hy does everything in the world, including science, have to be
political? One possibility is that politics is easy because politics
is hate, and people love nothing more than to hate each other, while
science demands dispassionate, cool calculation.
Whenever there’s a crisis in science, people immediately turn it political. Take scientific fraud. Last week a former colleague who stole a grant from me finally got his comeuppance. His papers came under scrutiny by a journal and their scientific integrity was found wanting.
I looked at his paper and it’s clear his career is doomed. Nobody will ever collaborate with him again. In the name of decency I offered to help write a rebuttal, though the offer will probably be ignored. These things are more often due to incompetence than fraud. I know the author and I think I can make a good case for that.
The criterion of truth or falsity as the sole measure of value is threatened by the introduction of politics into science, and high-profile magazines like Science and Nature are partially responsible.
Cleaning house
An editorial in Science magazine last week demanding a housecleaning of science is a good example. The author claims that an article exonerating glyphosate was ‘ghostwritten’ by academics but actually produced, written, and directed by employees of Monsanto (the official Default Bad Guy these days). The author notes that ChatGPT cited the article, and says ghostwriting is a type of fraud because the corporate authors are not listed. The idea is that if they were we would discount the article entirely because of its source.
It's always tempting to adopt an attitude of moral superiority, whether it's a profit-driven company or a dishonest former colleague. But in each case, what is important is not the moral character of the company or researcher but whether the data presented are correct and representative. The authors’ affiliation has no bearing on the truth or falsity or their claims. The editor believes that glyphosate causes cancer and that red meat is carcinogenic, and therefore the company must be lying. She wants to “clean house” by declaring studies that present conclusions that conflict with these beliefs to be fraudulent and, presumably, prevent companies from publishing articles that defend their product.
This is scarcely different from what we get from the popular media: a narrative complete with good guys (themselves) and bad guys (Big Something-Or-Other) designed to elicit outrage.
All you need is data, data. Data’s all you need
The golden rule in science is that the data are always correct if they’re reported accurately. The corollary, validated by my forty years of doing science, is that everything else that purports to explain the data can be wrong. Sometimes it’s something simple, like misreading a paper and confusing nitrate and nitrite; sometimes they misinterpret artifacts as something real to keep the funding coming; sometimes they run badly designed experiments; and sometimes they simply state the opposite of what their data show in order to get it published.
I've watched grad students being trained by researchers whose only concern is to help the student (and themselves) get a publication. The student was using the instrument wrong and getting nonsensical data, but the researcher didn't care. We’ve seen it a hundred times: alcohol, coffee, or HRT cause cancer. Alcohol, coffee, or HRT prevent cancer. On and on, around in circles, one well designed clinical study after another, each contradicting the last. The reason is that researchers are penalized for taking the time to investigate and prove each step at the molecular level, then systematically track down every possible confounding factor. This is why the most “productive” researchers write lots of papers, yet mysteriously the field makes no progress.
The one thing that is not relevant is whether the author works for a company that makes or sells a specific product. Everyone has a vested interest in their conclusion and everyone is selling a product of some kind, whether it’s their new theory, their new drug, or only themselves. In an academic or government lab, their boss can be as censorious of dissenting results as any corporate manager. It's the readers’ own fault if they're misled by that. Reading a paper critically means evaluating their design, checking their citations, and redoing all their calculations and statistics. Where the author works is the least likely to be relevant.
Satan L., Beelzebub L.F., et al.
Even if Satan himself wrote that glyphosate paper, the only credible thing in it is the actual data, if any. On some topics, like brimstone, Satan would be a bona fide expert, but even so we’d be under no obligation to accept his interpretation. Maybe he misleads us on purpose to throw competing archangels off the track; maybe he’s pandering to the funder, whoever that may be; maybe the peer reviewers demanded he state something false (as happened to me a couple times); or maybe he’s too invested in his own theory to notice.
Recognition of these facts has helped me many times: somebody totally misinterprets their data and no one notices. I read the paper, figure out what they really discovered, and voilà, a valid project. I always tried to teach that tactic to junior scientists in the lab. But the fact remains: Anybody who reads the scientific literature thinking they’re seeing truth, let alone “settled science,” will be disappointed.
The problem, they think, couldn’t be the system, so it must be bad people cheating or taking bribes; or maybe corporate greed or a bad molecule or substance, like alcohol or meat, that they can ban. They want a simple answer. This is why people like that editor try to generate outrage. It’s is a way to push people into doing what you want. But it only erodes the distinction between the science press and the popular press.
nov 05 2025, 5:47 pm. updated nov 06, 2025, 2:36 am
