Will Science Lives Up To Its Promises?

Rahim Salhi, Sept 15, 2022

    I grew up having a great interest in tinkering with gadgets around the home, breaking into electronics just for the sake of knowing how they function. What causes birds to fly, how do people breathe, how do plants develop, and where do wind and rain originate? Science has provided answers to every one of the existential issues I frequently raised as a child. And this interest grew further during high school when I was a member of our STEM club. It was those experiences that nurtured in me a love for science and boosted my interest later when I started doing research in the lab using the scientific method steps.

    All was great till I come across “Science Isn’t Broken” And “Science is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck”, by Christie Aschwanden, and Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen respectively. Both articles dive into the replication crisis that is facing Science and academic research. Aschwanden discusses how "p-hacking" becomes standard practice in many fields along with other human biases that affect statistical data like election polls. Collison and Nielson address in detail how science has reached its plateau during the last few decades; humans are unable to have discoveries and all resources that have been spent on science are just a waste. For instance, a recent study by the journal Nature found that between 40% and 70% of participants believed that irreproducible research is a result of selective reporting, fraud, and publishing demands.

    The way these two articles discussed the idea of science took me into a tunnel of questions, "Do all scientists exactly follow the scientific method?", and “Is there a reproducibility crisis in science?” No, some scientific fields are simpler to test than others. Scientists studying how stars age or how dinosaurs digested their food, for example, cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or conduct medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses. Scientists modify the scientific method when direct experimentation is not possible. Even when the goal is changed, the goal and many of the steps remain the same: to discover cause and effect relationships by asking questions, carefully gathering and examining evidence, and determining whether all available information can be combined into a logical answer.

    However, some people decide to disregard some steps of the scientific methods and create their own to gain for a variety of reasons, whether it is fame, academic competition (which is still ethical as long as it is not against the scientific method), or materialistic goals. Science and scientists are frequently stereotyped as rigorous skeptics, but bias trust plays a significant role in scientific research as it progresses from data collection to publication. And when an increasingly competitive profession is built on blind trust, the conditions are ripe for scientists to cheat.

    So, what motivates scientists to cheat? According to Michael White from Pacific Standard: “One commonly cited reason is that the incentive structure of modern science is out of whack”. Today's scientists must frequently be self-promoting entrepreneurs whose work is motivated not only by curiosity but also by personal ambition, political concerns, and funding needs.

    While we are continually inventing, it does not appear that we are moving considerably quicker than in previous decades. Medical research, for example, appears to be particularly delayed. There are medical technologies that we discovered decades ago that are still not being used to their full potentials like CRISPR and stem cells. I'm beginning to suspect that such technologies will not live up to the hype for decades to come.


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