Controlled Experiments, by Misha Angrist

When the opportunity arose for me to speak at a local Stand Up For Science event in March, I hesitated. Despite everything I’ve written, I found myself wrestling with the idea of becoming a participant—an activist—rather than a chronicler. I’ve not worn a white coat or wielded a pipet for many years; I have not a single grant dollar at stake. But I still teach at an elite private university and I’m fully vaccinated. So, you know—J’Accuse!

I wanted to be part of it, insofar as an old white dude who doesn’t do real science can be. But if I were going to speak, then I thought it was important to try to do more than just serve up a cocktail of rage. Here’s what I said, lightly edited.

In the 1991 Albert Brooks film Defending Your Life, our hero, Daniel Miller, dies in a car accident and finds himself not in heaven or hell, but in a place called Judgment City. There, if he is to move on to a better existence, he must prove to a panel of judges that, over the course of his life, he was able to conquer his fears. The problem, Daniel learns from his lawyer (an incandescent Rip Torn), is that humans only use three percent of their brains—we know so little, and thus we are afraid of so much.

At the risk of being melodramatic, I would say that “we”—by “we,” I mean those of us who have been referred to derisively over the last 20-plus years as the “reality-based community”—are all residents of Judgment City now. (Though unlike in the movie, the weather here is not always perfect, the food is not always delicious, and Meryl Streep is not smitten with us.) We have landed in this surreal moment that, not so long ago, would have been unthinkable. We find ourselves at risk of contracting diseases that had been consigned to the past, so much so that our physicians have never seen them; our institutions are routinely evaluated based not on the quality of our work but on their subservience to power, and misinformation/disinformation is becoming the coin of our increasingly messed-up realm. Fear is a perfectly rational response to all of this. Many are afraid now, simply as a consequence of having borne witness to so many devastating events, and so many unforced errors.

And yet. I refuse to waste my day in court. I want to defend not just science, but curiosity, knowledge, and the very act of thinking.

 

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In 1942 the sociologist Robert Merton wrote that, in the wake of their unending flow of achievement, scientists had come to regard themselves as independent of society. After so much winning, in other words, we’d gotten cocky. “You write the check, American taxpayer,” researchers said, “and we’ll do the rest.” More than 80 years later, too many of us are still too cocky. And that’s a problem.

In 1934, a few years before Merton’s observation, the Norwegian physician Asbjørn Følling discovered the cause of the inherited metabolic disease phenylketonuria (PKU)—an inherited lack of an enzyme that left sufferers unable to metabolize protein. Their brains and their lives were demonstrably diminished because of it. Følling’s was a remarkable finding that would go on to change the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients, to say nothing of the fields of genetics and metabolism. But despite this achievement and all of the accolades that came with it, Følling remained a kind and modest man. While his contemporaries embraced the adage that “knowledge leads to power,” Følling demurred. “Knowledge,” he liked to say, “leads to humility.” That kind of humility, I would argue, is a source of strength.

As scientists, as scholars, and as thoughtful, creative, reflective people, I reckon that we are compelled to ask “what if” questions that are aspirational, not just about science, but about what we do with that science. For example:

• What if we didn’t let anyone put our taxpayer-funded work behind a paywall? What if we agreed to post preprints or publish in legitimate open-access journals?
• What if we didn’t give into tribalism? What if we resisted the urge to call people names when they disagreed with us? What if we declined to condescend to people of faith? What if we asked ourselves: Is there any chance that this mean-spirited hashtag is going to change anyone’s mind?
• But by the same token: what if we didn’t tolerate abuse or injustice directed at ourselves or our peers? What if, when circumstances called for it, we allowed ourselves to be animated by anger and gave voice to it?
• What if we refused to control-F (or command-F—I see you, Mac users) find-and-replace words in our grant proposals at the behest of the Orwellian language police? What if we chose to shine a light on bullying, intimidation, and censorship?
• What if we didn’t outsource our thinking… to robots, or to anyone? What if, to paraphrase the writer Derek Thompson, we didn’t go to the gym and expect someone else to lift the weights for us?
• What if those of us who presume to think of ourselves as role models, as mentors to young people, and as sources of encouragement about science and academic life, were to reach consensus on the idea that lifting up—let alone asking for dating advice from—convicted sex traffickers is neither okay, nor likely to achieve our goals? What if we had honest conversations about how and why this happens?
• What if we made ourselves and our expertise available to our elected representatives in good faith, and not just as self-interested constituents?
• What if, in our grant proposals and clinical trials protocols, we built in mechanisms to keep the people we study informed about what we’ve learned about them?
• What if we tried even a tiny bit harder to discuss our work with non-scientists? What if we visited our children’s schools, a library, a cafe (not just a science cafe, though I host an awesome one), or a church to talk about how science works, and about our own work?
• What if we struck up a sincere conversation with a stranger about Artemis II or bomb cyclones or GLP-1s? What if we discovered that—despite being inundated with misinformation and disinformation—people still love science?

None of this is easy, but it’s worth it. Think about all the researchers, academics, and public servants who’ve already been censored, threatened, fired, gaslit, marginalized. The stakes are existential.

Science—capital S—is a powerful institution that has committed its own unforced errors, and alienated too many of the people who subsidize it. But science remains a sublime and transcendent way of seeing the world. What can we do to defend it and to share its wonders, beyond reflexively pining for the old days?

 

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A contribution by, Misha Angrist