nside Science (Cold Spring Harbor, 2023, 327 pages) by Benjamin Lewin
is an inoffensively gentle
critique of science. I don't want to criticize it: it's more like
a wistful reminiscence of how science used to be. But what science needs
now is not gentle criticism, but a brutal slap in the face.
Lewin, a former editor of Cell, a leading journal for DNA-related stuff, praises Cell, Nature, Science, and PNAS, but says the 10,000 journals at the bottom of the hierarchy are merely reducing the signal to noise ratio. It's true that these four have always had an extraordinarily high opinion of their own importance. But here's how people in the trenches see them:
If you always misinterpret your results, send it to Nature.
If you can't be bothered to write a methods section, send it to Science.
If you have a new multi-million dollar machine for analyzing DNA, send it to Cell.
If it's totally wrong but fits with the current fashionable ideology, send it to Lancet.
Working scientists don't dare criticize them, but Lewin is probably right when he says that print journals will soon be a thing of the past. When a scientific journal starts telling Americans how to vote or suppresses alternative viewpoints as if doing so protects the institution of science, it's a sign that it's no longer fit for purpose.
Citation Analysis
Chess problem
As an editor, Lewin has a different idea than scientists do about citation analysis. Scientists sometimes think of citation analysis as a tool created for bean-counters who don't understand anything about science, but know that when one number is bigger than another, that means it's better. Thus, a paper that is cited more often is better. This is a roundabout way of saying independent thinking is bad, and Lewin offers some good examples.
As for peer review, here's how it really works. The head of a lab gets a request to review something. It's ignored until the day before the deadline. He then gives it to a postdoc, who knows nothing about the subject, to review 'by tomorrow,' and takes credit for what the postdoc writes. When I was a postdoc, I reviewed dozens of papers each year for my boss. We saw it as our duty, as the boss would have said something embarrassing or offensive to the author, who would know it was him—you always know—and retaliate against us.
Scientific Fraud
Lewin says he thinks most retractions are due to fraud. Perhaps he doesn't realize how evil academics really are. Here's what happened to one lab that I once collaborated with.
Someone started sending anonymous letters to every journal this lab had published in, accusing them of fraud. By the time I found out, five of their papers had been retracted. Journals send reports detailing what they think is wrong and demand a response. I asked to see the reports and was flabbergasted: the journals' analysts were essentially inventing stories to justify their position. I also discovered that, having zero understanding of image analysis, these researchers had been analyzing and presenting their data incorrectly for years, which undoubtedly contributed to the problem.
The claims in the reports were easily refuted and I saved two of their next papers. I then gave them hands-on training, which the university wouldn't provide. They needed it: they had absolutely no clue that the original, valid images the journals had demanded were not lost as they thought, but sitting on their own computer the whole time.
This was an injustice committed by the journals and by the university bureaucrats, whose only interest was protecting the school's reputation. It turned out that the letters were coming from a faculty member with a grudge against the department. They had the desired effect: the department head took responsibility, thereby foolishly admitting guilt, and lost his position. The instigator then went after me for helping the lab and sabotaged a small grant I had written. The only way I found out about it was that the grant agency accidentally sent me a copy of the letter containing his signature. The university didn't care.
Lewin writes “Failure to handle fraud . . . cannot be forgiven in terms of the ideals of scientific investigation.” It's easy to act indignant. But when you look at what's actually going on, what you almost always find is massive incompetence and academic hate concealed under layers of lies and fake smiles.
What can you do when the fraud-hunters are guilty of fraud? Not much. Your university will not defend you. Your fellow academics will turn against you to avoid being tainted. Don't rely on “AI” to tell you anything true. A good defense is to learn image forensics yourself before they come after you. An even better defense is to avoid academia altogether.
Clinical trials
Why do 80–90% of clinical drug trials fail? It's not due to “attempts to protect the work by secrecy, rushing to obtain priority, or simple sloppiness” as Lewin says on page 81. Most often it's because there's no scientific basis for them. Often, a drug trial is a way of testing the hypothesis that the target of the drug has something to do with the disease. If they guess right, they stand to make millions. Of course, the chances of guessing right are slim.
What often happens is that some protein—beta-amyloid in Alzheimer's, alpha-synuclein in Parkinson's—is increased in the disease. It gets classified as a “protein folding disorder” and the goal becomes to get rid of the “bad” protein. Few think to ask why the cells started producing the bad protein. Drug companies like this strategy because antibodies all have the same physical properties (making formulation easy) and they're easier to get through the FDA than small molecules.
In other words, the goal is not to cure the disease, but to get rich by curing the symptom long enough to trick the FDA, which is desperate to be seen as doing something useful, into approving it. There's not usually scientific fraud here, only bad logic.
Last month I got a call from a company that plans to do diagnostic services. Their cultured cells were doing the opposite of what they were supposed to. I gave them what help I could, but I suspect they were starting to realize that the only relationship between the disease and their test, which they had pulled from the literature, was a statistical correlation. That's not enough. In the absence of a mechanism tying it to the disease, they'd have to do an astronomical amount of work to get it accepted.
The temptation in industry is to blame the researchers. But the real culprit is the system that forces scientists to publish when they don't want to—and tells them to say things they don't believe.
How science is done
Lewin also takes the conventional view on how scientists come up with ideas. He says a publication is a sanitized version adjusted to turn a serendipitous discovery into a coherent narrative. That's not quite true. What really happens is this: a researcher's goal is to be in possession of something that no one else has. That can be a piece of knowledge, a novel method, or an expensive piece of equipment. The researcher then uses it to get publishable results, which only he can get.
To make progress, a researcher does experiments and repeats previous work until he or she gets a result that doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean the past work was wrong. It means that discovery is actually a series of “How in the hell am I going to explain that?” moments. Contradiction is the mother of invention that forces researchers to invent a novel hypothesis. No one is concealing that. If you read the paper carefully, the scientists are actually saying it.
In the past decade, a new way of generating hypotheses has been invented. First you decide which group in society is most oppressed. Then you look for some difference between the oppressed and oppressor group. When you find it, you attribute the difference to stress caused by structural racism, sexism, or whatever is popular at the moment.
This is a subset of the “Figure out what the government wants and give it to 'em” strategy. In one recent paper the researchers bought a fancy new machine to measure particle sizes. Searching for a use for the machine, they tried burning various kinds of food and analyzed the smoke from the food in their new machine.
Getting food to produce smoke by burning it is, of course, not a novel discovery. My own parent did that every day. But the government wants to ban gas stoves, so the authors tacked on the fact that they used a gas stove to burn all that food, thereby making it interesting to the editor—and the government.
Covid
Science is the most powerful way of discovering the truth ever conceived. It is one of mankind's greatest inventions. Around it they've built the most corrupt, venial, and dishonest system ever devised.
Lewin pulls his punches when he criticizes the science establishment. He also blames people for doubting them:
The [COVID] pandemic has also revealed the extraordinary proportion of people who function on the basis of irrational belief rather than “follow the science.” [p.153–4]
The problem is not that people aren't “following” our demands enough. The fact is that the public health establishment, including the CDC and NIH, lied repeatedly to the public. Biologists have been manipulating viruses in ways that make them more pathogenic. There is strong reason to believe this is what caused the pandemic that killed unknown hundreds of thousands of people. In any other context, it would be called biological warfare. Laymen would be fools to “follow” an institution that does this.
The science establishment needs to stop circling the wagons and deal with this problem. The other problems in science need to be addressed as well, instead of telling us that everything will be fine. It won't.
Scientists want to cure diseases and advance our knowledge. Instead, they're being forced to write papers they know are worthless and to spend all their time writing grants. This is not a minor problem. The system is designed not to cure diseases, but to give the academic bureaucrats more power.
Changing the tenure system, imposing new rules, or increasing funding are not the solution. These changes would only make the system worse. The administrators at the universities need to be put out to pasture and the system radically changed to make the top priority saving lives, not kowtowing to parasitical, power-mad bureaucrats.
Lewin probably wants to uphold the reputation of science. I've worked in all three places: government, nonprofits, and academia. They all have the same problems. Pretending that everything is mostly okay and a few tweaks are needed here and there will not work. Covid revealed the extent of institutional lying and and corruption in science. If it's not corrected, millions will continue to die from uncured diseases and cynical conspiracy theories will continue to arise to explain why.
may 08 2024, 5:55 am. last updated may 08, 6:36 pm
