abuse of science essay

Essay on Uses and abuses of science in 200 – 300 words

Essay on Uses and Abuse of science:

We are living in the age of science. Scientific inventions have revolutionized human life. They have brought about remarkable changes in our ways of living and make the world a better and happier place for us.

Science has made our domestic life comfortable. Science has discovered many useful things. The invention of the Gramophone, Radio , Television , Cinema , Computer , etc. has added to our pleasure and made life interesting.

Science has reduced human labour. It has invented various machines for different kinds of jobs. Machines sweep and cook for us. Electric fans and coolers protect us against the heat of summer. Refrigeration and cold storage have helped the preservation of food articles and make possible their exchange between different countries.

Science has proved to be a great blessing in agriculture , industry , and in fields of medicine and surgery . It is no more a thing of surprise that electricity can be produced from the wind.

Besides all this, science has also invented bombs , guns, missiles, etc. These things can prove destructive if they go in the hands of some foolish people.

So, science is both, useful and harmful. If we use it in a proper way, it can make our life happy. But always remember that the wrong way use of science may very dangerous for the world.

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Abusing science

Joseph d. mcinerney.

1 Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, National Coalition for Health Professional Education in Genetics, American Society of Human Genetics, Lutherville MD, USA

Michael J. Dougherty

2 Department of Pediatrics, University of Colorado School of Medicine, Aurora CO, USA

The perversion of science in the interest of ideology and greed is not a new phenomenon, but a public that is largely scientifically illiterate now is besieged by “alternative facts” and well‐designed efforts to discredit legitimate science on topics ranging from vaccines to climate change. Here, we examine three topics rooted in biology and biomedicine—creationism, harms from tobacco, and opioid addiction—to show that those purveying misinformation employ a consistent pattern of intellectual dishonesty to delegitimize science that challenges their ideological positions. Individual scientists and the scientific community at large should confront and counter these attacks on the intellectual integrity that is at the heart of the scientific enterprise.

“The foundation of morality is to have done, once and for all, with lying.” Thomas Henry Huxley, keynote address at the inauguration of Johns Hopkins University 12 September 1876

1. INTRODUCTION

In August 2017, the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), in the United States, published an editorial titled “Teaching Biology in the Age of ‘Alternative Facts’”. 1 Biology teachers in the U.S. certainly were accustomed to being besieged by the alternative facts of creationism, especially as that movement morphed from its religious foundations to the charades of “creation science” and “intelligent design,” failed attempts to make the Christian creation myth less overtly violative of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

Given that history, why would NABT’s board feel compelled to issue a broader statement on “alternative facts” and the challenges they present to teachers and students? The editorial explains as follows:

In an age of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” our society is constantly bombarded with disinformation designed to undermine the principles under which scientific inquiry operates and cast doubt on conclusions derived through the scientific enterprise…. Our members understand that the recent efforts to cast doubt on the science of climate change or the process of evolution are no more valid than past campaigns that attempted to cast doubt on the deleterious health effects of tobacco use or the benefits of immunization for individuals and society….When science denialism goes unchallenged, each instance not only impacts that specific area of science, but serves to undermine all of science, with dramatic and harmful effects. 1

As the editorial indicates, the range of scientific topics threatened by disinformation is broad, and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic quickly became subject to the same threats, ranging from inaccurate, even dangerous, speculation issued by the White House 2 to frank scams designed to bilk a nervous public out of its money. 3

When confronting such misinformation, is it sufficient for scientists simply to remind the public that science does not recognize “alternative facts” and designates them as “errors”? We think not. When confronting willful misinformation, it is important to be clear about the objectives of those who are inventing and promulgating “alternative facts” in the current political climate. Those responsible are not seeking to engage the public in abstruse and nuanced discussions about epistemology. Their intent, rather, is to delegitimize valid science, to obfuscate the issues at hand, and to confuse a public that has low scientific literacy. 4 , 5 , 6 To counter those efforts, the public needs to understand the often‐malign motives of the individuals and entities responsible, and it needs the tools to distinguish valid information from sheer nonsense.

Motives for the invention and promulgation of “alternative facts” often have their roots in ideology—political, religious, economic, and otherwise. In trying to combat willful misinformation and “alternative facts,” therefore, one must do more than provide the correct information. The “deficit model” of improving science literacy by merely providing accurate content is known to be inadequate because scientific knowledge is linked to attitudes about science. 5 The history of the evolution/creation controversy makes clear, for example, that scientists cannot simply “throw facts at the problem,” as Eugenie Scott, long‐time director of the National Center for Science Education, often said, and the steady accumulation of evidence that supports descent with modification, including comparative genomic sequencing, has had little or no impact on creationists. Both of us have asked creationists to identify scientific evidence that would convince them of the validity of evolution. The unequivocal answer has been, “there is none.”

In the face of such intransigence, one must consider the best use of time, intellectual energy, and resources, and one must understand and address the ideologies that make its adherents embrace erroneous information and that leave them refractory to legitimate science. Further, one must be clear on the meaning of “ideology” itself, especially in the context of science‐related controversies.

Throughout this paper, our definition of ideology will follow that of David Joravsky, developed in The Lysenko Affair , 7 his detailed analysis of one of history's most notorious and long‐lived ideological attacks on the integrity of science. According to Joravsky:

When we call a belief “ideological,” we are saying at least three things about it: although it is unverified or unverifiable, it is accepted as verified by a particular group, because it performs social functions for that group. “Group” is used loosely to indicate such aggregations as parties, professions, classes, or nations. “Because” is also used loosely, to indicate a functional correlation rather than a strictly causal connection between acceptance of a belief and other social processes. 7

The intent of the several examples that follow is to demonstrate the pattern of willful ignorance and duplicity that underlies assaults on the integrity of science driven by ideology. There are other examples, of course, but those we have chosen have their roots in the abuse of biology and biomedicine. For each topic we review briefly the underlying science, falsehoods promulgated by the abusers, intended audience(s), mechanisms for distribution, underlying ideologies, damage, and potential repair.

2. CREATIONISM

Perhaps no issue at the interface of biology and American society has the staying power and pervasive cultural reach of creationism and its factual and ideological conflicts with evolution theory. The conflicts derive largely from the unending growth of scientific and technological knowledge that contradicts the pleasant creationist fictions of Judeo‐Christian scripture and their accounts of the origin of the universe and life on earth.

Readers of this journal know that evolutionary biology and its related disciplines such as geology posit an ancient age for the universe, our planet, and its biota. Evolution also demonstrates the relatedness of all species through descent with modification and the appearance of H . sapiens as a product of the same natural processes that produced all other life on earth. Charles Darwin established the mutability of species and the centrality of natural selection in the generation of earth's biodiversity and in the appearance of design in living things. 8 , 9

Although it is not monolithic – there are varieties of creationism – the creationist belief system is rooted in a broad, interrelated network of falsehoods that challenge virtually all assumptions of evolution theory and seek to affirm scriptural accounts of life's origin and diversity. The Genesis account of creation is, according to its adherents, the true and inspired word of God. Creationist literature asserts that the universe and life on earth are anything but ancient; young‐earth creationists have settled on roughly 6000 years. Species are said to be immutable and were specially created by a supernatural entity, the God of Judeo‐Christian scripture. Intelligent design, the most recent putatively scientific iteration of creationism, leaves the designer unnamed so as to escape legal sanction in court cases that adjudicate creationism's religious intent. According to creationists, H . sapiens was created by God in his image. Furthermore, the fit of a species to its niche is claimed to be evidence of an intelligent designer, not the result of cumulative, iterative selection acting on naturally occurring inherited variation.

Creationism's underlying ideology is a powerful and toxic blend of religion and social engineering, performing social functions for those who insist on the validity and authority of revealed knowledge and those with a commitment to a religious foundation for the basic structure of society, including governance. The relentless drive to insert creationism into public schools reflects the desire of its adherents to ensure that public education reflects sectarian principles. 10 , 11

A secondary motivation, if not precisely an ideology in the Joravsky sense of the term, is greed. Individuals and entities whose educational materials promote creationist perspectives, for example, stand to profit from adoption of those materials by religious institutions or by public schools whose administrations support creationist perspectives in the curriculum. Similarly, those who run creationist theme parks such as the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum, both in Kentucky, derive revenue from those attractions, 12 notwithstanding their scientific bankruptcy.

Intended audiences for creationism are expansive and reflect the underlying ideology. The general public, students, and teachers, for example, are targets of creationist content that seeks to support the validity and acceptance of the movement's underlying religious perspectives. On the other hand, creationists often target school boards, state legislatures, and the courts at all levels in their continuing, but largely unsuccessful efforts to secure political and legal sanctions for the inclusion of creationist content in public institutions.

Distribution of creationist ideology occurs through well‐established religious institutions, especially fundamentalist Christian churches in the United States, and through their associated print and electronic media. In Islamic countries such as Turkey, creationist textbooks have reflected the perspectives of leading American creationist organizations and have enjoyed support of the national government, 13 in this case with the intent of weakening long‐standing public support for a secular society and government.

Creationist organizations in the U.S., such as Answers in Genesis and the Discovery Institute, produce “research” that purports to demonstrate the scientific validity of creationism, though the relevant work products rarely if ever find their way into legitimate, peer‐reviewed scientific journals. The aggrieved authors claim discipline‐wide conspiracies on the part of scientists to bar creationist “research” from the scientific literature, a charge that itself performs a social function by bolstering the assertion that religious freedom is under attack by a secular society.

The mainstream media often has been complicit in the promulgation of creationist views by its insistence on “presenting both sides of the evolution/creationism controversy,” a classic example of the false equivalence of some competing ideas. In reality, there are not two equal sides of this issue; there is science and there is pseudoscience and mysticism.

Creationist propaganda calls the cadence on a march toward ignorance for thousands of members of the adult public and for thousands of students who are exposed to mysticism masquerading as science. This assault on scientific integrity damages the public's understanding of biology in particular. It is, of course, possible to teach biology without addressing evolution—it happens all the time 14 —but it is not possible to understand biology if one does not realize that evolution is the central organizing concept of the entire discipline. 15

Beyond biology, creationist propaganda damages science in general in at least three ways. First, creationists assert repeatedly that “evolution is only a theory”, 16 a claim that reduces a theory to little more than an ephemeral guess, when science actually views a theory as a compelling conceptual framework that explains and organizes a large body of observations and experimental results. Indeed, “theories are the end points of science”, 17 not the speculative beginnings. Second, creationism begins with a set of conclusions and acknowledges only data that support them, a perversion of deductive reasoning. Science, by contrast, relies on a combination of (honest) deductive processes, which use questions and hypothesis‐testing to go where the data lead, even if the destination is not what one had hoped, and inductive processes. Indeed, Darwin's work was itself a monument to the power of inductive reasoning as he collected detailed observations over decades until he was able to shape them into a general theory, arguably the most impressive act of synthetic thinking in the history of biology. Third, the use of political and legislative tactics to compel inclusion of creationism in the public‐school curriculum circumvents the standard processes by which scientific content is vetted, accepted as part of the corpus of scientific knowledge, and, ultimately, incorporated into science education.

Finally, creationism does serious damage to secular societies and governance by seeking to overturn the underlying assumptions of separation of church and state, and to religion by forcing it to reject overwhelming scientific evidence and to adhere to patently erroneous—even ridiculous—propositions to explain the history and nature of life on earth.

Repair of the damage to science and society done by creationism is problematic given that surveys show public attitudes toward evolution have remained virtually unchanged for decades. 18 About half of the American public, for example, still accepts that all life on earth was created withing the last 10,000 years by a supernatural entity and has remained unchanged since that time. Damage control, especially in the United States, may be the only real option for science and scientists because, as Gary Wills 19 has written, creationism will never disappear because “the Bible will never stop being the central book of Western civilization.”

Scientists and science educators who have dealt with the leaders of the creationist movement for many years know that it generally is pointless to argue with them; they are essentially impervious to scientific data and to reason. The better use of time and resources is to determine where these leaders are attempting to influence policies—educational, political, legal—and to meet the battle there. The law, for example, clearly is on the side of science, 20 and one should use it to blunt attempts to insert religious dogma into the science curriculum.

Too often, working scientists fail to take creationist efforts seriously, dismissing them as so absurd as to be unworthy of attention. History shows that view to be dangerously mistaken, and scientists should be willing to help oppose any attempts to insert creationist dogma into science education.

One should not, however, tackle these issues without substantive, experienced assistance. The National Center for Science Education ( https://ncse.ngo/ ) is a very good place to start when looking for such help. Furthermore, scientists, no matter how well versed in evolution theory, should resist invitations to debate creationists. Such events are not really debates—creationists are unconstrained by the truth—but rather performances by creationist hucksters. A classic example of the willful perversion of science in such events is the claim that the second law of thermodynamics precludes evolution. That assertion was standard debate fare for the late Duane Gish, former director of the oxymoronic Institute for Creation Research. Gish, who held a PhD in biochemistry from University of California, Berkeley, clearly knew better, but he perpetuated the lie nonetheless before lay audiences.

There still is benefit and hope in dealing with students, some of whom have been sold the false notion that they must choose between evolution and their faith. Experienced educators who are knowledgeable in biology and scripture can help guide such students through this challenge, but that skill requires more than an understanding of evolution; it requires as well a deep understanding of the social functions creationism performs for the believer.

3. SMOKING IS HARMLESS

Tobacco has a long history in America, beginning with its cultivation by Native Americans, but the commercialization of tobacco by early British colonists—and the profits it generated—would provide, centuries later, an incentive for the abuse of science using sophisticated methods that now serve as a playbook for other industries and ideologies. Despite tobacco's pre‐Revolutionary origins as a commodity, it was not until the early twentieth century that cigarettes replaced chewing tobacco as the major consumer tobacco product. Before long, rapidly increasing lung cancer diagnoses, which had been rare, began to raise concerns about the harmful effects of smoking. 21

Studies from the 1920s through the 1940s linked smoking with lung cancer, but these had been retrospective and relied heavily on smokers’ self‐reported—and often unreliable—use of cigarettes, which allowed tobacco companies to criticize any potential cause and effect relationship. The results of the first large prospective study were published in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1954, which demonstrated significant increases in deaths among cigarette smokers due to cancer and heart disease. 22 The authors wrote that “… we are of the opinion that the associations found between regular cigarette smoking and death rates from diseases of the coronary arteries and between regular cigarette smoking and death rates from lung cancer reflect cause and effect relationships.”

Additional studies supported those results, and now we know a great deal more about both the hazards of tobacco use and the mechanisms by which those harms are effected. There are more than 7000 chemicals in smoked tobacco, hundreds of which are harmful and at least 69 of which are carcinogenic. The harmful effects occur when cells absorb these chemicals, which then damage DNA and disrupt normal function. The changes can contribute not only to cardiovascular disease and cancer but to a variety of other diseases, such as immune system disorders. 23 Smoking during pregnancy is a major contributor to low‐birth weight babies and preterm births. 24

Tobacco companies, rather than respecting the emerging science, were already manipulating it toward ends that would compromise public health. According to court rulings in the landmark trial of “Big Tobacco,” nicotine levels had been manipulated in cigarettes since at least 1954 to encourage smokers to smoke more. 25 Leaders of the major companies lied about this fact for decades, including in hearings before Congress. 26 As far back as 1964, the Surgeon General of the U.S. linked cigarette smoking and disease, and tobacco companies lied about this as well even when their own research showed it to be true. Companies also used false advertising to promote low‐tar cigarettes as less harmful than regular cigarettes, a tactic specially designed for older smokers to prevent them from quitting. 27 Older, current smokers, of course, were not the only target audience for tobacco companies. R.J. Reynolds’ egregious behavior in cultivating youth smokers through its “Joe Camel” advertising campaign has been well documented, and in 1997, after a run of nine years, the campaign was ruled by the Federal Trade Commission to have violated federal law. According to the FTC, “after the campaign began the percentage of kids who smoked Camels became larger than the percentage of adults who smoked Camels”. 28

The distribution of Big Tobacco's messages to promote smoking or to deny its harms were not limited to traditional advertising, such as print ads and event sponsorships. In late 1953, working through leading a public relations agency, Hill and Knowlton, Big Tobacco created an industry‐sponsored research organization, the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), that was promoted as independent but was, in fact, wholly controlled by the industry. 29 Similar to the organizations that would later promote creation science and intelligent design, TIRC worked to find data in support of a conclusion, in this case the conclusion that smoking was not harmful. One way this was accomplished was by recruiting prominent scientists as leaders, funding scientists who were skeptical about the emerging health consensus, and then using their results in counter‐messaging. 30 Industry‐funded research then, as now, presents potential conflicts of interest, and not all scientists are equally sensitive to, or respectful of, such conflicts. Another goal of TIRC‐funded projects was to undermine mainstream research studies that did not support conclusions favored by TIRC. Common tactics included highlighting flaws in methodology or gaps in understanding the mechanisms of cancer, 29 which were later adapted by creationists (e.g., playing up “gaps” in transitional fossils). According to Brandt, 29 “The TIRC marks one of the most intensive efforts by an industry to derail independent science in modern history.”

The ultimate motive for these efforts at scientific obfuscation was not a religious or social ideology as it is for creationists, which, though misguided, at least has the merit of sincerity. The motive here is rank profit, even at the expense of tobacco customers’ life and health, but the false‐science “belief system” of Big Tobacco still satisfies Joravsky's definition of ideology. Their science is wrong (i.e., unverified); it is accepted as verified by tobacco executives and presumably some smokers; and it performs a social function, for example justifying an economic system that employs thousands. Profit may be the ultimate motive for the tobacco industry, but the cynical, proximate means to that end was far more sophisticated than creationists’ appeal to biblical literalism. According to Brandt:

“Hill & Knowlton [the public relations agency] had successfully produced uncertainty in the face of a powerful scientific consensus. So long as this uncertainty could be maintained, so long as the industry could claim ‘‘not proven,’’ it would be positioned to fight any attempts to assert regulatory authority over the industry. Without their claims of no proof and doubt, the companies would be highly vulnerable in two crucial venues: regulatory politics and litigation.” 29

Eventually scientific proof—achieved honestly—overwhelmed the disreputable science and doubt suffered a serious, but perhaps not fatal, blow. As the tide turned against smoking, the tobacco industry faced both greater regulatory control and lawsuits won by plaintiffs. The damage, however, had been done. Millions of American smokers are addicted to nicotine, and the harms caused by smoking are by now familiar. Even today, after sharp drops in the number of smokers, an estimated 480,000 people die annually from cigarettes in the U.S. More than 90 percent of lung cancer and 80 percent of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is caused by smoking. 31 Smoking is also estimated to cost the U.S. $170 billion per year in direct medical costs, and $300 billion overall. 32

Public health officials have been trying for decades to reduce the health and economic toll of smoking by supporting campaigns to help current smokers quit and to prevent smoking in the young. Given that 95 percent of tobacco smokers began before they were age 21, the most‐effective way to reduce harm is to prevent the development of a new generation of smokers. 33

Unfortunately, we now see some of the same Big Tobacco tactics being used to raise doubts about the potential harms of e‐cigarettes, which are essentially nicotine‐delivery devices. Juul, the largest of the e‐cigarette companies, is now owned in large part by Altria, the parent company of Philip Morris, and Vuse is owned by Reynolds American. These Big Tobacco players have an obvious interest in maintaining, and growing, the pool of people addicted to nicotine, and claims that e‐cigarettes are intended primarily to help adults quit smoking are undercut by the companies’ marketing.

Indeed, regulators are alarmed by the popularity of vaping among minors, which was driven largely by first‐wave products with fruit and candy flavors that are appealing to children. E‐cigarette use jumped 78 percent among high schoolers and 48 percent among middle‐schoolers in just one year, from 2017 to 2018. In a statement of concern from the Food and Drug Administration, then‐commissioner Scott Gottlieb outlined steps he intended to take to prevent the use of e‐cigarettes by children. 33 Predictably, lobbyists for tobacco companies, including Altria and Reynolds American, have aligned against legislation to regulate and tax e‐cigarettes. 34

It still is too early to tell whether e‐cigarette companies will attempt to corrupt science in the systematic ways that tobacco companies used to promote smoking. Scientists, public health advocates, and educators, however, should be prepared to counter such disinformation campaigns. K‐12 education, public and private, must do a better job teaching the methods and nature of science, not just its content, but long lag times and an ever‐increasing number of important science issues currently being undermined (e.g., anti‐vaxx, climate change) suggest this will not be sufficient. Efforts should include enlisting the media, traditional and social, to help educate the public about the differences between honest science and the intellectually dishonest “science” peddled by those with alternative motives. Money from pro‐science philanthropists to support such efforts and promotion by key influencers may help level the playing field.

4. FOLLOWING A COMMON PLAYBOOK

Creationism and the hoax of harmless smoking are hardly the only examples of science corrupted in the service of ideologies unrelated to science. With some variation, the tactics used so successfully by creationists and Big Tobacco have been adopted and used by other groups with agendas that range from medicine to the environment. The recent polarization of American politics and society, the denigration of expertise as elitist, and the media's tendency to provide legitimizing, “both sides” coverage of issues, even when undeserved, seem only to have exacerbated this problem.

Opioids provide an interesting example where sloppy scholarship, dishonest marketing, the evolving practice of medicine, the co‐opting of scientific and medical leadership, and greed combined to create an addiction epidemic that has roiled the country for more than two decades. It all began in 1980 with a one‐paragraph letter by Jane Porter and Hershel Jick in the New England Journal of Medicine that made a simple observation: based on hospital records, narcotic addiction was rare in patients with no history of addiction. This was not a formal study, and there was no information about the narcotics being used or their dosage, frequency, or duration. 35 Over time other researchers cited this letter without context or qualification and, in some cases, later apologized for having never read it. An important missing caveat was that Porter and Jick's observation was based on hospitalized patients, not outpatients being prescribed drugs for self‐administration. 36

Unfortunately, this letter ended up serving two masters: a drug industry energized by Madison Avenue‐style marketing and a medical community in the midst of a changing paradigm, namely that pain was being undertreated and should be viewed as a “fifth vital sign”. 36 By the mid‐1990s, disreputable physicians, many of whom had been sanctioned, began opening pill mills across Appalachia. At the same time, Purdue Pharma developed OxyContin as a time‐release drug and promoted it as a less‐additive painkiller in spite of having provided no supporting data to the FDA. They falsely claimed that the narcotic was harder to extract (and thus abuse) than other painkillers when their own studies indicated that 68 percent of the oxycodone could be extracted when crushed and liquified. Phony graphs were also used in marketing to give the impression that the plasma levels of oxycodone were steady when, in fact, they spiked in the users’ blood and then crashed. Purdue Pharma ultimately was called to account, reminiscent of Big Tobacco, when three executives pled guilty to misdemeanor false branding and paid a $634M fine. 36 , 37

If manipulated and fraudulent science were not enough, the opioid industry also followed the Big Tobacco playbook by cultivating physicians, institutions, and organizations willing to support pharma's message that opioids were safe and non‐addictive. As alleged in a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts Attorney General in 2019, “Purdue hired the most prolific opioid prescribers in Massachusetts as spokesmen to promote its drugs to other doctors. Purdue funded the Massachusetts General Hospital Purdue Pharma Pain Program and an entire degree program at Tufts University to influence Massachusetts doctors to use its drugs.” 38 Tufts even promoted a Purdue Pharma employee to Adjunct Associate Professor in 2011. 39

Leading advocacy groups and professional societies also played a role by lobbying on behalf of the opioid industry's marketing and prescribing practices while accepting their donations. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued guidelines for primary care providers who prescribe narcotics for non‐cancer chronic pain. Those guidelines encouraged the preferential use of non‐opioid pharmacologic agents, highlighted the risks of addiction, and identified the drugs most likely to cause harm and the patients most at risk. 40 The drug industry did not approve. According to a report from the U.S. Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), The American Pain Society, the U.S. Pain Foundation, the Academy of Integrative Pain Management, and the American Academy of Pain Management accepted more than $6M from narcotics manufacturers from 2012‐2017. 41 Altogether the report identifies more than a dozen groups receiving almost $9 M from five manufacturers. What did all this largess buy the industry? In part, active opposition to the development and issuance of the CDC guidelines by a majority of the groups identified in the HSGAC report. According to the report: “Many of the groups discussed in this report have amplified or issued messages that reinforce industry efforts to promote opioid prescription and use, including guidelines and policies minimizing the risk of addiction and promoting opioids for chronic pain”. 41

The internet, celebrity culture, and targeted marketing through social media such as Facebook make it easier to spread anti‐science messages to receptive groups than in decades past. Andrew Wakefield's reputation in the scientific community may be in shambles thanks to his fraudulent research claiming a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, but his public profile remains high and he is an unfairly maligned hero to the anti‐vaxx community. 42 The TV personality Jenny McCarthy runs a non‐profit called Generation Rescue that continues to provide a forum for Wakefield's dishonest claims, 43 which have caused real harm in the form of depressed vaccination rates in Great Britain and the United States. 44 What was Wakefield's motivation? The now‐familiar motivator of greed, in this case an elaborate scheme to get rich from lawsuits generated by vaccine fears. 45

Today there are also organizations, largely on the political right, that exist solely or in part to cast doubt on science that does not comport with their ideology of opposition to regulation. Not surprisingly this opposition often provides a side benefit: bolstering the economics of specific industries. Some of these organizations are respected think tanks with political philosophies strongly favoring free enterprise, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution, which sometimes provide a forum for climate‐change skeptics. 46 , 47 Others identify themselves as grassroots organizations while functioning primarily as lobbying groups for fossil fuel and other industries, such as the Koch‐funded Americans for Prosperity.

The non‐profit Association of American Physicians and Surgeons is a particularly interesting example. Through its publishing arm, the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, this trade association provides a forum for commentary about free‐market medicine (often not evidence‐based), polemics against regulation in medicine, and sometimes fringe science that has nothing to do with medicine but does align with its overall anti‐regulation ideology. Articles have cast doubt, for example, on the existence of climate change as a global threat, or trumpeted its benefits. 48 , 49 Others have questioned HIV as the cause of AIDS 50 and offered a sympathetic airing of anti‐vaxxers’ fringe view that autism is linked to vaccines, despite evidence to the contrary, even providing a forum for the discredited Andrew Wakefield. 51 , 52 , 53

5. CONCLUSION

Intentional perversion of science in the service of ideology makes clear the validity of the following assertion by neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris:

“The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledge a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn't”. 54

Intellectual honesty is the heart of all scholarship, irrespective of the discipline, and the translation of scholarship for the public should honor it, not debase it in the interest of ideology or greed. A public that has low scientific literacy and numeracy now faces a growing wave of misinformation, and that public will struggle to separate valid science from nonsense. 4 , 5 , 6 These trends bode ill for public awareness and acceptance of legitimate science and serve as an injunction for individual scientists and the scientific community to push back aggressively against all attempts to misrepresent the methods and results of sound research.

Strategies to counter the abuse of science vary and depend on the nature and context of the abuse in question. Some strategies may be specific and highly targeted, while others may be more far‐reaching. For example, one of us (JDM) threatened legal action against his children's public‐ school district if a creationist candidate for the board of education made good on his promise to mandate the teaching of creationism in the biology curriculum. On a broader scale, an organization both of us have worked for, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, assisted in a number of evolution/creationism court cases whose decisions had implications at state and national levels.

Whatever the context, prevention of and opposition to the abuse of science begin with the integrity of individual scientists and the scientific community at large, as invoked by Thomas Huxley and Sam Harris. Scientists should model that integrity in their work and should discuss it explicitly with their trainees—the next generation of scientists. Perhaps it is time as well to consider a complete ban on industry‐funded research for individual scientists working in academia and other non‐industry settings to remove incentives for bias in reporting of results and to help ensure the public that research agendas are not determined by corporate interests. Science education for the general public—formal and informal—should emphasize the expectation of intellectual honesty in its treatment of the nature and methods of science. It serves little purpose to impress upon students the steps in “the scientific method” if those steps do not reflect a commitment to ethical conduct.

McInerney JD, Dougherty MJ. Abusing science . FASEB BioAdvances . 2020; 2 :587–595. 10.1096/fba.2020-00054 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

The Use and Abuse of Science

First Online: 21 March 2020

Cite this chapter

Paul Needham 7

Part of the book series: Synthese Library ((SYLI,volume 423))

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Moral issues concerning the use and abuse of science are broached in this chapter. Scientists have responsibilities to conduct their research in such a way as to respect and acknowledge the contributions of others and to present their work honestly and without seeking to avoid criticism by misleadingly overestimating random error. The onus on scientists of a wider social responsibility for informing the public and guiding decision makers is also discussed, together with the reciprocal responsibilities of decision makers to ensure that they are informed and able to understand the bearing of new knowledge.

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But a more general claim by Koyré that it would not have been possible to carry out any of the experiments and observations Galileo reported goes too far. Settle ( 1961 ) repeated an experiment on inclined planes in accordance with Galileo’s description, which Koyré had described as completely worthless, and found the ingenious device for measuring time gave quite precise results—certainly precise enough to attain the relations of proportion between distance and times that Galileo claimed. Koyré maintained further that Galileo’s procedure couldn’t possibly furnish a reasonable value of the constant of proportionality appearing in the algebraic expression of this relation of proportion. But as Settle points out, this modern way of expressing the law of free fall by writing distance as a function of time was not the way Galileo expressed the relation, which was weaker and didn’t entail all that the modern functional expression does.

Note that in modern usage introduced towards the end of Sect. 2.2 , we should say “precision” rather than “accuracy”.

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Needham, P. (2020). The Use and Abuse of Science. In: Getting to Know the World Scientifically. Synthese Library, vol 423. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40216-7_4

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The use and abuse of science and technology: rethinking dual-use

23 October 2018 1 March 2019

For over a decade now, I have be rolling around the concept of dual-use in my research, much like how a kitten plays with a fluff ball in the sunbeams of a room. What is the term? I’m mildly interested in it, though it might appear to some others that it’s all I focus on. I like rolling it around, batting it about to see how it will react. I also notice how different it appears in different lights. When I’m engaged in research on security concerns in nuclear settings, the duality presents itself as that between energy production and weapons production. In computing/cyber, it is between defensive and offensive applications. In conventional export controls, it is between civil and military applications.

Many of these contexts for understanding what the ‘dual’ is in dual-use shifted after 2001 to incorporate a focus on terrorism as an ‘other’ category. Perhaps this has been taken up most strongly in biology, where an initial focus on the ‘dual-use dilemma’ of biological research was laid out in the 2004 Fink Report, Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism , focusing on how “the same technologies can be used legitimately for human betterment or misused for bioterrorism” (p. 15).

Ten years ago, I would have said that all of these ways of understanding dual-use are curious, and that they all pivoted towards terrorism in the same way, given their different starting points, was even curiouser.* In my research now, I am pivoting to thinking about the limitations of the concept of dual-use itself. Why focus on duality at all?

To work through this question, in the last week or so I have turned back to Foucault, particularly to his lectures on “Society must be defended” . I’ve been really taken with his analysis of the othering that is at the heart of the construction and normalisation of power, regardless of whether that power is centered around a sovereign or distributed throughout a society. “Dual-use” as a term in use today, especially in biology, has been developed, however unconsciously, to structure a group of potentially unruly people (scientists and bioengineers) around a set of practices that employ themselves in the process of governing security concerns in the life sciences. The point that most people don’t know what the ‘dual’ is in ‘dual-use’ when first introduced to it is a very sly tactic to ‘reveal’ to that person a whole world of biosecurity threats that sit beneath the thin veneer of intended beneficial use of advances in biology. This world of threats is presented as real, as definitely out there and in need of constant vigilance to keep at bay.

It is a process of indoctrinating students and researchers into the current dominant narrative of biosecurity governance. The duality, in its general form, might then be considered as a balancing not of military and civil applications of science and technology, but as balancing ‘use’ and ‘abuse’. Normalising researchers into a biopolitics of biosecurity is about creating a system of relations between them and the rest of society that governs themselves. ‘Abuse’ here can then refer to non-socially sanctioned uses of biology. Is it ok for DARPA to be developing biotechnologies? Is it ok for companies to be developing massive synthesising capacity when capacity to understand things like pathogenicity are still not clearly known? Whether these are uses or abuses of a line of innovation can only be answered within particular epistemes.

Characterising the concept of dual-use this way, we can more clearly see a stumbling block that isn’t very widely acknowledged in biosecurity governance right now: to define what constitutes an abuse of power of biotechnology is to agree on the terms of reference for the debate. Do we? There seems to be broad, though perhaps more tenuous than some would like, consensus for not using biology as a weapon (the Biological Weapons Convention). But where novel biological security concerns are going to come from is not entirely clear. A system of governing based on bright lines around known objects of concern, like the American policies on Dual-Use Research of Concern , relies on a central authority to define a threat, but on a distributed network of practitioners to internalize that threat and govern themselves. Many of them, however, do not perceive the threat in the way the state does, and what do you do about threats that are not yet known?

There are two different understandings of security that are at play in the dual-use debate these days: one that has a clear authority searching for the objective list of objects of concern and clear examples of what will happen when rules about their use are disobeyed; and one that has a network of varying levels and kinds of awareness and attention to security governance of science and technology, coupled with a situated and responsive responsibility for addressing concerns as they are identified. I don’t think we yet appreciate the radically different forms of governing these are based on.

* We are indeed going down a Lewis Carroll rabbit hole.

Historical Lessons on the Use and Abuse of Science and Scientists: A Letter from Patrick J. Loehrer, Sr. M.D. to Colleagues

Peter Schwartz, MD, PhD Jul 24, 2020

Dear colleagues,

“One thing only I know … and that is I know nothing.” So said Socrates, one of the founders of Western philosophy, about 2,400 years ago. This was in response to hearing that the Oracle of Delphi declared there was no one who was wiser than Socrates. He tried to prove the Oracle wrong by interviewing “wise men,” but he found that unlike these so-called wise men, Socrates did not claim to know what he did not know. This was the true meaning of the Oracle’s message. Socrates frequently engaged students and citizens in Athens in philosophical discussions using questions and answers (the Socratic Method). Socrates also was an outspoken critic of the Athenian government, which eventually led to his conviction and a sentence of death by drinking hemlock.

Persecution and defamation also have not been uncommon in science. In Renaissance times, there emerged heretical thoughts that the Earth might rotate around the sun, rather than the other way around (heliocentric theory). Nicolaus Copernicus published this theory in 1543 in his famous work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium , which directly challenged the teachings of the Bible. Perhaps fortunately, he died shortly after its publication sparing him persecution. It did not fare as well for Galileo Galilei, who was born a couple decades after Copernicus death. Galileo was found by the Catholic church to be “vehemently suspect” of heresy for his publications supporting the Copernican heliocentric views. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life and his offending texts were banned. Four centuries later, Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the Catholic church had erred in condemning Galileo.

Yearly mortality rates of patients with puerperal fever

Another example of delayed scientific acceptance is the story of James Lind who was a military surgeon who served in the British Royal Navy from 1739 t0 1748. Lind conducted one of the first randomized clinical trials in medicine. In his time, scurvy was a leading cause of death among sailors, reportedly causing more deaths in the British fleet than by the hands of their French or Spanish foes with whom they were engaged in armed conflict. Scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, but in Lind’s day, the concept of vitamins was still unknown. After two months at sea, many of his fellow shipmates on the HMS Salisbury were afflicted with scurvy. Lind divided 12 of these sailors into six groups of two. They all received the same diet. In addition, group one was given a quart of cider daily, group two 25 drops of elixir of vitriol (sulfuric acid), group three six spoonful’s of vinegar, group four half a pint of seawater, group five received two oranges and one lemon, and group six a spicy paste plus a drink of barley water. The treatment of group five (oranges and lemon) stopped after six days when they ran out of fruit, but by that time one sailor was fit for duty while the other had almost recovered. In 1753, Lind published A Treatise of the Scurvy , which was ignored for decades.

Today, we are faced with a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, discovered just a few months ago. Like the scientists and philosophers over the last two millennia, we are struggling to understand this virus, including its treatment and prevention. We have the advantages of modern technology and the rapid exchange of knowledge that is unprecedented in our history. This still does not mean we get it all right, but we try.

No one is trying harder than Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has been the public face of rational scientific reasoning during this pandemic.

Amid speculations of displeasure by the White House, the editorial board of USA Today wrote last week, “Fauci, 79, is a national treasure. He is one of the leading authorities in his field. He combines extraordinary expertise with an exceptional ability to communicate with ordinary people. He has held his position for 36 years , earning the admiration of multiple presidents, including George W. Bush, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom . ” Through the HIV, SARS, MERS, and Ebola crises, Dr. Fauci has led with candor and caution.

However, in an opinion piece in the same issue , White House trade adviser Peter Navarro painted a different view: “ Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Navarro went on to describe how Fauci was wrong on masks, travel bans from China, and the benefits of hydroxychloroquine and when it comes to listening to Fauci, he only does so with “with skepticism and caution.” Also, Dan Scavino, the administration’s deputy chief of staff for communications, posted a cartoon lampooning Fauci as an economy-destroyer. In the caption of the post, he wrote, “Sorry, Dr. Faucet! At least you know if I’m going to disagree with a colleague, such as yourself, it’s done publicly — and not cowardly, behind journalists with leaks. See you tomorrow!” Fortunately, others have come to Dr. Fauci’s defense.

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) issued the following statement:

“The AAMC is extremely concerned and alarmed by efforts to discredit Anthony Fauci, M.D., our nation’s top infectious disease expert. Dr. Fauci has been an independent and outspoken voice for truth as the nation has struggled to fight the coronavirus pandemic. As we are seeing from the surge in COVID-19 cases in areas that have reopened, science and facts — not wishful thinking or politics — must guide America’s response to this pandemic. … a successful response depends on Dr. Fauci, his colleagues, and scientists throughout America’s system of medical research who are able to draw conclusions based on current observations and continuously adjust those conclusions based on continuing observations. Science is, and must be, a dynamic and evolving process.”

And on behalf of the Infectious Disease Society of America, President Thomas File wrote :

“As 12,000 medical doctors, research scientists, and public health experts on the front lines of COVID-19, the infectious diseases community will not be silenced nor sidelined amidst a global pandemic. Reports of a campaign to discredit and diminish the role of Dr. Fauci at this perilous moment are disturbing. … This is a full-blown crisis unlike any America has ever faced and it needs to be treated as such. The only way out of this pandemic is by following the science, and developing evidence-based prevention practices and treatment protocols as new scientifically rigorous data become available. Knowledge changes over time. That is to be expected. If we have any hope of ending this crisis, all of America must support public health experts, including Dr. Fauci, and stand with science.”

As scientists, we are used to being critiqued on our work. Of course, we are upset when receiving inappropriate reviews of our grant submissions or uninformed comments on our submitted papers. This current atmosphere on a national level feels much different. There are efforts to dismiss the field of science and discount sound public health practices. More disturbing is a concerted effort to disparage the messengers. Despite the advances in science, technology, and communications, we are reminded that there still remain people who persecute others that share what are inconvenient truths. It is our duty to be resilient in defense of our vocation but also admit when we are wrong, or as Socrates said, “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.”

Patrick J. Loehrer, Sr., M.D. Distinguished Professor Associate Dean for Cancer Research Director, Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center H.H. Gregg Professor of Oncology Professor of Medicine Indiana University School of Medicine

Peter Schwartz, MD, PhD

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Science and technology have contributed to huge changes in human society, bringing many benefits, but also helping to cause global scale problems. Using a series of examples from the past century or so, this presentation examines the balance of costs and benefits, and argues that the role of science and technology in society needs to change, if we are not to be overhwhelmed by the problems we now face.

Presentation by Dr Stuart Parkinson, SGR, at the What is science for? teachers' conference, Widnes, Cheshire, UK

25 February 2012

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Essay on Uses and Abuses of Science

Just as fie is a good slave but a bad master, science too has its positive as well as negative aspects. Science is the most revolutionary thing that has been devised by man. Science does not rely on supposition and imagination but is an organized body of knowledge based on facts. Earth Science was one of the first to be studied and we have come a long way from the days when the Earth was believed to be flat. People are always curious to learn more about the world surrounding them. This has brought about fascinating discoveries and inventions not only in the fields of biology, astronomy, chemistry but in our daily lives too. The vast improvement in the field of medicine the average life expectancy. Diseases like influenza, chickenpox or typhoid are no longer fatal and leprosy and even some forms of cancer are now curable. The crippling disease, polio. Has been eradicated from most parts of the world.

We have better drugs and instruments but men are becoming weak in terms of physique and mind. What an irony of fate it is! Today, we suffer from sensitives ‘ear’, sensitive ‘lung’ and a sensitive ‘liver’ due to fast speed, smoky atmosphere, and dusty roads. So, science makes making happy with its latest achievements but it also makes us unhappy when it shows destructive power. Science can be used for gaining happiness but science put to wrong and negative use, can cause unimaginable disasters.

Science has given us such comforts as were unimaginable a few years ago. Today, we switch on the radio and listen to music. We have electricity, telephone, television, washing machines, refrigerators, air-conditioning plants, satellites, cellular phones, metro trains, fast trains, aircraft, and most modern medical systems. All these things have made the life of a man very comfortable. The electric fans, cinemas, cars, trams, mobile phones, and jumbo aircraft are among other scientific inventions and discoveries that have made life easy and comfortable.

The industrial revolution has been a landmark in the development of many countries. Rapid industrialization required more markets and that gave rise to the concept of colonization. Today, the major concern with most developed countries is the management of their industrial waste. More recently, the concern has shifted to the disposal of radioactive waste. Scientists have discovered nuclear energy which is a non-polluting source of energy, but there has been an increase in the number of disasters caused by radioactive waste. Cases like Chernoby! Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Bhopal Gas Tragedy highlight the ill-effects of nuclear energy. Though presently it is the best alternative for the increasing requirement of energy, we cannot overlook the increasing requirement of energy, we cannot overlook the ever-increasing use, or rather misuse, of nuclear energy and development of sophisticated and powerful nuclear weapons.

Science has progressed in both the domains-constructive as well as destructive. The latest triumphs of science try to remove the evils of disease and death. These have also increased the threat to human life. On the destructive side, science has invented weapons that are most dreadful and disastrous. The inventions of laser beams, neutron bombs, and hydrogen bombs have increased the chances of human destruction. If these weapons are put to use, they would spell disaster for the entire mankind.

One of the most frequent and popular questions which are often asked is, “Are scientific inventions making us happier?” Science has made life easier for men. Telecommunication and technology have made the world, not just a small place, but a tiny world. We can talk to a person across the world sitting in front of our webcams, we can send pictures and videos in minutes over the net and we can carry a world of information in a tiny microchip. However, we must keep in mind that wrongful exploitation of science can result in disastrous consequences like nuclear wars, high levels of atmospheric pollution and a widespread loss of life and property.

As modern age is of science, man has become calculative and mechanical. Science is advancing and it is thwarting our civilization. In the kingdom of science, words like love, affection, and sentiments are fast becoming alien. So what is the use of science for man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul? Spiritualism is on the wane while materialism is on the rise. Philosophy, culture, and poetry are fading from human life because of the rapid advancement of science.

Therefore, the opinion remains divided on the science is a boon or bane. No one claims for certain that science is complete happiness or an impending curse. However, the latest triumphs and victories of science need to be properly utilized, otherwise, they can bring certain death and destruction to the human race.

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Essay On Uses and Abuses of Science

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Use of science brought about a great change:

At the dawn of civilization man developed a scientific outlook. With the help of science he made observation and experiment, though they were crude at first. he discovered the relationship between a cause and its effect. He discovered some secrets of nature. He came to know the use of fire. With the help of it, he cooked his meal and scared the wild animals. Then he came to know sowing and planting. He discovered the conditions for seeds to sprout.

He discovered the process for tending plants. He grew crops and stored the surplus. He came from cave to cottage and from cottage to pucca house. He knew the tending of useful animals and put them to his service. He made many works of invention. He grew cotton were due to proper uses of science.

Modern use of science: Uses of science are now inseparable even from out dayto-day life. With the help of science and technology we have made pin to space-craft. We have made highly complicated machines for large-scale productions. We have conquered over time and distance. We are conquering disease and sickness. Radio and telecommunications, XRay and electricity, rotary and railways are all the works of science. So at present the uses of science are many and varied.

Abuses of science: Modern man has begun to abuse his scientific knowledge, invention of atom bomb is the burning example of it. Abuse of science will lead to destruction of mankind.

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NATURE CAREERS PODCAST
28 June 2023

Bullying in academia: why it happens and how to stop it

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A yellow biohazard sign is marking the entrance to the microbiology laboratory

Credit: zmeel/Getty Images

Morteza Mahmoudi and Chris Jackson talk about how to address bullying in academia.

Morteza Mahmoudi witnessed bullying behaviours during a series of lab visits following his PhD in 2009. He now studies the topic alongside his role as a nanoscience and regenerative medicine researcher at Michigan State University in East Lansing. In 2019 he co-founded the Academic Parity Movement, a non-profit which aims to end academic discrimination, violence and bullying across the sector.

In the seventh episode of this podcast series about freedom and safety in science, Mahmoudi tells Adam Levy that bullying is triggered by workplace power imbalances and is particularly prevalent in academia with its hierarchical structure, often causing targets to stay silent.

Bullying can cause a range of physical and mental health problems, he says. Perpetrators damage individuals, institutions’ reputations and wider society. He outlines steps to take if you find yourself bullied, and how academic institutions can tackle the problem.

Mahmoudi is joined by geoscientist Chris Jackson, who left academia in 2022 for a role at engineering consultancy Jacobs, based in Manchester, UK. Jackson welcomes the fact that bullying harassment and discrimination in academia is now more talked about, but says its root cause is an individual’s inability to put themselves in someone else’s position and identify with their personality and experience.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02172-w

Adam Levy: 00:03

Hello, I’m Adam Levy and this is Working Scientist , a Nature Careers podcast. In this episode: bullying in science.

Throughout this series we’ve looked at the threats to scientists and to science itself, threats to freedom and safety that can end careers and block avenues of research.

As we’ve discussed, many such threats come from outside of science. External factors like war, an economic situation, or political interference. But today, in our seventh episode of the series, we’re taking a look at a problem that comes from within the research world, a problem whose severity can derail lives, and yet can be found in labs the world over.

Today we’re talking about bullying and harassment in academic research.

Harassment and bullying can take many forms, and no two experiences are the same. Earlier in this series, we spoke about the impact that online harassment can have on researchers. And in that episode we spoke with Chris Jackson, a geoscientist at the engineering company Jacobs, in the UK.

Chris also shared his thoughts on why, despite evidence of widespread harassment in the sciences, there’s so little awareness of the problem.

Chris Jackson: 01:35

There seems to be this amazing bus between how common it is and the awareness of it. And I think that, in itself, explains why, that it’s so common bullying and harassment, is because I think some people are just ignorant to it.

Either they don’t know what bullying harassment means or by them not being subjected to it, they can't almost imagine it happens to other people.

And I really think, you know, whether it’s bullying, harassment, such as racial discrimination, or its anti-queer sentiments and discrimination, I think a lot of these things arise because people are unable to put themselves in somebody else’s position and identify with the axes of that other person’s personality, which might mean that discrimination is more likely to occur to them than it is to them themselves.

So I do think just that awareness, and continually talking about things, and then showing a bunch of data which kind of explain numerically what the problem is and how it affects people, it’s really, really important, because sometimes it’s just ignorance, and sometimes it’s just, you know, an unwillingness to believe that happens. But we need to keep on banging the drum about these things.

Adam Levy: 02:46

It can seem like a lot of institutions are taking more and more measures to actually fight bullying and harassment. Do you think this is actually taking place in institutions you’ve been aware of? Or is it more about paying lip service to the idea of taking action?

Chris Jackson: 03:03

I think there’s some good people trying to do some good things, is probably the first bit of my answer, I think.

The second bit of my answer is there’s some people who want to be seen to be doing the right thing and doing good things, and they want to be seen to be good.

I can honestly say 20 years into my academic career, although I’m not you know, I’ve kind of recently moved away from the centre of it, these things are being talked about more.

We are, we are talking more about bullying and harassment. You know, there are podcast series and op-eds about about the importance of this, and we’re trying to recognize the importance of good academic conduct and positive academic environments as an integral part of the academic process.

And that wasn’t happening 20 years ago. I think we have moved positively in that sense, which I think is good. Now we still need to have the tenacity and the processes and the, you know - whether they’re disciplinary or supporting victims of abuse - we need to have resources, financial and otherwise, being put into those things to make sure that we’re not just talking about these things more, we are actually seeing people having a better experience within academia or within science more generally, as a function of these things we’re trying to implement.

And that’s all that matters really. It doesn’t matter if you talk about things. All that matters is that people have a better time of it. That’s where we want to get to. How we get there is kind of secondary in a way.

Adam Levy: 04:27

Chris Jackson there. Some researchers have made it their mission to find a way to make the situation better, and to uncover why so many individuals and institutions resist the changes needed to stamp out bullying and harassment in science.

For example, nanomedicine and regenerative medicine researcher Morteza Mahmoudi, who’s at Michigan State University. Besides his official academic research, Morteza is also the co-founder and director of the Academic Parity movement.

Since 2019 the organization has aimed to provide external resources for targets of academic bullying.

We began our conversation discussing what inspired Morteza to found the movement.

Morteza Mahmoudi: 05:15

When I basically got my PhD back in 2009, I had to basically get training in different aspects of science, like in medicine.

So I started visiting different labs and get additional training. So no matter where I basically work, I always basically saw people suffering from the issues of academic bullying and harassment.

So I wrote a short piece to Nature about the issues of the reporting system in the field of academic bullying and harassment.

And it was interesting that between two weeks after publication of these pieces, the number of feedback that I’ve got was like hugely higher than all of the feedbacks that I’ve got for over 200 papers that I had in the field of nanomedicine and regenerative medicine.

So I thought with myself that, okay, our role as a scientist is to make the world a better place to live. So what is better than studying academic bullying? It seems that it’s a real problem, but yet no one talks about it. So I basically, I started studying academic bullying seriously, from that time.

Adam Levy: 06:37

Now, when we talk about bullying, and specifically academic bullying, how do we define those terms?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 06:45

In general terms academic bullying is a violation of human rights in an academic setting.

But it has a wide range of actions. It starts from, like, verbal abuse, all the way to stealing intellectual properties, or authorship credit. Advanced version, I would say, it’s a false allegation of academic misconduct in an attempt to basically remove star scientists from competition.

Adam Levy: 07:19

What are the effects on academics who are being bullied, both in terms of their careers, but also in terms of the actual wellbeing?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 07:30

It has huge effects. It starts from mental health issues in short term, like anxiety or stress.

But in long term, it can also develop serious cardiovascular issues, PTSD, and other mental and even physical health issues.

I always encourage people to also consider the fact that this is not a problem that only affect targets. It also affect like other people. For example, if a target is in like a medical setting or in healthcare, academic bullying, or other types of bullying and harassment, can increase wrong decision-making in medical procedures. So it even affects patients.

Adam Levy: 08:20

Given all these incredibly negative effects on the person on the receiving end, as well as the wider discipline, why does this kind of behaviour happen in the first place?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 08:32

So there are many reasons for that. I mean, the bullying happens actually, when we have power differences. And unfortunately, in academia, they have a unique power difference structures.

If you look at the universities, when an international student basically comes to a lab, many of the major decisions about the careers and also their residency in the lab, gets limited to one person, which is a PI.

So people at higher level of power feel less accountable about their actions and behaviours. If, like a bullying cases get kind of escalated at the lab level, and the target basically complains to department chair or other authorities at the universities, the outcomes that at least we see from scandals that comes to the news are very disappointing, and encourage basically perpetrators to do what they do. And also encourage targets to use the code of silence.

For example, in many cases of academic bullying that comes to the news, specifically like a couple of cases that basically they witnessed last year, the situation is that the perpetrator does bullying behaviour for even a couple of decades.

There were like hundreds of targets, who a portion of them complained to the university and nothing happened. Basically perpetrators got protected for a variety of reasons. For example, one reason is that their interest is intertwined with university’s interest. They bring huge amount of money and funding to the university. Universities gets overhead. So they basically sweep the case under the carpet,

It sends a clear signal to perpetrators that they are protected. They can do whatever they want to do, and another negative signals to target that it's better to use the code of silence

Adam Levy: 10:47

Given all of that. it might seem almost a bit helpless to someone who does find themselves on the receiving end of bullying. What actions can someone actually take if they are in this situation, being bullied by someone in the academic workplace, especially when that might be a superior, someone with power over them?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 11:08

So the first thing is that they should detect and identify academic bullying at the first place. The second part is to document everything. Academic bullies are clever. They barely leave trace of their actions.

So every single chance that basically a target can get to document, they need to document that. If someone is witness, they basically need to also collect their names, their ideas. The third important thing is collective actions.

So it would be great that they basically find allies and look for others that are in the, in the same situation. So this helps a lot.

The other thing is to inform themselves, or basically educate themselves, about the internal and external resources that are available to them to get help.

For example, one of the trusted resources is ombudsofficers, getting consultation from legal bodies, for example. They can consult with a lawyer about the situation.

Be aware of retaliation of any kind, which is unfortunately very common in the case of, like, academic bullying. Try to see what happened to other people at the same cases, and have Plan B in mind.

Adam Levy: 12:38

Now, how is all of this limited when there are serious risks to the career of the academic when they would speak out? For example, I’m speaking about maybe foreign students whose visa depends on them continuing their degree with their supervisor.

Morteza Mahmoudi: 12:56

Yeah, that’s unfortunately the sad reality.

The outcomes of our global survey, which we have done in 2019, and we received over 2000 responses to that, reveal that one of the main reasons that targets try to use code of silence instead of speaking up, is the fear of retaliation.

The examples like I mentioned, that came to the news shows that when a person basically complain, they receive serious direct or indirect mobbing which is basically ganging up against targets.

But at the same time, the recent awareness about the issue of academic polling basically forced other stakeholders to come in and take some actions.

For example, funding agencies now have a direct line for targets to basically report any abuse they receive, if the PIs are funded by that particular agency. One thing I always emphasize for international students is to be proactive about the lab that they want to do the research.

So if they try to reach out to the former lab members, they can get useful feedback.

So by being proactive, they can actually evaluate the lab health prior to joining a lab.

Adam Levy: 14:30

That note of doing research before moving a lab is actually something we touched on in a previous series of this podcast when we were discussing moving labs.

But a lot of what we’ve been talking about just now has been about what the victim of bullying can do if they find themselves in that situation.

What about third parties, people who perhaps witnessed this kind of behaviour taking place?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 14:55

Yeah, so first of all, I would like to change the word of victim to target.

It’s important because victim has kind of a negative feeling to the, to the basically target. Anyway, a witness can basically do a lot of things.

They can interfere with the situation to basically change the direction of the discussion. They can report what they witness, at least to the trusted internal resources, like to the ombudsperson. They can basically back up the claims of the targets, if they decide to speak up. There’s a kind of risk. But if they take the risk and want to report they can have a great effect.

Adam Levy: 15:44

As you’ve shared, a big part of why bullying and harassment are so commonplace is because there are all these structures in place which which effectively protect the bullier. What should institutions change in how they handle these kinds of cases?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 16:01

So institutions and universities by its own basically, have limited intention to fairly consider the cases of academic bullying and harassment. What we are basically advocating for is making a platform that all of the involved, the stakeholders, can be responsible and response able for those cases.

For example, if funding agencies gets involved in the cases, and they basically ban universities that have higher rate of bullying cases from funding they provide, then universities are forced to take more fair actions about, like those issues.

The other thing is to better understand the long-term effects of academic bullying and harassment on institutions and also on science.

The long-term side effect is far beyond the target. It causes many talented scientists to leave academia. It can cause data fabrication, because in many cases that the basically witness and reach to the reports, bowling was the initial force, to targets to fabricate data. And the other important stakeholders that needs to be involved, I think, are taxpayers.

All of the costs of the perpetrators are being covered by the university’s lawyer, which are basically taxpayers’ money and funding.

The other thing I think is very important that needs to be carefully considered in the field of academic bullying and harassment, is the accountability of the investigation, internal investigation committees, who basically made those decisions and what responsibilities they have over the decisions.

Adam Levy: 18:07

What does it mean to you purely on a personal level, to be able to carry out this work to try and address academic bullying and harassment?

Morteza Mahmoudi: 18:17

As a scientist and as a building block of the scientific community, we want to basically do something that matters. If the universities can’t handle the bullying and harassment, because it’s very unfortunate, but again, it’s a reality, that if targets of academic bullying and harassment remains unhealed, there’s a great risk that they would be a future bullies when they basically get to the power position.

So honestly, I get paid, like, for my works in nanomedicine, and regenerative medicine. But I value the work I do volunteering on, like, academic bullying and harassment, because I see in real time that it helps targets of academic bullying, and it may help the field to kind of move forward in creating a platform that finally all of their stakeholders and decision-makers and gatekeepers basically, can feel responsible and response able to finally put an end on this age-old issue.

Adam Levy: 19:32

Morteza Mahmoudi there. We mentioned in previous episodes that this series would be in seven parts, and this is indeed the seventh episode.

But in producing the series, in particular this episode, we’ve realized there’s just too much to say to fit it all in.

And so we'll be returning to the topic of harassment and misconduct in science in an episode coming soon, where we'll look specifically at the devastation that sexual harassment and assault can have on researchers, and on research.

That episode should be out in a couple of weeks. So make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it. Until then, thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.

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The Challenge and Necessity of a Shared Reality

A ll animals, including humans, have limitations in how they find out about the world. And we humans invent instrumentation to correct for weaknesses in our perceptions of the world. The most basic weakness we have is that our perceptions don’t tell us everything about what’s going on with the world. So we need corrective devices. Some of us need spectacles. To see very distant things, like distant galaxies or planets, we use telescopes; to see very small things, like cells, we use microscopes. It’s hard for many of us to hear the difference between a single tone and a chord, so sound analyzers let us break down complex sounds into their constituents, in a way most of us couldn’t do unaided. We usually see daylight as undifferentiated white light: it takes the prisms to let us analyze the complexity of daylight, to see that it is made up of rays of different colors.

But the acceptance of the instruments we use in analyzing our surroundings is hard-won. Consider electricity. To find out about electrical currents, we use various measuring instruments—voltmeters, ammeters, and so on. These instruments tend to be familiar, so nowadays we take it for granted that the instrument does what it says on the tin. “It says ‘voltmeter,’ so I guess it’s measuring volts,” we say. But this raises a tricky puzzle about instruments: Since each instrument represents our best attempt to measure what’s true about some aspect of the world, what can we compare its results to? Can we ever really know whether our whole system of knowledge is solid?

One answer to this conundrum can be seen metaphorically in the story of Kon-Tiki. When adventurer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl took his balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, on its trip from Peru to Polynesia in 1947, his crew predicted that the balsa logs from which the raft was built could become waterlogged on the journey. So they took with them spare balsa logs. That way, if any one of the logs from which the raft was built became waterlogged, and so unusable for flotation, they could strip it out and replace it with one of the fresh logs stored on board. But what they couldn’t do, of course, was to strip out and replace all the logs simultaneously. The moment they stripped out a number of logs, the whole raft would collapse, and they would drown.

This image of the raft works quite well as a metaphor for the crisscrossing pattern of justification that we use to demonstrate that an instrument, like the telescope, works and is giving us the information we are counting on it to give us. Suppose you tried to suspend belief in everything: You don’t accept anything at all of current knowledge, and then try to reconstruct all that we do from scratch. That means throwing out everything from knowing how to tell if someone’s illness can be cured by antibiotics, to knowing whether spots mean measles, to knowing the patterns of movement in the night sky, and then justifying all that we believe from scratch, including, for example, which vaccines will work on which diseases. That would be like throwing away all our logs to rebuild the raft from the beginning: We wouldn’t be left with enough to work with. We would drown.

What we can do, however, is test each proposition individually, while keeping steady most of the background, and toss out and replace ideas that don’t pass muster. Given most of our current background of medical knowledge, for example, we can go back and review whether a particular vaccine is really protecting against a particular illness. And similarly, for each medical proposition we believe, we can, holding the rest of the background constant, review and assess whether it’s right.

The raft metaphor also captures another key issue. Each element of our scientific understanding, each log in the raft, only gets its strength by relying on all of the other scientific-element logs that it is connected to. We trust one bit of science because there are many other bits that, together, support it. In this sense, we are “triangulating”—using several different pieces of evidence together, each coming at the problem from a different angle and testing a different concern, to trust any other given piece of evidence. That is how the scientific raft functions.

Practical instruments that extend what we can perceive with our senses help us identify a common, shared reality out there in the world. After playing with these instruments, we don’t find ourselves saying things like, “Well, maybe LED lights and sunlight behave this way for you, but some other way for me.” We instead tend to use the instrument to reach a shared understanding—and, ideally, to use that understanding to effectively act on the world.

Read More: Science Isn’t Always Perfect—But We Should Still Trust It

We also have to recognize the cases where we do, currently, struggle with our sense of reality. Today, for example, every society across the globe is making decisions that will affect the trajectory of life on Earth for a very long time. But we don’t get immediate feedback on the consequences of those decisions. If we lower carbon dioxide emissions, we can’t “wait to see what happens,” just like we can’t wait to see what happens if we don’t lower emissions. There is so little sense of interactivity with the system; the output is too far into the future. That’s the problem with building our scientific understanding of reality—and also for politics and governments, who are planning policy based on this shared reality.

For an example like this, it’s not that there isn’t any reality out there, but that there are many issues for which the reality is very hard for us to establish. That leaves much room for debate. But science doesn’t give up when the going gets tough. Instead, people have invented further scientific tools and clever experiments that are all aimed at triangulating in on reality to help us deal with the situations where interactivity becomes more difficult. And, ideally, they provide a link to a shared understanding of reality in these more complex cases.

We can’t just go to our corners of the room and pretend that it doesn’t matter if two people or groups are acting on conflicting ideas of how the world actually is. If we are trying to figure out what's real, and if we need to reach a shared agreement about reality, then we need to proactively find people with a different picture, and work together to help us triangulate on what is truly going on in the world.

Adapted from THIRD MILLENNIUM THINKING by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun. Copyright © 2024 by Saul Perlmutter, John Campbell, and Robert MacCoun. Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from ieee computer journals, use of "lenna" image in computer image processing research stretches back to the 1970s..

Benj Edwards - Mar 29, 2024 9:16 pm UTC

On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsén. The so-called " Lenna image ," (Forsén added an extra "n" to her name in her Playboy appearance to aid pronunciation) has been used in image processing research since 1973 and has attracted criticism for making some women feel unwelcome in the field.

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Bay Shore case shows we must confront sexual abuse in schools

The allegations against teacher Thomas Bernagozzi, of the Bay Shore school district, are troubling and a stark reminder of the vulnerability of our children within the educational system. Credit: James Carbone

Recent reports of sexual abuse cases involving educators have once again brought the issue of safeguarding our children to the forefront of public discourse. Allegations against individuals like retired teacher Thomas Bernagozzi of the Bay Shore school district, and countless others nationwide, make clear we must address the systemic failures that allow such misconduct to occur and persist.

The allegations against Bernagozzi are troubling and a stark reminder of the vulnerability of our children within the educational system. Schools should be places of safety, trust, and growth; when those entrusted with our children’s education and well-being betray that trust, the repercussions are profound and long-lasting.

It is essential that we acknowledge the courage of survivors who come forward to share their stories, often in the face of skepticism and institutional resistance. Their bravery underscores the urgency for comprehensive reforms in how schools prevent, respond to, and address instances of sexual abuse.

First and foremost, accountability must be at the forefront of any response. Institutions must conduct thorough and impartial investigations into allegations of abuse, and perpetrators must be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. This includes not only criminal prosecution but also civil remedies.

This guest essay reflects the views of Ralph Kohl, a graduate of Bay Shore schools, former state Assembly staff member, and government affairs professional specializing in health care in Alexandria, Virginia.

We also must prioritize prevention through education and training for educators, students, and parents. This includes fostering open dialogue about boundaries, consent, and healthy relationships from an early age, as well as implementing robust policies and procedures for reporting and addressing instances of misconduct.

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Beyond individual cases, we must also confront the broader cultural and systemic factors that enable sexual abuse to occur unchecked. This includes challenging harmful power dynamics, dismantling barriers to reporting, and fostering a culture of accountability and transparency within schools.

Ultimately, confronting sexual abuse in schools requires a collective effort from educators, administrators, lawmakers, and the broader community. It is incumbent on all of us to stand in solidarity with survivors, to demand accountability from those in positions of power, and to work tirelessly to ensure that every child has the right to learn and thrive in an environment free from fear and harm.

One of the most concerning aspects in Bay Shore is the apparent repetition of mistakes by the current administration, mirroring the mishandlings of past cases. By not believing their former students, victim-shaming, and failing to accept accountability, administrators not only undermine the trust of current students and parents but also send a chilling message that victims will not be believed or supported if they come forward with allegations of abuse.

This perpetuates an environment of fear, silence, and mistrust, further entrenching the barriers that prevent survivors from seeking justice and healing. Educational leaders must break this cycle of impunity and indifference by prioritizing the voices and experiences of survivors, fostering a culture of transparency and accountability and ensuring that every student feels empowered and supported to speak out against abuse. That’s how we can begin to rebuild trust, safeguard our children, and create safer learning environments for all.

It is time for the superintendent and school board to demonstrate courage and integrity by admitting the failures of the district, addressing them, and ensuring that survivors receive the support and justice they deserve. Anything less is a betrayal of trust and a grave disservice to the victims and their families, many of whom reside and have children in the district.

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Guest Essay

How the SAT Changed My Life

An illustration of a man lying underneath a giant SAT prep book. The book makes a tent over him. He is smiling.

By Emi Nietfeld

Ms. Nietfeld is the author of the memoir “Acceptance.”

This month, the University of Texas, Austin, joined the wave of selective schools reversing Covid-era test-optional admissions policies, once again requiring applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.

Many colleges have embraced the test-optional rule under the assumption that it bolsters equity and diversity, since higher scores are correlated with privilege. But it turns out that these policies harmed the teenagers they were supposed to help. Many low-income and minority applicants withheld scores that could have gotten them in, wrongly assuming that their scores were too low, according to an analysis by Dartmouth. More top universities are sure to join the reversal. This is a good thing.

I was one of the disadvantaged youths who are often failed by test-optional policies, striving to get into college while in foster care and homeless. We hear a lot about the efforts of these elite schools to attract diverse student bodies and about debates around the best way to assemble a class. What these conversations overlook is the hope these tests offer students who are in difficult situations.

For many of us, standardized tests provided our one shot to prove our potential, despite the obstacles in our lives or the untidy pasts we had. We found solace in the objectivity of a hard number and a process that — unlike many things in our lives — we could control. I will always feel tenderness toward the Scantron sheets that unlocked higher education and a better life.

Growing up, I fantasized about escaping the chaos of my family for the peace of a grassy quad. Both my parents had mental health issues. My adolescence was its own mess. Over two years I took a dozen psychiatric drugs while attending four different high school programs. At 14, I was sent to a locked facility where my education consisted of work sheets and reading aloud in an on-site classroom. In a life skills class, we learned how to get our G.E.D.s. My college dreams began to seem like delusions.

Then one afternoon a staff member handed me a library copy of “Barron’s Guide to the ACT .” I leafed through the onionskin pages and felt a thunderclap of possibility. I couldn’t go to the bathroom without permission, let alone take Advanced Placement Latin or play water polo or do something else that would impress elite colleges. But I could teach myself the years of math I’d missed while switching schools and improve my life in this one specific way.

After nine months in the institution, I entered foster care. I started my sophomore year at yet another high school, only to have my foster parents shuffle my course load at midyear, when they decided Advanced Placement classes were bad for me. In part because of academic instability like this, only 3 percent to 4 percent of former foster youth get a four-year college degree.

Later I bounced between friends’ sofas and the back seat of my rusty Corolla, using my new-to-me SAT prep book as a pillow. I had no idea when I’d next shower, but I could crack open practice problems and dip into a meditative trance. For those moments, everything was still, the terror of my daily life softened by the fantasy that my efforts might land me in a dorm room of my own, with endless hot water and an extra-long twin bed.

Standardized tests allowed me to look forward, even as every other part of college applications focused on the past. The song and dance of personal statements required me to demonstrate all the obstacles I’d overcome while I was still in the middle of them. When shilling my trauma left me gutted and raw, researching answer elimination strategies was a balm. I could focus on equations and readings, like the scholar I wanted to be, rather than the desperate teenager that I was.

Test-optional policies would have confounded me, but in the 2009-10 admissions cycle, I had to submit my scores; my fellow hopefuls and I were all in this together, slogging through multiple-choice questions until our backs ached and our eyes crossed.

The hope these exams instilled in me wasn’t abstract: It manifested in hundreds of glossy brochures. After I took the PSAT in my junior year, universities that had received my score flooded me with letters urging me to apply. For once, I felt wanted. These marketing materials informed me that the top universities offered generous financial aid that would allow me to attend free. I set my sights higher, despite my guidance counselor’s lack of faith.

When I took the actual SAT, I was ashamed of my score. Had submitting it been optional, I most likely wouldn’t have done it, because I suspected my score was lower than the prep-school applicants I was up against (exactly what Dartmouth found in the analysis that led it to reinstate testing requirements). When you grow up the way I did, it’s difficult to believe that you are ever good enough.

When I got into Harvard, it felt like a miracle splitting my life into a before and after. My exam preparation paid off on campus — it was the only reason I knew geometry or grammar — and it motivated me to tackle new, difficult topics. I majored in computer science, having never written a line of code. Though a career as a software engineer seemed far-fetched, I used my SAT study strategies to prepare for technical interviews (in which you’re given one or more problems to solve) that landed me the stable, lucrative Google job that catapulted me out of financial insecurity.

I’m not the only one who feels affection for these tests. At Harvard, I met other students who saw these exams as the one door they could unlock that opened into a new future. I was lucky that the tests offered me hope all along, that I could cling to the promise that one day I could bubble in a test form and find myself transported into a better life — the one I lead today.

Emi Nietfeld is the author of the memoir “ Acceptance .” Previously, she was a software engineer at Google and Facebook.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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In 1996, Alan Sokal published an essay in the hip intellectual magazine Social Text parodying the scientific but impenetrable lingo of contemporary theorists. Here, Sokal teams up with Jean Bricmont to expose the abuse of scientific concepts in the writings of today's most fashionable postmodern thinkers.
The Counter-Revolution of Science
The Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies on the Abuse of Reason is a 1952 book by Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek.In it Hayek condemns the positivist view of the social sciences for what he sees as scientism, arguing that attempts to apply the methods of natural science to the study of social institutions necessarily overlook the dispersed knowledge of the individuals which compose ...
Sokal affair
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London.In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of cultural studies.The submission was an experiment to test the journal's intellectual rigor, specifically to investigate whether "a leading ...
The Challenge and Necessity of a Shared Reality
Perlmutter and Campbell are professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and MacCoun is a professor at Stanford University. They are the coauthors of the forthcoming book Third Millennium ...
The Abuse of Power and Science in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Brave New World, a novel by Aldous Huxley was written at a tine in history when war had ravaged much of the nation, Depression was blanketing society, and people's wills were being put to the test. Science had become an overwhelming force for better or for worse. People had witnessed scienc...
Abuse of power: An experimental investigation of the effects of power
So far we have only seen how many subjects decided to abuse, but we have not seen the amount of abuse. As can be seen in Fig. 1 there seems to be no level effect of transparency in the low-power treatment on amount abused (t(46) = 0.9, p = 0.39, d= 0.2 (small)) while there is a level effect of transparency in the high-power treatment (t(46) = 2.7, p = 0.011, d= 0.8 (medium)).
Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals
On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsén.
Daniel Kahneman, pioneering behavioral psychologist, Nobel laureate and
Daniel Kahneman, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, professor of psychology and public affairs, emeritus, and a Nobel laureate in economics whose groundbreaking behavioral science research changed our understanding of how people think and make decisions, died on March 27. He was 90. Kahneman joined the Princeton University faculty in 1993, following appointments at Hebrew ...
NASA Is Recruiting a New Class of Astronauts
NASA does set a fairly high bar for education — a master's degree in science, technology, engineering or mathematics, followed by at least three years of related professional experience.
The Philosophical Use and Misuse of Science
We think philosophers are prone to misuse science: to give undue weight to results that are untested; to highlight favorable and ignore unfavorable data; to give illegitimate weight to the authority of science; to leap from scientific premises to philosophical conclusions without spelling out their relevance; to treat mere resonance between a ...
Mass Tech Layoffs? Just Another Day in the Corporate Blender
Guest Essay. Mass Tech Layoffs? Just Another Day in the Corporate Blender. March 21, 2024. ... Were more leaders to be guided by the science of change, or by the stories that people on the front ...
Bay Shore case shows we must confront sexual abuse in schools
This guest essay reflects the views of Ralph Kohl, a graduate of Bay Shore schools, former state Assembly staff member, and government affairs professional specializing in health care in ...
Opinion
This month, the University of Texas, Austin, joined the wave of selective schools reversing Covid-era test-optional admissions policies, once again requiring applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores.

Essay on Uses and abuses of science in 200 – 300 words

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Abusing science

Michael J. Dougherty

1. INTRODUCTION

2. CREATIONISM

3. SMOKING IS HARMLESS

4. FOLLOWING A COMMON PLAYBOOK

5. CONCLUSION

The Use and Abuse of Science

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The use and abuse of science and technology: rethinking dual-use

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Historical Lessons on the Use and Abuse of Science and Scientists: A Letter from Patrick J. Loehrer, Sr. M.D. to Colleagues

Peter Schwartz, MD, PhD

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