Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt

Sutter (How to Die in Space), an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University, levels a fiery critique at the perverse incentives that compromise the quality of scientific research. The pressures captured in the dictum “publish or perish,” Sutter contends, have fueled a $10 billion science and technology publishing industry “with double-digit profit margins” while producing a rash of studies with fabricated or unverifiable results. For example, in 2014 a Ohio State University geneticist was accused of cutting and pasting DNA test results to create the impression of active proteins where there were none, and a Harvard University biologist resigned in 2010 after assistants alleged he told them to ignore results contradicting his hypothesis regarding monkeys’ ability to recognize auditory patterns. Suggesting that subtler forms of bunk science are widespread, Sutter explains how researchers use p-hacking (massaging data so that statistical quirks appear to show correlations between likely unrelated variables) to create the impression of positive findings and boost their chances of publication. Sutter puts together a reasonable case that scientists should do more to make their work accessible to the general public so that lay readers don’t have to rely on sensationalistic or misleading accounts from journalists, but his argument that eliminating tenure would motivate “senior scientists” to take more risks appears just as likely to have the opposite effect. Still, it’s an ardent appraisal of what ails the scientific establishment. (Feb.)