, but as editor-in-chief he was ultimately responsible for them. According to the UK Daily Mail, he was forced to resign and was replaced in 2022 by Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, which the Mail described as “a female doctor of color [sic].”
Most scientists couldn't care less about DEI, considering it to be the pointless nattering of mere mortals, but we have dogmas of our own. Five years ago, a scientist I was mentoring had his grant rejected because he didn't propose genetic manipulations of animals.
This guy was a brilliant researcher who had just made an important discovery in Alzheimer's disease and wanted to follow it up in a type of brain cell known as astrocytes. Transgenic mice don't get Alzheimer's disease—only toxic effects from the overexpressed proteins—so genetic manipulations on animals wouldn't have made any scientific sense. But his idea conflicted with the dogma about what methods we must use, so they weren't interested. He published his discovery in some obscure journal and then left to become the associate director of some big research institute in his home country.
How are these two incidents related? They both illustrate how any deviation from the assigned conclusion or conventional methodology is fatal to the career of any scientist. That makes DEI, as much as any other dogma the mortals invent, a threat to science.
Most scientific papers and grant proposals start in a stereotyped way: there is some problem that affects some large number of people. By mid-century, if the problem is not solved, many people will die. There is “increasing evidence” that the problem is caused by x, which just by coincidence we happen to be studying, and we have something that will solve the problem.
Upon reading the article, it becomes clear that the only problem it solves is the presence of excess white space on the authors' CV. But that is irrelevant. Solving problems hasn't been the goal in science for many years. The goal in science is to bring in money to pay for new carpeting in offices of the campus bureaucrats. And you use the methodology the agency wants. In biology, that means manipulating the genes of some organism. In climate studies, it means finding a way to get rid of carbon dioxide. Adhering to dogma is the only way to get funded, and therefore the only way to survive in academia.
Before Covid, you might have plausibly said: better safe than sorry. Maybe science won't cause a catastrophe, even if they follow fads, and who knows: the fads are mostly harmless, and maybe the scientists will accidentally cure something. Yet the genetic gain-of-function fad funded by the top science agency in the USA was anything but harmless. It was science that caused the deaths of nearly seven million people. Specifically it was the dogma that to do good science we have to genetically modify viruses, bacteria, and other organisms that led to this easily foreseeable catastrophe.
It's no wonder that science magazines and science bureaucrats resisted this conclusion. They used every trick they could think of: gaslighting, name-calling, and accusing critics of being racist and bigoted. Others blame the PRC's attempts to use it to explore new biological weapons. The goal was to avoid admitting the fact that science caused a calamity. Their goal was not to protect public health; it was to protect the institution of science, upon which they depend for their status and financial well being.
If scientific institutions avoid reform by interpreting criticism as opposition to science, they can expect government to step in with new rules that nobody will like.
But it's not just biology. Here's an example of what climatologists are considering:
The average global temperature is increasing faster now than at any time in the last 2 million years. This has fueled record-breaking droughts, heat waves, and wildfires, and has intensified weather patterns, causing more extreme and damaging hurricanes and rainfall. Human activity is driving this change, primarily through the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, which are released when fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas are burned to produce energy.
Except for the part about fossil fuels producing energy, everything in this paragraph, written by a first year Ph.D. student in virology, is false or at best unproven. The only suitable description for their proposed solution—geoengineering—is ‘insanely dangerous’: if you think Covid killed a lot of people, wait until we start tinkering with the climate. Just as with Covid, people will blame science for what happens.
There is nothing more dangerous than using science to try to solve a problem that is not real. But that is now how science is done: go through the list of what the funding agency wants to pay for, pick something you know how to do, and then define your topic as an urgent public health problem. All proposals do it this way. The ones that get funded are the ones that happen to pick some methodology that the reviewers think is ‘cool.’ Most times, the conclusion, that the hypothesis was proven correct, is also pre-ordained.
In many of the grants I've read, the researchers ignore results that conflict with their hypothesis. There are even grants that ask for funding for a hypothesis that their own published research showed to be false. More often than not, my fellow grant reviewers never noticed.
Question to the class: is this evidence of corruption? If you define corruption as telling people what they want to hear in exchange for money, raise your hand.
(These days, of course, neither grad students nor med students will ever actually dare to raise their hand. Grad students will write the question in their notebooks and memorize it, and med students will just snore louder because it won't be on the Boards.)
For biology, the problem starts at the Center for Scientific Review, or CSR. CSR is the branch of NIH that determines where the funding goes for extramural projects, which is to say projects done outside NIH itself. I have many friends and colleagues at CSR. They're smart and they're earnestly doing the best they can. But they also tell me they're under intense pressure to find grant reviewers, but forbidden to pressure people into accepting. Academics get flooded with invitations: I received eight in my four years in academia, and while reviewing grants is interesting, it's also hard, time-consuming work.
It's also frustrating: grants that don't subscribe to the prevailing groupthink have no chance, while proposals that are clearly naive sail through. For example, a clinical study to find biomarkers for some disease might be praised as innovative. But I've consulted with companies studying biomarkers. It's a rat's nest of false positives and statistical confounders, as anyone who attempts such a study will quickly discover. Of course the academic's goal isn't really to find biomarkers; it's to get a paper and another grant. They write up whatever they get, propose x, y, and z as good markers, and move on. It's a perfect example of how easy it is to get sidetracked from the true goal of science by the struggle for funding.
Most laymen have never heard of CSR, but it has a death grip on how science is funded. Through CSR, NIH imposes its embrace of diversity onto academic science. It is the reason so many of the NIH Program Announcements, known as PAs, RFAs (Requests for Applications), FOAs (Funding Opportunity Announcements), and NOSIs (Notices of Special Interest) are now asking for useless clinical studies to find out if systemic racism and discrimination are affecting the rates of disease. This means that even in topics with no possible roots in racism, we're now required to pretend to believe it's a contributing factor.
Given the already intense pressure to produce positive results, evidence be damned, there's no doubt we'll be up to our earballs in fake results purporting to show that it is. The result has been to shift resources away from attempts to identify the pathogenesis of diseases. Scientists are now grinding out papers intended to show that global warming and racism cause disease.
The NIH is now requiring scientists to produce something called a PEDP, or Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives. A PEDP is exactly what it sounds like: a diversity statement, and it's already mandatory for some FOAs Unlike some of the other sections of a grant, the PEDP is scored, which means the peer reviewers have to evaluate it, and applications without a good enough PEDP won't be funded. The rules are couched in reassuring terms, but in practice they'll probably end up like those government-mandated spreadsheets for clinical studies that list the numbers of each sex and each ethnic group in our patient population. What will a researcher do if he can't find enough co-investigators of the appropriate group? There will only be three choices: invent a fake one, recruit a token representative of the missing group, or abandon the research, leaving the disease uncured as society goes off on a wild goose chase.
The bright side is that DEI ideologues have gone too far. I've been hearing from left-wing friends who discovered that conservatives and libertarians were right all along about DEI. From what they tell me, working at NIH is now a nightmare exercise in eggshell-walking. Although government employees can't be fired, a single misinterpreted phrase gets them placed on leave, reprimanded, their workload increased, and threatened with jail as the gigantic diversity-equity-inclusion bureaucracy comes down on them like a ton of bricks, just as it does in academia and elsewhere.
If there's one hard rule in being an oppressive dictator, it's this: never oppress your own allies. DEI was just fine and dandy when people thought it only affected “bad” people. Their opinion changes abruptly when they get nailed themselves for some innocuous comment. Maybe they accidentally let slip that they think sex is not really ‘assigned’ at birth; or maybe they asked whether meritocracy and affirmative action might possibly be conflicting goals. Or maybe they just asked: If there are an infinite number of sexes, why is it that ‘transitioners’ always choose either ‘male’ or ‘female’?
Eventually enough people will dare to call the emperor naked. The counter-revolution is coming, and it will see diversity activists tossed out of our colleges and corporate HR departments and erased from our collective memory by the news media, which will pretend it never happened and it was also wonderful that it did. But the damage to science has a deeper cause than just DEI, and reversing the loss of our preeminence in science will not be so easy.
jun 19 2023, 9:55 am. last updated jun 21 2023, 7:11 am. edited for brevity jun 23 2023, 4:11 am
