Introducing Observing Science

A new essay series, written with Michael Stein, on the workings of science, the challenges it faces, and its potential to shape a healthier future.

Last week, I announced the launch of The Turning Point, a new book based on a series of essays written in collaboration with my friend and colleague, Michael Stein. Today, I am delighted to introduce a new series of essays Michael and I will be co-writing, to be released each Tuesday through Public Health Post.

For those who are new to Public Health Post, it is our public health science translational website, which we have run as a school for eight years now. Deeply shaped by the vision of its founding Editor-in-Chief, our late and much missed colleague David Jones, it features articles by our faculty, and by writers from around the world. PHP also hosts a student fellowship where every year five fellows join the PHP team to write pieces, as a way of educating the next generation of public health communicators. PHP has been a delight of a project, a wonderful link between education and translating science. You can find PHP here, and if you want to get the PHP weekly digest you can sign up here.

Michael Stein, in addition to serving as Chair of our Health Law, Policy, and Management department, has long served as Editor-in-Chief of PHP. As I wrote in last week’s essay, in 2021, Michael and I wrote a series of reflections on the moment which became our new book, The Turning Point. I much enjoyed our collaboration on this project, and so am delighted to be embarking on another series of short essays with Michael, this time focused on science.

We are calling the series Observing Science because its aim is to take a critical look at the workings of science, its potential for creating a healthier world, its limitations, and the steps we can take to optimize science in this moment and beyond.

Science, as a discipline, emerges from our human urge to make sense of the world. We apply a system of logic and reason to our engagement with natural phenomena, with the dynamics of the world in which we live, towards the goal of results we can define and interpret and conceptual clarity of our theories. Science starts in the realm of ideas, but it is the basis of much, perhaps all, that is material, tangible. Airplanes fly, computers process data, medicines heal because science works. We keep science working through an approach that is at once probing and skeptical, rooted in a tradition of peer review that ensures the rigor and replicability of findings. In this way, the observation of science is core to the effective functioning of science. The keener our observations, the better we prove or disprove ideas, the more we can know our world. Through science, we understand nature. In the context of biomedical and population health sciences—the subject of our new series—science helps us understand the contexts and technologies that shape the health of humans.

We all depend on the work of science. Yet despite the ubiquity of what science contributes to our world—from medical devices, to our iPhones, to our cars—the process by which scientific output moves from the idea stage to utility is seldom explored in the public conversation. The public does not often see, for example, the trial and error that characterizes much of the development of biomedicine and technology. We have grown in our confidence in the power of science to support societal progress with an eye towards the public good. But this view does not always consider bumps in this road to progress. Science must contend with the realities of politics, of the bigotry and pedantry that can seep into research, and the challenge of miscommunication, misinformation, and simple human confusion that can muddy the waters in which science swims. This has all shaped a context in recent years in which public trust in science has significantly declined.  

This decline in trust has deep implications for a pursuit of health based on reason-informed scientific engagement. It undermines our efforts to create a healthier world and to treat disease when it emerges. We are in a moment when science is needed more, perhaps, than ever. Yet it is also under tremendous pressure, buffeted by the winds of politics and sometimes hostile public opinion. Science must always be insulated, to some extent, from the demands of politics, yet science cannot be conducted without investment, resources—and the allocation of resources is the business of politics. Science needs space for the investigation of theories without immediate practical application, yet it must also account for itself to the decisionmakers who hold the purse strings, and this means increased demand for science to be applicable, saleable, as soon as possible. It must appeal to patrons who may have agendas that diverge from the aims of pure science.

Adding to this mix, there has been a global increase in institutions engaging with science, which has opened the door both for more excellence in science and for more shoddy, compromised work. New technologies have allowed the public to weigh in on science as never before, reducing the opacity that can sometimes obscure the work of science. This has marshaled some support for science, but it has also led many to question the very idea of expertise itself, placing scientists in the position of having to justify themselves and their work not just to their funders and patrons but to the public at large, often in the real-time daily scrum of social media. In this new context, science has found itself under attack, facing demands for greater transparency, a greater diversity of perspectives and voices within science, and broader access to the field, unmediated by factors which have long served as gatekeepers to a scientific career. Science has been placed under the microscope not just for what it does but for how it does it.   

The evolution of science has meant that all of us who work in this field, who care about it, who depend on it, would benefit from reflecting on science’s place in this moment. This is perhaps particularly so when it comes to biomedical science, which is changing rapidly, with profound implications for how we live and die, with how we heal. As we emerge from a pandemic, an emergence facilitated in large part by the development of cutting-edge vaccines, science has a key role to play in addressing the public’s fears of future pandemics. The public is primed to care deeply about developments in biomedical science because these developments personally affect all of us, as we saw clearly during the pandemic. These developments also have social and commercial implications, as the progress of biomedicine intersects with market forces, cultural trends, and the societal inequities that shape who has access to the resources that generate health and who does not. We hope, collectively, that biomedical science can repeat its COVID-era success in creating game-changing vaccines, while also hoping everyone will be able to access the fruits of this technology, with no one left behind.

The goal of Observing Science is to do just as its title suggests—observe the workings of science in this moment. The series will address not just the ideas and principles that support scientific work but also the mechanics, the technicalities, of modern biomedicine. The essays will reflect the perspectives of two working scientists who are actively engaged on a practical, day-to-day basis with the issues the essays will address. We are not philosophers. Certainly, we think about the philosophy that underlies our work, but our central focus is on the practicalities of modern science and the tangible effects of how science intersects with social and political trends. We are writing Observing Science because we all would do well in 2024, particularly those of us working in population health science, to step back and reflect on what is core to all we do—the science that supports our work.

This means asking: what is science? What are the processes and technologies that enable scientific progress? And what of the values that animate these processes, that guide our engagement with technology and biomedical science? How can we structure the work of science in ways that reflect our values and maximize our ability to do good at the level of both technological development and our work addressing the social and political forces that are inextricable from scientific endeavor? In engaging with these questions, Observing Science will also aim to look at the people who do science, at the demands and pressures they face, and at the good they are doing in this moment. We will look at both the doers and consumers of science, towards better understanding the human impact of science, the values and assumptions that shape scientific development, and what all this means for the future. Additional topics will include scientific ethics, misinformation and whistleblowers, censorship, biases and fraud, hierarchies of evidence, precision medicine, rethinking how science is communicated, peer review, silo-ing in science, the politics of funding, orphan drugs, elitism and racism, diversifying science, and scientific freedom.

I am enjoying this new project, and am interested, excited, to see where it leads. If you would like to receive the weekly Observing Science essays by Michael and I, you can get them here. We hope that by engaging with these issues we can help readers become better informed about the workings of science, and better able to advocate for a science that supports a healthier world. 

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Also this week.

I recently had the pleasure of joining The Michael Shermer Show to discuss Within Reason.