Rescuing Science
Restoring Trust In an Age of Doubt
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- £29.99
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- £29.99
Publisher Description
For readers concerned about the roots of the public mistrust of science, get the book that Publishers Weekly says is "an ardent appraisal of what ails the scientific establishment."
Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt is the product of Paul M. Sutter’s long career in the scientific community, both inside and outside academia. Interweaving his own experiences as an astrophysicist with broader trends observed by himself and others, Sutter roots the current distrust of science within the academic scientific community itself. Throughout this book, Sutter reveals a community that has come to disregard the broader public, is obsessed with winning grants, ignores political landmines, limits the entrance of minorities, and permits fraud in the pursuit of notoriety.
Sutter tackles these and other issues through the lens of a vicious cycle, where public mistrust and misunderstanding of science leads to fewer funding opportunities, which leads to more competition within science, which leads to a rise in fraud, which circles back to greater mistrust. Each chapter addresses one of the vices the academic scientific community has allowed to perpetuate, the sum of which he likens to an illness of the soul of science. He also explores the historical context of each issue in order to identify its root causes. Sutter concludes each chapter by providing actionable solutions for both the nonscientific and scientific communities, as well as what he regards as an ideal and healthy scientific approach, which will lead to greater public trust.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sutter (How to Die in Space), an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University, levels a fiery critique at the perverse incentives that compromise the quality of scientific research. The pressures captured in the dictum "publish or perish," Sutter contends, have fueled a $10 billion science and technology publishing industry "with double-digit profit margins" while producing a rash of studies with fabricated or unverifiable results. For example, in 2014 a Ohio State University geneticist was accused of cutting and pasting DNA test results to create the impression of active proteins where there were none, and a Harvard University biologist resigned in 2010 after assistants alleged he told them to ignore results contradicting his hypothesis regarding monkeys' ability to recognize auditory patterns. Suggesting that subtler forms of bunk science are widespread, Sutter explains how researchers use p-hacking (massaging data so that statistical quirks appear to show correlations between likely unrelated variables) to create the impression of positive findings and boost their chances of publication. Sutter puts together a reasonable case that scientists should do more to make their work accessible to the general public so that lay readers don't have to rely on sensationalistic or misleading accounts from journalists, but his argument that eliminating tenure would motivate "senior scientists" to take more risks appears just as likely to have the opposite effect. Still, it's an ardent appraisal of what ails the scientific establishment.
