Gregory Petsko on "the right to be wrong"

Gregory Petsko expounds eloquently on the "climate of fear" in science in a recent commentary in Genome Biology, titled "The right to be wrong." Drawing a provocative parallel to US politics, he describes how honest, intelligent people willing to admit their (almost always) understandable mistakes are turned on and burned at the stake for by their opponents, accused of lacking integrity and being "flip-floppers" . In science, the attacks are much less direct, but the attitude is still entrenched, and the vast majority of scientists are opting for "safe", incremental, "data gathering/discovery" based research as opposed to bold, hypothesis-driven science. The sentiment is echoed by funding agencies who do not want to risk funding anything that might "fail."

The commentary, although ominous at first, should inspire us all to behave as true scientists should - boldly but carefully, objectively and rationally.

Ignorance of the masses - should we worry?

This is the second somewhat negative post I've written on Open Science. You might say I've moved from the Honeymoon phase to the phase where all you can do is judge and criticize and focus on the bad. Let's hope I move on to the mature, balanced, productive phase soon! In any case, I still highly support the concept of Open Science and want to see it grow, but right now I am using this blog to explore both sides.

There are many issues and questions surrounding Open Science which I have been slowly familiarizing myself with over the last few weeks. Some things, like intellectual property rights, privacy, and scooping, are obvious and comprise the bulk of the debate. I started thinking about a different issue related to Open Science recently, mostly inspired by the escalating battle between evolution and Creationism/ID and the comments of former presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee. The following may be more politically charged than appropriate for a blog like this, so consider yourself warned.

It boils down to this: the public is essentially ignorant. What I mean is that most people know a lot about very few topics, and very little about everything else. Most of what they learn about everything else comes from the media. I won't even go into the problems with our education system or the fact that most Americans have a very strange idea of what science is. The problem is that it doesn't take much for a study to be misinterpreted, or science to be misrepresented. Mainstream media will go for the most sensational spin. Think about all those "health" and "wellness" magazines that immediately latch on to and exaggerate the latest studies on coffee, supplements, and compounds in food, regardless of where they were published.

If Open Science is fully realized, bleeding edge scientific research will be at everyone's fingertips. Preliminary results, perhaps before appropriate controls are performed, will be available to people who don't have the training (or desire) to distinguish between rigorously obtained findings and works in progress. Prior to this, the only science accessible to the world outside went through the filter of a peer-review journal (and presumably is already summarized and interpreted in the way that best describes all the data and findings in the entire study). Without a filter, is there more risk for misinterpretation and misrepresentation by those outside the scientific sphere? If so, what precautions can we take to mitigate it?

Science and sharing

Following up on my last post on this subject, it appears there has been a recent spate of posts and articles about sharing in science. Taken together, they're a great summary of the challenges Open Science is facing, but also of the benefits and the steps some groups are taking to enhance openness.

Both Neil Saunders and Cameron Neylon point out this article in the NY Times, and a post on the 23andme blog.

In response to the 23andme post, Jasper A. Bovenberg refers to his paper in Genomics, Society, and Policy from 2005.

There is also an article from BusinessWeek in 2007 about some big pharma companies embracing Science 2.0, and an article in Scientific American from a few weeks ago debating the pros and cons.