Science

Not to be confused with rigged science, which is the corrupted counterpart; or scientism, an exaggerated belief in science

Science
Interest of	• Mark Boguski • Denis Rancourt • Science and Technology Select Committee • United States Office of Research Integrity
Subpage(s)	•Science/Corruption •Science/Dissident •Science/Problematic notions
Ideally, the scientific method is a powerful tool. However, it is often corrupted to rigged science

Science is the study of the natural world through experiment and observation. Scientific research involves using the scientific method, which seeks to objectively explain the events of nature in a reproducible way.

After World War 2, science entered a period of unprecedented growth, having gone from being a scattered, amateur pursuit of wealthy gentleman to a career profession, where publishing articles became the measure of success, able to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself.

Scientific publishing

It is difficult to overstate how much power a journal editor now had to shape a scientist’s career and the direction of science itself. “Young people tell me all the time, ‘If I don’t publish in CNS [a common acronym for Cell/Nature/Science, the most prestigious journals in biology], I won’t get a job,” says Nobel prize winner Rany Schekman. He compared the pursuit of high-impact publications to an incentive system as rotten as banking bonuses. “They have a very big influence on where science goes.”

The market for scientific journals is highly concentrated. In 2015, Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Springer ans Wiley-Blackwell controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market.

Perspectives on the Pandemic: The Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine — "As much of the world rushes to receive a lightly-tested pharmaceutical product, we thought it was high time to look again at the (very) big business of medicine. Leemon McHenry, PhD, guides us to the fraudulent core of ghostwritten studies, captured legislators, revolving-door regulatory agencies, pay-to-play medical journals, and the "key opinion leaders" who lend their academic credentials to giant corporations...for a price."

Few people did more to shape the way science is conducted today than Robert Maxwell (1923-1991), who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society, by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. By 1959, Maxwell's Pergamon was publishing 40 journals; six years later it would publish 150. In 1991, shortly before his demise, Maxwell sold Pergamon to his quiet Dutch competitor Elsevier.

Sydney Brenner, Nobel laureate in medicine 2002, criticized the journal system:

I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists. There are universities in America, and I’ve heard from many committees, that we won’t consider people’s publications in low impact factor journals.

Because publications have become a proxy for research quality, publications in high impact factor journals are the metric used by grant and promotion committees to assess individual researchers. The problem is that impact factor, which is based on the number of times papers are cited, does not necessarily correlate with good science. To maximize impact factor, journal editors seek out sensational papers, which boldly challenge norms or explore trendy topics, and ignore less spectacular, but equally important things like replication studies or negative results. As a consequence, academics are incentivised to produce research that caters to these demands.

Academics are slowly awakening to the fact that this dogged drive to publish rubbish has serious consequences on the quality of the science that they produce, which have far reaching consequences for public policy, costs, and human lives. One study found that only six out of 53 landmark studies in cancer research were replicable. In another study, researchers were only able to repeat a quarter of 67 influential papers in their field.

Scientific method

Scientific research involves using the scientific method, which seeks to objectively explain the events of nature in a reproducible way. An explanatory thought experiment or hypothesis is put forward as explanation using principles such as parsimony (also known as "Occam's Razor") and are generally expected to seek consilience – fitting well with other accepted facts related to the phenomena. This new explanation is used to make falsifiable predictions that are testable by experiment or observation. The predictions are to be posted before a confirming experiment or observation is sought, as proof that no tampering has occurred. Disproof of a prediction is evidence of progress.

When a hypothesis proves unsatisfactory, it is either modified or discarded. If the hypothesis survived testing, it may become adopted into the framework of a scientific theory, a logically reasoned, self-consistent model or framework for describing the behavior of certain natural phenomena.

While performing experiments to test hypotheses, scientists may have a preference for one outcome over another, and so it is important to ensure that science as a whole can eliminate this bias. This can be achieved by careful experimental design, transparency, and a thorough peer review process of the experimental results as well as any conclusions. After the results of an experiment are announced or published, it is normal practice for independent researchers to double-check how the research was performed, and to follow up by performing similar experiments to determine how dependable the results might be. Taken in its entirety, the scientific method allows for highly creative problem solving while minimizing any effects of subjective bias on the part of its users (especially the confirmation bias).

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Biology	the science of life.
Chemistry
Physics
Precautionary principle	Better safe than sorry
Psychology	The science of mind and behaviour.
Sociology

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Big pharma	“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.”	Marcia Angell	2009
Big pharma	“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”	Richard Horton	2015
Burson Cohn & Wolfe	“It is critically important that third-party genetic experts, including respected authorities with no specific background in radiofrequency, be identified to speak on the following issues: • Problems with the Lai-Singh and Sarkar studies [on an increase in single-strand DNA breaks in the brain cells of rats after a single two-hour exposure to 2.45 GHz microwaves, at power levels officially considered safe] • The health implications of DNA single-strand breaks. We do not believe that Motorola should put anyone on camera. We must limit our corporate visibility and defer complex scientific issues to credible, qualified scientific experts. We have developed a list of independent experts in this field and are in the process of recruiting individuals willing and able to reassure the public on these matters.”	Motorola	1994
Matthew Ehret	“[...] The City of London is a very old institution and is has been the center of world finance for hundreds of years. So how were they able to control 400 million Indians, for 200 years, how were they able to do that? When they only had at most maybe 12-13.000 soldiers physically on the ground. That doesn't make sense. And so it's only when you begin to realize, okay it's a much more multifaceted component, you have intelligence, you have cultural warfare, which is something reserved for the elite, as far as a knowledge of science of cultural warfare. This is not something you learn in community college. This is something which is reserved for a very select batch of young people, who are perhaps of the right family, who have the right inclinations, who are selected, they're discovered, they're provided sometimes, Rode-scholarships as part of their process of reaching upper level management position. And in the course of doing that, a set of experiences is provided to those young people, who go through an Oxford, or another, there's there's a variety of these types of scholarships that are provided, who then are brought into a sense of an understanding of the longer waves of history and how history actually moves, versus how we're taught in popular books you can buy at your local bookstore, which involves controlling the way people are thinking, controlling the way they're feeling, [the interviewer mentions the Tavistock Institute] That's one aspect. Yeah it's the psychological warfare component of the British Empire. [on the question if it is the main component of that kind of operation] Yeah it's an artery, there's also other aspects of it too. There is cultural wars that also involve approaches to science. What method will be permitted in the scientific world, so what sorts of theories are going to receive money, financial support, publications in peer-reviewed journals and which approaches to science are going to be crushed, choked of funding. There's things like that. There's also artistic aspects too. What sorts of artistic traditions will be provided money, revenue to grow, and which ones will be choked off. Why are we producing no more Beethovens, or Mozart's, or Schubert's today, why is that? [interviewer mentions the sub-standard quality of modern music/artists and the propaganda aspects of it] It's kind of like this question of, terrorism foreign and domestic, is: are these naturally occurring phenomenon, or are they artificially created to induce a certain effect in a target society you want to control, through fear and through other things, confusion. And it's the same sort of thing with abstract art, a-tonalist music, scientific theories that are useless. We discovered the god particle 10 years ago, what changed? Nothing! [Matthew Ehret continues that with billions of founding of the LHC an observation was made that had no effect on the world that people experience, it only could unite theoretical models that were not compatible before (since gravity was a force that could not fit with the other four fundamental forces)] Is that a real scientific discovery, if you make a discovery and then nothing changes? No, not at all. A scientific discovery comes [brings] with it, a power of of action, of having an ability to make better discoveries, but also live a better life, to translate those discoveries into new ways of having better technologies, of having more power to move to live a better life [...]”	Matthew Ehret	19 June 2022
Anthony Fauci	“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science.”	Anthony Fauci	2021
Mae-Wan Ho	“What makes genetic engineering biotechnology dangerous, in the first instance, is that it is an unprecedented, close alliance between two great powers that can make or break the world: science and commerce. Practically all established molecular geneticists have some direct or indirect connection with industry, which will set limits on what the scientists can and will do research on, not to mention the possibility of compromising their integrity as independent scientists. . The worst aspect of the alliance is that it is between the most reductionist science and multinational monopolistic industry at its most aggressive and exploitative. If the truth be told, it is bad science working together with big business for quick profit, aided and abetted by our governments for the banal reason that governments wish to be re-elected to remain in ‘power.’”	Mae-Wan Ho	1997
Christopher Langan	“[...] but that's the way it works, it's one giant self-reinforcing system, basically it's run by people with money and if people with money want certain questions to be answered in certain ways, then they make sure that nobody advances in academia who does not parrot the party line, and say what he is expected to say, so this kind of self reinforcement is antithetical to intellectual freedom and creativity. [...] (00:11:10)”	Christopher Langan	2019
Brian Martin	“Science is normally presented to the public as an enterprise based on skepticism and openness to new ideas, in which evidence and argumentation are examined on their own merits. Trusting newcomers who present views that conflict with standard ideas may thus expect that their work will be given a prompt, fair, and incisive analysis, being accepted if it passes scrutiny and being given detailed reasons if not. When, instead, their work is ignored, ridiculed, or rejected without explanation, they assume that there has been some sort of mistake, and often begin a search to find the "right person"; someone who fits the stereotype of the open-minded scientist. This can be a long search! Certain sorts of innovation are welcome in science, when they fall within established frameworks and do not threaten vested interests. But aside from this sort of routine innovation, science has many similarities to systems of dogma. Dissenters are not welcome. They are ignored, rejected, and sometimes attacked. To have their ideas examined fairly, it is wishful thinking to rely on the normal operation of the scientific reception system. To have a decent chance, dissenters need to develop a strategy. They need to understand the way science actually operates, to work out their goals, and then to formulate a plan to move towards those goals, taking into account likely obstacles and sources of support.”	Brian Martin	1998
Peter McCullough	“I’m deeply worried concerned regarding the future of America and also deeply afraid of loss of freedom of speech and of scientific discourse.”	Peter McCullough	2021
Plastic word	“In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality.”	George Orwell	1946
Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez	“There's a powerful public opinion campaign induced by Big Pharma. If one explores the national and international press, and traces recommendations like these, one can perceive an important lack of scientific information to support these kind of recommendations. And by contrast there are statements by Big Pharma executives that already take it for granted.”	Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez	July 2021

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:How Monsanto silences scientific dissent	commentary	3 December 2013	James Corbett
Document:Open Letter on Retraction and Pledge to Boycott Elsevier	open letter	4 December 2013	Institute of Science in Society
Document:Retracting Séralini Study Violates Science and Ethics	article	4 December 2013	Mae-Wan Ho Peter Saunders
Document:Scientific fraud and the power structure of science	paper	June 1992	Brian Martin
File:Global Climate Alarmism and Historical Precedents.pdf	paper	September 2013	Richard Lindzen	Authoritative opinion from one of the world's leading climate scientists and IPCC member working on the 1995 and 2001 Assessment reports

 

An official example

Name
Cochrane Collaboration

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