On the bias of science: Part One

It seems that many people have some fundamental misconceptions about the nature of the scientific enterprise. It is obviously an institution with some flaws -- it's a human endeavor and humans are flawed. One of its strengths however, is a proclivity for self-examination. Most errors get corrected reasonably soon, and the culture, norms and policies of scientific institutions have tended to change for the better over time. (Past results are no guarantee of future performance.)

Here are some facts that I know because I am inside it. I am on the faculty of a school of public health, which is associated with a medical school; our university also has a biology department and various specialty institutes in biology and medicine. We also have physics, chemistry and mathematics departments, psychology, computer science, you name it -- it's a big, old, university. I can assure you, 100%, that neither our university, nor universities as a class, have any "agenda" for what the outcome of scientific investigation is supposed to be in any of these fields. The investigators are all independent, they obtain research grants through the university in their own names and they develop and carry out their own programs of research. Nobody, from the president to the provost to the dean to the department chair, tries to tell them what to study or what conclusions to reach. 

And why would they? These disciplines don't work that way. You carry out the study and the data speaks for itself. It is what it is. Now, you can get fake results past peer review, and it happens, but you'll be found out eventually when the results don't replicate or the implications don't pan out. Fraudsters, once caught, are reviled by their colleagues, they lose their jobs, and their claims are rejected. Nobody, as far as I know, has any straightforward political interest in the outcome of investigations in basic science except for people who have a strong stake in denying the truth -- evolution, climate change, environmental toxicology. The university does not promote any particular outcomes in these fields, the findings are what they are. The truth is out there.

However, it is possible for more subtle biases to creep in, particularly in  the case of applied research, of which the most prominent example is development and evaluation of novel therapeutics. (Traditionally most of these have been called "drugs," but I'd like to get away from that, it's confusing. The word has a different meaning, for one thing; and a lot of the newer ones are different and more complicated than the chemical agents that were important in the 20th Century.)

Most biomedical research at universities is funded by the federal government. A small percentage is funded by foundations, and some university based investigators get funding from industry. The latter is regarded as problematic and there are rules about it, though their effectiveness can be questioned. And of course a lot of research is carried out by the manufacturers themselves. 

 

Next time, I'll discuss these arrangements in more detail and the problems they can pose.