Author: Stephen Webster

Good Science Project launches programme of animation workshops

Good Science Animation Project

Science for Humanity 

To sign up or find our more please email Dr Stephen Webster (stephen.webster@imperial.ac.uk)

 

Workshop leaders: Litza Jansz and Esther Neslen

 

Introduction

 

Through a series of participatory animation, film, art and sound workshops we will explore and represent the experience of being a scientist, in all its forms, from the profane to the sublime.

 

The research life is varied and rich, and also repetitive and frustrating. When we think of ‘good science’, and try to imagine ways of describing it, we might well turn to art. Very likely we will seek some very flexible artform, one that can capture and express myriad meanings, and which can utilise diverse talents.  Here, the animated film is ideal.

 

Our short experimental films, made with you, will combine montages of animated images and sound that together represent contemporary research culture and ‘the life scientific’.

 

 

General notes about all Animation workshops

 

  • All 3 hr workshops take place on Wednesday afternoons. They are designed to offer an interesting art/animation experience both to those who just want to drop in for a short time as well as those commiting to the full session. We understand how busy you are.
  • There will be more than 1 participatory activity per session. You will always be learning new skills.
  • Some activities will continue and build from session to session; other activities will be introduced as we progress through the programme.
  • Some activities will be developed by participants in between workshops. You will be able to contribute anywhere and anytime, through creative drawing activities, time lapse filming and sound recording in labs, film and photography recording of aspects of home life, interviewing colleagues and mentors.
  • Workshop themes and outcomes can change and develop according to the wishes of the participant: you will help us shape the programme.
  • All participants will be credited in the final films and artworks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Animation Workshop 1

Wednesday 29th January 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

The pace of science, the race against time – rush to publish, winners and losers.

Participants learn technique of Rotoscoping to create a drawn animation of athletes sprinting to the finishing line

 

Revealing the human – exploring the murky spaces in between everything we give our conscious attention to.

Participants develop creative approaches to doodling as an art form. Practice encouraged to be continued outside workshop to be shared with group (through social media) for development as animation.

 

Animation Workshop 2

Wednesday 26th February 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

Clearing the hurdles – The obstacles in the way of achieving success.

Participants further develop technique of Rotoscoping to create a drawn animation of athletes jumping over hurdles. Hurdles will be creatively represented by collages of money, publications etc.

The life Scientific- effect on home life, issues for women

Stop motion animation of containers used in labs (specimen jars/test tubes etc) juxtaposed with stop motion animation of containers used in the home throughout life (baby’s bottles, mugs, bedpans etc)

 

 

Animation Workshop 3

Wednesday 26th March 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

Change of pace – The sometimes slow pace of scientific investigation that often appears not to progress.

Participants further develop technique of Rotoscoping to create a drawn animation of different people individually running on a treadmill.

Message in a bottle – How has our view of science changed and what would we like to be different?

Animate the reveal of written messages. These can be used in conjunction with container animation from wkshp 2.

 

Additional

Filming faces of participants for use in Animation wkshp 4

 

 

Animation Workshop 4

Wednesday 30th April 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

 

The Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat – What status, preference or privilege does a lab coat confer? What does it conceal? Do we still wear lab coats? Has it’s meaning changed?

 

Remake a lab coat out of pages from prestigious science journals.

 

The scientific gaze– turning our attention to the subject of the gaze. Consider collaborations and question what makes for good collaborations.

Film and create a drawn animation of close ups of faces of participating scientists examining an instrument or the results of an experiment/research .

 

 

Workshop 5

Wednesday 28th May 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

 

The Amazing Technicolour  Dream coat (continued)– Further develop the techniques for workshop 4. Possibly rig and animate lab coat and/or green screen movements of lab coat for track matting (filling 2D image with moving image footage) or projection mapping (projecting onto 3D object).

 

The scientific gaze (continued)– What does the scientific gaze see? What lies behind the subject of the gaze?

Further develop drawn animation of close ups of faces of participating scientists closely examining an instrument/research.

 

Workshop 6

Wednesday 25th June 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

Suggested themes and techniques

 

The Amazing Technicolour Dream Coat (continued)– Further develop the techniques of creating, rigging and animating a lab coat. – How is status affected when we put on or take off a lab coat?

Develop further animation of lab coat exploring different signifying poses and movements.

 

Heroes – Introducing personal motivations and inspiration in choosing to become a scientist

Using different drawing/collage techniques create images of Inspirational characters or events.

 

Workshop 7

Wednesday 9th July 2025 14.00 – 17.00

Lunch and pre workshop project development chat 13.00 – 14.00

 

Suggested themes and techniques

 

Heroes (continued) – Who are (or were) our heroes? What flattens our imagination or creativity. Introducing personal motivations and inspiration in choosing to become a scientist. Changing the world – Publish v protest.

 

Using different drawing/collage techniques to create images of Inspirational characters or events continued. Create puppets from characters and animate them.

 

 

 

 

 

Additional Activities and Themes

 

Additional Activities

Sound/voice workshops – Dates TBC These will be held outside workshop dates

Sound over recordings – Dates TBC These will be held outside workshop dates

Filming timelapse footage of labs- Dates TBC These will be held outside workshop dates

 

Additional Themes

These may be foregrounded in creative voice montages.

Friendships and collaborations – importance in ‘good science practice’, is this supported?

Why do experiments sometimes fail? – factors outside our control/importance of failure

Migrant science – How international is the science community? What are the issues that make this challenging?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New series of Friday Forums to discuss the scientific virtues

I was happy this week to announce a third series of Friday Forums, and indeed a third year of life for the Good Science Project. Our first Friday Forum, on October 25th, is on the future of animal experimentation. Like all our Forums, this one will be a discussion of something close and intimate to the life scientific. And like all our Forums we will be able to step back from our busy lives for a short hour, discussing a matter of great importance to our lives as scientists, and gaining new perspectives.

The subtitle for the ‘animals’ Forum was provided by my colleague in Central Biomedical Services, Dr Anna Napolitano, who has been so helpful in setting up the meeting, finding speakers and setting the agenda. The subtitle is ‘Looking back, looking forward’ and is an excellent pointer to how the discussion might go. For in our work to ensure animal experiments are efficient in their outcomes, controlled by agreed conventions, and tied to progress in biomedicine, no doubt we should have a sense both of the history of vivisection and its projected future.

Ethics in science is always a mixture of technical fact and moral principle. With the animal model, the sense of moving forward in ethical discussion is very reliant on technical and methodological advances. Such advances are characterised by the ‘3Rs’, namely ‘replacement, reduction and refinement’, and have as their champion a campaigning organisation that promotes the very ideas we will be exploring at our Friday Forum. It is a very good thing that Imperial College now has its own, excellent website devoted to the 3Rs.

Stepping back a little, I can see that our ‘animals’ Friday Forum is a good example of how I want the Good Science Project – now in its third year – to work. I want our meetings to be properly sensitive to the daily priorities and pressures of daily science, and the things we call ‘ordinary science’. In the last two years the Project has therefore promoted a great amount of such ‘ordinary’ talk. We’ve argued about: the way technicians are important to science; the way scientists sometimes feel they have to be politically active; the way the design of laboratories matters; the problems of moving country to do your science; how your priorities change, or do not change, as you get more experienced in research. At the same time I have wanted to mix in with these quotidian matters much broader and elusive concepts: what do we mean by progress in science? What are the risks in science moving away from ‘blue-skies’ research to the high-impact variety? Can the arts and the sciences find points of contact?

In a recent blog I started to discuss a theme close to the heart of the Good Science Project. I told how our Vice-Provost, Prof Mary Ryan, had described my project as ‘ethics’. This had prompted me to go away and get clear in my mind how good science, and ethical principles, might mesh. As I described in that blog, the Good Science Project’s interest in daily science didn’t seem to match well the demands of utilitarianism, or rule-based ethics, which are the two strands of ethical argument we are most familiar with, and which typically are seen as the moral grounding of science. Instead, I asserted, it is virtue, or Greek ethics, that seems the better fit.

Can I explain this further, by looking at the subject matter of our first Friday Forum, on animals? Can I be confident that, if the Good Science Project is an exploration of ethics at Imperial College, as Mary Ryan suggested, the main philosophical tradition we should use comes not from Kant (rule-based ethics), or the Victorians (utilitarianism), but instead from classical Athens, and the work of Plato and Aristotle?

At first sight it seems likely that the ethics of the animal model will depend entirely on rule-based ethics, and on utility. For the way we describe the ongoing relevance of the animal model is clear. The results obtained from animal experiments are highly beneficial to human health and understanding. This lines up with the utilitarian idea that an act is good if it increases the sum of human happiness. And Kantian ethics are central to our understanding of the animal model too. For legislation and regulation – ‘Home office rules’ – are the basic grounding of good practice.

No doubt at our Friday Forum discussion of animal models these strands of thought will be mentioned. But it is my strong hunch that, when we have finished our conversation , and leave the Sir Alexander Fleming Building for some well-deserved weekend rest, it will be the classical Greeks, and the moral philosophy of Aristotle, that in some quiet way will be echoing in our minds.

For Aristotle, and for the tradition of virtue ethics, the point of focus must be on daily life and on the steady practice of our skills. This is no mere ‘turning of the handle’. On the contrary, for the idea of virtue to take hold, the importance is in the way we constantly enhance our skills, share our knowledge with others, see how best we can do our job, and challenge ourselves to work well. Aristotle describes this vision of virtue at length in his Ethics but for a more contemporary, and highly celebrated account, you should turn to Alasdair MacIntyre’s magisterial After Virtue, published in 1981. It’s a densely argued book, so you’ll need to take your time. It is said that MacIntyre tore up his first manuscript, and started again, after reading the highly influential text of philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Written by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, the book is famous for its elevation of the importance of ‘normal science’ and its suggestion that the heart of science is not its progress, but rather its daily practice. And Kuhn went so far as to suggest that if philosophers want to ‘understand’ science, it is laboratory life that matters, rather than simply its developing knowledge. In a sense then, MacIntryre’s subsequent promotion of virtue ethics owes a lot to new ideas then circulating about the life of science.

Let’s be precise. Where does virtue ethics get traction, when it comes to the animal experiment? Why might utility, and rules-based management of animals, be usefully supplemented by ideas dating back two and a half thousand years, to classical Athens?

When we gather in Room 121 SAFB, on January 25th, it is the attentiveness, and the craft knowledge, of our panellists that no doubt will be striking.  They will be triangulating ideas about physiology, biochemistry, and comparative evolution and anatomy. We will hear about animal husbandry and we will hear about veterinary science. We also will hear from our Imperial experts about the regulation of experiments, and the way the value of such experiments can be discussed in public. It is great that joining us is John Meredith, head of outreach and education at Understanding Animal Research. And no doubt our audience will listen, share experience, and ask important questions. This, quite precisely, is what is meant by ‘virtue ethics’: a community, learning together over time, sharing skills, and putting priority into what is in front of us now, rather than some imagined future. Take care of the present, Aristotle would have said, and the future will take care of itself.

Celebrating the social sciences at Imperial

We are now planning our next series of Friday Forums, including one that will focus on the social sciences as a partner to STEM research. Titled ‘Celebrating The Social Sciences at Imperial College’ this keenly-awaited Friday Forum will have three panellists – Diana Varaden, Mike Tennant and Steve Fuller – debating the issue. Traditionally Imperial College, with its focus on the natural sciences, mathematics, engineering and medicine, has not been a place associated with the social sciences and the humanities, although these fields have always maintained a presence. Yet as the impact agenda increases in importance, and complex fields such as climate change and AI accelerate the interdisciplinary gaze of Imperial, the number of social scientists at Imperial, and the value of social science research in our institution, correspondingly increase.

A few months ago I gave a talk to a group of social science-oriented PhD students at Imperial, all of them interested in how best Imperial can support them in their research fields. To an extent I adopted a philosophical approach, as can be seen in the transcript, reproduced below. We can expect in the Friday Forum similar points to be discussed, together with talk of institutional matters concerning how Imperial can put in place structures likely to help the particular research needs of our social scientists.

Talk given by Stephen Webster to PhD students on the relation between the social sciences and the natural sciences, with especial reference to Imperial College

 An historical preamble

The relation between the natural sciences and other arenas of knowledge is a centuries-old issue.  When Sir Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) made his first attempts to kickstart modern science, three issues preoccupied him. First, he wanted to identify the method of science. Second, he wished to separate science from religion and from classical knowledge. Third, he wanted to establish the utility of science – ‘science for humanity’.

 Bacon did not disguise how difficult it might be to obtain secure scientific knowledge. But he did imply that science was a royal road to truth and that its method was in principle a mechanism for obtaining certainty. He suggested that science, properly performed, was a deductive activity in constant interaction with careful observation. To assist the smooth running of this method, he said, every effort should be made to reduce or eliminate ‘the human touch’.

His motive in all this was partly to do with his own ambition, and partly because he was impressed by the work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543). A major statesman rather than ‘scientist’ (the word scientist was only coined in the mid-19th century), Bacon was influential in the setting up of the Royal Society, which then as now combined scientific learning with civic, institutional power.

Bacon’s suggestion that with scientific knowledge comes power provides us with a starting point on how to understand the position of the social sciences at Imperial.  For the natural sciences are understood to be interested in the mechanisms of nature – material independent of humans that we convince ourselves can be observed objectively. The social sciences, with their gaze turned to human beings, find themselves embroiled in issues of objectivity. For Bacon, and all those who follow him, a secure sense of objectivity is exactly where the power of science lies. For all social scientists therefore, a considered view on objectivity is a necessity.

The philosophical questions I ask today are well-rehearsed. How objective, really, are the natural sciences? And how non-objective, really, are the social sciences?

The situation at Imperial College

As a social scientist at Imperial College you are not alone. The number of researchers here who incorporate into their work, or attempt to, a degree of social science methodology, is increasing. As today’s meeting shows, there are researchers now at Imperial who are based entirely within social science arenas. Your meeting is prescient because it foregrounds an issue Imperial has never felt it necessary to address specifically: the role of the social sciences in driving, guiding and critiquing the natural sciences.

Several explanations are readily available for what some would call STEM’s reticence in collaborating with the social sciences. In the case of Imperial College our specialisation in STEM results from our origins in the Victorian golden era of advances in science and technology, linked of course to the wealth created by the British empire. The Great Exhibition of 1851, an initiative of Prince Albert, led to the founding of all the institutions of Exhibition Rd. The success and importance of the scientific vision was so obvious that no apology could be needed for a science-specialist research and teaching institution. 

A philosophical detour

Given the success of Imperial College in all areas, including its recent QS classification as second in the world, and first in Europe, its role as a ‘STEM university’ seems beyond challenge. Nevertheless attempts to better articulate the role of the social sciences, in a place like Imperial, are likely to be fruitful, and perhaps even welcomed. Broadly speaking, there are two strategies to follow, in such efforts. One we will describe as epistemological, the other pragmatic. On the first, efforts since the 17th century to downgrade the truth claims of the human sciences in comparison to the natural sciences (the ‘Enlightenment project’, have proved unreliable. Rather, a whole series of philosophers, ranging from Giambattista Vico and David Hume in the 18th century, to Thomas Kuhn, Quine and Russell Hanson in the 20th century, have argued convincingly that scientific knowledge has a profoundly social element. And on the second, and this is a particularly contemporary point, scientific research now, with its ever-growing emphasis on utility and impact, transfers very quickly out of the lab and into the world of human politics, culture and media. We might even talk of scientists having to orientate their work – their knowledge – to a society where trust in institutions and authority seems to be changing. We also know that the laboratory, far from being an austere place of objective fact-finding, is irretrievably social. In sum, there are good philosophical reasons to doubt that scientific knowledge is more foundational than social science knowledge; and there are good reasons to believe that science innovation is impossible now without a corresponding understanding of social processes.

Dr Stephen Webster

Senior Lecturer in Science Communication

Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise)/Science Communication Unit

10th June 2024

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ethics and The Good Science Project



When Vice-Provost Mary Ryan said: ‘Yours is an ethics project’, I had to start thinking.

Two years ago I started The Good Science Project. My idea, as told to Mary, was simplicity itself: the research culture in which we flourish will be one where conversation and debate, on contextual issues as well as ‘scientific topics’, are nurtured. I would set up brief, in person, lunch-included, discussion meetings – the Friday Forums. Nothing much, but it would help. At this point Mary said to me ‘That sounds good, this is an ethics project’.

I went away and asked myself: is communication-within-an-institution, however thoughtful and illuminating, a matter of ‘ethics’? Is Mary right?

The history of the phrase ‘research culture’ gives us a clue why the topic might indeed be an ethical issue. For the previous word we used was ‘misconduct’. As I write in a previous blog, the ancestor to our interest in research culture is a concern about trust. At the start of the millennium a number of high-profile cases from across the world made journal editors in particular, and research centres in general, worry about cheating. To a large extent the concern at that time seemed to be trust in individuals. Are some scientists ‘bad apples’, and what should we do about them? The year 2000 was also the time when the House of Lords Science Select Committee produced their epochal Third Report ‘Science and Society’. The report began with statements about a ‘crisis of trust’ in science. No particular mention was made there of misconduct or research culture, but in highlighting the concept of dialogue between science and society, the idea that the internal workings of science has civic relevance was bound to gain ground.

Thus it was that a discourse grew about science ethics being as much about institutions as it is about individuals. In 2002 and 2003 influential MRC scientist Peter Lawrence wrote for Nature magazine well-received articles on publication norms and the nature of scientific esteem. A broad conception of the culture of research institutions was the force of Sir David King’s code of conduct Rigour, Respect and Responsibility in 2007. Perhaps of greatest significance was the Nuffield Council of Bioethics 2014 report The Culture of Scientific Research in the UK, chaired by Professor Ottoline Leyser (who subsequently went on to champion these issues when she became CEO of United Kingdom Research Innovation).

All of us know that ethics is about the difference between right and wrong, about how to separate benefit from harm, and about how to advance justice rather than injustice. But all this is very abstract-sounding. How do ideas like these get traction on a laboratory? If discussions about research culture classify as an ethics project, what precisely should we discuss? Why might people gathering to discuss perspectives on their work, at a lunchtime Friday Forum, be considered to be engaging in an ethics project?

Let’s do some homework. When it comes to serious descriptions of European ethical thought, three strands exist. At the risk of being dull, I will list them. Firstly, there is deontology, or rules-based ethics. Here you know right from wrong because of rules: religious rules; rules which seem self-evident (murder is wrong; dishonesty is wrong); and, famously, ‘the golden rule’: do unto others as you would wish others would do unto you’. The philosopher most associated with rules-based ethics is Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). In science we have plenty of rules: animals, health and safety, and any number of management, HR and policy requirements.

Secondly, there is utilitarianism. This is where you judge an action by its consequences. If, all things considered, the action makes the world a better, happier place, then that action is the right one. A corollary, and a slightly disturbing one, is that the action itself does not carry particular moral weight. For example, perhaps in some circumstances killing, or telling lies, is the right thing to do, because the consequences are seen as so important. Another way of putting this is ‘the ends justifies the means’. Utilitarianism is a 19th century movement especially associated with the social reformers Jeremy Bentham (1746-1832) and J.S.Mill (1806-1873).

In science we are well-practised in using rules-based ethics, and utilitarianism, as groundings for our work. As regards utilitarianism, the resources we put into science are justified because of the future benefits that will accrue to people. Consider our College strategy: it is called ‘Science For Humanity’.

Almost automatically we think of the values of scientific research as founded on rules and on utility. The rules we set ourselves, the truth of the scientific results that we produce, and the likely future value of our work, dominate the stories we tell about our work.

But, just to give us pause, accounts of what scientists value about their work seem not quite captured by concepts of future benefit, or adherence to rules. Scientists on the contrary prefer to describe their enjoyment in their craft skills, in their steady accumulation of knowledge, and in their sense of being in a community where trusted sharing of ideas is a norm. And when they discuss their concerns about the scientific life it is the distorting impact of intense competition, too hard a fight for grants, and fears about a secure future in science research, that gain mention. And the strong sense often is that these drivers, even if accepted as inevitable and manageable, are not considered as central to scientific practice. These are not the aspects of science that make scientists happy, and cause them to think they are making progress in their understanding. Instead they are a distracting burden from the main task, a tax. We can suggest then that there is more to the life scientific than rules and future benefit. And this is where the Good Science Project comes in, and where Mary’s words prompted its strategy.

For it turns out that a third and lesser-known branch of ethics is perhaps best placed for elaborating the actual lives of scientists – virtue ethics. This is a very ancient tributary of ethical thought, stemming from the classical Greeks. Here, it is character that forms the focus, especially as regards a person’s daily commitment to their work and to their growing skills. For example, to use an example from classical Greece, a ‘good’ farmer is one who understands seed and soil behaviour and knows what needs doing when. Getting good at all these things – the steady development of skills and knowledge, and with that the steady growth of reputation – is the ethical ground for this farmer. There is no emphasis on broader rules, or on consequences. In today’s language, you might say that it is the person’s ‘practice’, and the respect it gleans within their professional community, that matters.

For the Good Science Project, virtue ethics provides the best way of responding to Mary Ryan’s declaration, and indeed establishes the point that this is ‘an ethics project’. By finding ways to help scientists articulate those aspects of daily science that normally lie hidden from view – I mean the pleasures of the technical and intellectual challenges of daily science – we can claim to be followers of Socrates and Aristotle, the very founders of European ethics.

A rough guide to ‘research culture’

 

Preamble

No doubt about it, anyone trying to understand the concept ‘research culture’, in particular its problems and its routes to improvement, has their work cut out. In considering research culture, are we likely to find ourselves discussing ethics, or management technique, or HR policy, or diversity and inclusion, or something else entirely? As the Good Science Project moves into its third year I anticipate spending time trying to put order into this unruly list. I remember, at our very first meeting, I discussed the god Perseus, and his way of dealing with the Gorgon by refusing to look directly at those terrifying locks. Instead, by holding up a mirror, he could deal with his problem satisfactorily. Is there a sense in which ‘research culture’ cannot be looked at directly, that like Perseus we must hold up a mirror? This was certainly my thinking in setting up the Triptych of Science art project, where scientists made art works to express their views on their working life.

It always helps discipline the mind when an invitation to give a talk comes your way, and so I was grateful to the United Kingdom Research Integrity Office when it asked me to give a seminar, alongside my ex-student Mun Keat Looi, on the relation between research culture and science communication. I decided to take the opportunity to do some ‘organising’, both of how I see the history of the field, and how I think ‘ethics’ might have a role in issues of research culture. Thus, towards the end of my talk, I began to discuss how virtue ethics – that is, the branch of ethics that considers matters of character and stems from classical Greece – might be for us a key support in our search both for understanding, and for action. My next blog, in fact, will be a detailed look at how ethics, and what aspects of ethics, might illuminate our thoughts about research culture.

 

I reproduce below the briefing notes I provided to UKRIO and the participants of the webinar.

 


Hand-out notes for UKRIO webinar talk by Dr Stephen Webster, Imperial College London. 26th June: ‘Science Communication and Science Integrity’.


Introduction

Science communication is generally considered to be the facilitation of science-society relations, through a number of formats: science journalism, university outreach and communication, policy initiatives and social science research. However, a very important aspect of science communication concerns the issue of how, within a research institution, scientists communicate with each other. Therefore, in today’s webinar, if Mun Keat Looi considers integrity and science journalism as a key external communication issue, I will look at something more internal: integrity and daily laboratory life. While Mun Keat looks at how science journalists manage the various and often conflicting demands of their profession, so I will look at the way research integrity is sometimes vulnerable to the conflicting demands of the life scientific.

A Brief History of Science Integrity

The United Kingdom Research Integrity Office, today’s host of our discussion, was set up in 2006. Fourteen years earlier, in 1992, the US Department of Health had instituted the Office of Research Integrity, in response to anxieties running from the early 1980s about some well-publicised, even sensational, cases of scientific misconduct. An example would be the David Baltimore Affair. Later in 1997, responding also to what was felt to be rising cases of misconduct, all of them quite challenging to deal with, British journal editors, including Richard Horton of The Lancet, set up The Committee on Publication Ethics (‘COPE’). By this time the problem of scientific misconduct was raising serious issues for the journals, for the universities, and indeed for the whole concept of science as a truth-gathering exercise. Quite a range of interesting comment began to accumulate, with the MRC scientist Peter Lawrence FRS being notably influential through his thought-provoking 2002/3 Nature articles ‘Rank Injustice’ and The Politics of Publication. A particularly high-profile case in 2005/6, involving the multiple and well-publicised ethical transgressions of scientist Woo Suk Hwang, can be seen as a defining moment.

Many reports and codes of conduct followed this 2005 watershed. One such code of conduct was Sir David King’s Rigour, Respect and Responsibility, which had its university launch at Imperial College in 2007. In the same year Imperial’s graduate school started its compulsory course ‘Science, Research and Integrity’, where neophyte scientists could discuss these issues, and – very importantly – give their point of view. It was as a result of Sir David King’s work, and courses similar to the one offered by Imperial, that a subtle but important shift occurred. While the misconduct cases we read about in those years seemed always to involve astonishing examples of individual frailty and corruption, leading to the view that we were dealing here with ‘bad apples’, wise heads, including those of PhD students, reminded us that if ethics always has an individual component, the institutional aspect is critically important too. Slowly we moved in the direction of this question: ‘How Can Our Institution Support Good Science?’ Then, in 2014, under the guidance of Professor Ottoline Leyser (now CEO of Research England), the Nuffield Council on Bioethics launched at Imperial College their seminal report ‘The Culture of Scientific Research’. This brave document made plain the issue of institutional responsibility. It asked: how can an institution make unethical behavior less likely? And, particularly, it seemed to imply that we must be as diligent in discussing culture as we are in chasing down example of misconduct. In sum, as I discuss in the webinar, discussions of research integrity have roots in very different styles of discourse: there is an alarm about misconduct, and there is an aspirational, fervent desire for something just as complex, ‘good science’. Does this ‘mix’ of discourse pose problems?

What Does ‘Integrity’ Mean?

While I wouldn’t say that the discourses of ‘misconduct’ and ‘integrity’ are wildly incompatible, some thought is needed over how to navigate a rather heterogeneous set of concepts. And while ‘misconduct’ centres on the transgression of fairly well-defined rules, it is hard to know quite what ‘research culture’ means. For example, should we talk about ‘research cultures’, in the plural? That might look like a good option, but then we remember the important philosophical tradition, still central today, that science is unified: it has a method; it doesn’t matter where you do your science or who you are; a scientific fact is the same, whether you are in Southampton or in Sydney. Culture scholars, however, spend a lot of their time exploring how cultures evolve, and how they remain sustainably different. Meanwhile a growing aspect of enhancing research culture relies on the idea that both in in our wider lives and in our laboratories, identity recognition is central to the flourishing of our working life.

The word ‘integrity’ is usually defined as ‘honesty, the capacity to inspire well-founded trust, a position of moral worth’. However there is a second, equally important meaning. This is to do with wholeness, of different parts within a system being in communication, being in balance, and being mutual, interested and respectful.

Research Integrity and Science Communication

It is this second aspect of the word integrity that forms the basis of my short talk. I will be exploring how concepts like balance, and of course imbalance, are helpful tools in understanding research culture. At Imperial College we have been promoting the idea that research culture (among other things) is a matter of ethics. Similarly, at Imperial, we understand the ethics of research culture as broader than that routinely examined by research ethics committees. As I shall briefly suggest at the end of my talk, to attain the required ethical breadth, more to do with character and habit than with rules and policy, it may be helpful to study the great tradition of Virtue Ethics, stemming from Aristotle and the traditions of classical Athens.

Summer travels

 

Good science and the European dimension

British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has been travelling this week, aiming, as the media put it, to ‘re-set’ relations with Europe. The self-destructive act of Brexit, while not likely to be undone anytime soon, must plainly be mitigated if our new government is to see the economic growth that forms the basis of its plans.

 

A big headline this week, coming from Starmer, is that perhaps a European youth mobility scheme is back on the agenda. We all know it is important for young Europeans to experience life in another country. This is not migration. Let’s call it growing up, or simply growing a better world. In an interesting accident of timing Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, that great poem to human unity, has just had its annual performance up the road from Imperial College, at the BBC Proms.

 

For the Good Science Project, the link between travel and science, between research and new perspectives, is endlessly interesting. Our first Friday Forum last year, titled Nauka Emigrantka, looked at the joys and the perils of migrating for your science. Chaired by science journalist Urszula Kaczorowska, a staffer at the Polish Press Agency, this was a fascinating panel discussion about the challenges a scientist faces, when they move their research to another country.

 

As the Good Science Project moves into its third year, I hope we can grow links with other European countries, and travel more,  both physically and intellectually. Certainly the desire to enhance research culture is not simply a British preoccupation. The distortions scientists sometimes suffer, from the competitive hunt for grants or from the insecurities of employment and publication, are found across the continent.

 

The Good Science Project in Krakow

Can we learn from our European colleagues, as we try to understand better the social, economic and political forces that impact on scientists? Last summer I co-directed, with Urszula Kaczorowska, a summer school in Krakow, at the invitation of the Jagiellonian University. We worked with social science doctoral students, nurturing the communication skills young academics need if they are to flourish. Because they were social science students, their research areas often touched on the fractured nature of European politics.

 

Each morning of the Summer School, Urszula probed the students’ research. What was their project? How does it work? Why does it matter? Listening to Urszula’s interviews I felt I was experiencing in real time the basic tenets of the Good Science Project: that when it comes to research we always will find that the character of the scientist – their persistence, their care, their ingenuity – has powerful relevance. So often, in laboratory life, the gaze turns exclusively to publications, grants won, and the frailties of collaboration. It was a great discovery too, to see how much the students enjoyed and benefited from those conversations with Urszula, feeling – rightly – that such supportive but critical scrutiny itself is a boon to their research. At the same time they were learning the best ways for academics and journalists to interact.

 

Thinking of that wonderful Summer School in Krakow, it is clear why Poland is a good country for a science communication partnership with Imperial College. Like the United Kingdom, a change of government in Poland has brought a sea-change in official attitudes to Europe and the EU. Today, from opposite ends of the continent we in the UK and colleagues in Poland look across at each other, and perceive in the land between us not zones of national fervour, but routes to a shared wealth. No doubt an element of that wealth will be the common benefit that good science brings.

 

In 2021 Imperial College signed an agreement – a Letter of Understanding – with four Polish Universities. Together we would explore ways of spurring on progress in science communication. The agreement was a success, with meetings in Poznan, Krakow and Warsaw. Back at Imperial, Gareth Mitchell, Urszula Kaczorowska and myself, looking for ways to capture good practice in science communication training, made the Minding Science podcasts. Meanwhile feelers are out also with the Medical University of Gdansk, the Pomeranian University of Słupsk and the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. Let’s see what happens.

 

A philosophical epilogue

There are philosophical reasons too why those interested in innovation in science communication might be drawn to Poland and other Central European countries. For in this area of Europe, over the last 100 years, two vital philosophical developments gave us new ways to look at science. Interestingly, the two developments seem at odds with each other. On the one hand, partly in response to the programmes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, scientists, mathematicians and philosophers, many of them fleeing west, looked for ways of detaching science from society and from culture, so that research could never again be abused and shaped by dictators. Yet, on the other hand, our contemporary belief that science is inseparable from society also has origins in Poland and its neighbouring countries. Think of the Polish physician and microbiologist Ludwick Fleck (1896-1961), a survivor of Auschwitz, who argued that scientific facts take shape through the collective processes of belief and social interaction. For Fleck, scientific knowledge is as much social construction as it is the mechanical collection of data and the blunt comparison of theory. If Fleck is an obscure name to us today, his vast influence is obvious once we remember that his work was known to Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996). Kuhn’s 1962 text The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is today recognised as the epochal moment when science was pushed back into the embrace of society – sometimes an unwilling embrace, but an embrace nonetheless.

Another Central European philosopher-scientist, Hungarian chemist Michael Polanyi (1861-1976), was also a forerunner of  Kuhn. In his 1958 book Personal Knowledge Polanyi wrote that scientific thought and practice are guided and even fixed by tacit understanding and by personal styles of thought and expression. These social and personal aspects of the scientific project, argued Polanyi, are central to scientific advance, but are not easily reduced to objective foundations of data gathering and theory testing.

These rich intellectual traditions of Poland and its neighbours, both pulling science into society, and also separating it from society, remain pressing and central tensions for science communicators. For it is science communicators who we rely upon to navigate a safe path through social issues as well as through scientific issues. Science journalists, in other words, are not simply transmitters of information, or informal educationalists. When they work properly, these communicators are agents of science-society enrichment, and are very much needed. Science communicators must continue to look across Europe, learning from each other, and developing their philosophical, social and technical understanding of the scientific world-view.

Nauka emigrantka/science on the move

Nauka Emigrantka/Science on the Move


We’ve just had our last Friday Forum of the year, on The Ages of Science. Naturally this milestone made me reflect on the series as a whole, and particularly on the first event, held in February.

Our subject was Nauka Emigrantka, translated from the Polish as ‘Science on the Move’. The Polish motif comes from a Warsaw-based colleague of mine, Urszula Kaczorowska. Urszula is a long-time visitor and teacher with Imperial’s Science Communication Unit and is a science journalist at the Polish Press Agency.

Some years ago Urszula became interested in the issue of ‘migrant science’. What is it like, travelling for science? Scientists often uproot themselves to go and pursue their craft in another country. Science is always international, global. What could be more ordinary, then, in moving somewhere that offers the right opportunity? But what are the difficulties in ‘being global’, in migrating for your science? Being a journalist, Urszula sensed a good story.

In its publicity material Imperial describes itself as ‘the United Kingdon’s most international university’. UCL in turn calls itself ‘the global university’. But ‘being international’ can’t be an undiluted good. Mixed in must be joy, opportunity, peril and heart-ache.

These are big themes for the life scientific, and rather under-explored. I was interested too in the philosophical angle. It is a myth of science that it has a method, maybe one method. In that case surely science is the same everywhere. You can see the point: DNA is a double helix, whether you are in Moscow or in Malibu. But do the undoubted facts of science flatten out all difference, all geography, all sociology? Is science more a place of nowhere, rather than somewhere? It seems unlikely.

The job of the Friday Forum is to explore in congenial fashion such issues. And so we gathered one Friday lunchtime, to take stock of the matter. Naturally, three travellers took charge. Urszula herself chaired the session, and her interviewees were two perambulatory scientists, one from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the other based at Imperial but trained in India.

Dr Szymon Drobniak is an evolutionary biologist, especially interested in bird colouration. Like a migrant bird himself, he moves rather regularly between Poland, Australia and Sweden, spending good patches of time in each. Dr Dhanya Radhakrishnan works in Imperial’s Form and Function lab, and gained her PhD in India in 2021.

Urszula carefully probed our speakers’ motives for their migration, and way they feel about their radical geographical extension. Symon and Dhanya’s perspectives of course were multiple, and far from straightforward. Part of the challenge is in adapting to a new culture: Syzmon was by turns amusing and thought-provoking in comparing the Scandinavian mind-set with that of the Australian. For Dhanya, the remarkable change in opportunity and in the dynamics of research culture made Imperial almost the natural place to be. But not quite natural. She is far from home, from parents and friends, and time is passing.

It is a rule of the Friday Forums that, of the short hour available, half is given to the panel, half to the audience and a question-and-answer session. Ideas, thoughtful and challenging, flowed quickly. We discussed how, for those who have come to the UK from LMICs, the phrase ‘brain-drain’ is too much of a simplification. We talked about how migratory science, as a phenomenon, intersects in complex ways with other features of science that vary nationally. You can’t talk about migrant science without considering the gender gap, and the professional status of women. The rigidities of hierarchy, and how they shift across societies, will impact on a person’s choices when it comes to workplace. And then there is the issue of dominance of English as the lingua franca of science, and how this influences both the native, and the non-native speaker of English.

As ever, our Friday Forum produced no answers. As ever, the simple act of assembling in person, to discuss as a group some contextual issue of science, seemed both profound and easy. Led by Urszula, and with Szymon and Dhanya pondering the issues, no one wanted the discussion to end. As the next class filed into our room, and we made our exit, we soon assembled again down the stairs, in the Medical School café, to continue the discussion. Szymon I noticed, settled there too, with his enormous suitcase, all ready for Heathrow, and Australia, and another lap of his travels.

With thanks to:

Dr Szymon Drobniak, The Jagiellonian University, Krakow
Dr Dhanya Radhakrishan, Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London
Urszula Kaczorowska, Polish Press Agency, Warsaw

Briefing note for Friday Forum No. 5

Friday Forum May 17 Briefing Note

What do undergraduate education and science research have in common?

The Good Science Project, which organises The Friday Forums, exists to promote debate and development in research culture, here at Imperial College. What is meant by ‘research culture’? Certainly this is a large and amorphous concept. It relates to how scientists work. It is in particular interested in the social and personal factors that are so important in the ‘life scientific’. These factors include intellectual autonomy, the importance of trust between colleagues, the stresses of career security, publication and funding, the pace at which we work, the pleasures of slowly building expertise, the costs of set back and failure, and much else besides.

Today’s discussion

Our main aim in the May 17th Friday Forum is to explore the links between UG education and research culture. Quite often in universities research and education become somewhat separate. We should always aim to challenge that division. Tomorrow’s scientists are drawn from today’s undergraduates. Further, for the majority of UGs who do not go to work in universities, an authentic understanding of scientific culture will be an important part of their CV.

To make clearer the link between UG education and research we frame our discussion around sustainability. Sustainability is of course an important aspect of environmental concern. But it has a wider meaning that makes it relevant both to the life of an undergraduate and to the life of a scientist.  In this wider meaning, something that is sustainable can endure and flourish with no risk of long-term damage to the individual, to the institution, or to the environment.

To see how we can encourage sustainability in both education and in scientific research we will focus on five areas of interest:

Imagination

Both as students and as scientists, we want to be able to use our imagination. In one way of telling the history of science, our great scientific heroes are often pictured as people of imagination: Einstein with the beam of light he imagined riding upon; Kekulé and his ring of fire that became the benzene ring. But more ordinarily, any scientific observation requires imagination – admittedly an imagination that is mixed in with reason. Science always involves ‘the making of meaning’, a concept not quite captured by a word more commonly used about science, ‘discovery’. For example, how is it that two scientists, looking at the same set of data, can reach completely different conclusions? And when a science student is captivated by something they are learning, is it not their imagination that has been fired? Here is a concluding question: if imagination is central to science research and to science learning, how do we ensure that students and scientists have space and time for the imagination to flourish?

Inclusivity

For a long time after Sir Francis Bacon founded modern science in the 17th century, science was considered to be ‘one thing with one method’. We know this as ‘the Enlightenment view’. But today the philosophy of science leads us to doubt the monist view of science. Rather, we sense that Inclusivity – the ability of different groups  to access science as a profession, and science as a body of knowledge, itself enriches science. A many-headed science will be better at finding the way.  We might say: the scientific imagination, is enriched by difference. And the resulting truths may be more relevant to more people. But we ask: how good is the laboratory, or the classroom, at encouraging ‘different views’?

Collaboration

Perhaps when we collaborate – work together – our imagination is enhanced. Suddenly we are ‘thinking jointly’.  Collaboration, whether in the classroom or the laboratory, is much more than the sharing of equipment. It is guessing together, developing ideas together, working together. But for this to happen you need trust and you need time. When we organise collaborative work for students, do we allow enough time? And what are the challenges in making a collaboration successful?

Interdisciplinarity

It is often said that good ideas occur at boundaries, at the interface between disciplines. All scientists, and all science students, are aware of the costs of specialisation, of narrowing. But how easy is it, in the classroom or in the laboratory, to traverse disciplinary divides? Are we honest about the difficulties? Both for students and for scientists, are there risks to being interdisciplinary?

Assessment and evaluation

All through this Friday Forum we focus on the themes above. But something big is missing: the question of our success. We want to know we are doing well: we enjoy the approval of our teachers, our peers, the leaders in our field. What are the problems of assessment however? Can it get in the way of learning, or of scientific innovation? Scientists know all about the pressure to publish, and students know that assessment can somehow miss the point. Do students have examples or assessment that enriches learning, and aids collaboration and the imaginative spirit? And do scientists know of ways their work can be followed and appreciated in ways that remain supportive and fruitful?

Dr Stephen Webster

Senior Lecturer in Science Communication

Office of the Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise)/Science Communication Unit

May 17th 2024

The Scientist as Citizen: Finding your voice

By Philip Howard | 14 June 2023

What happens when the nature of your research seems to necessitate urgent political action, particularly in the fields of climate change, biodiversity and air quality? Should you be the passive, contemplative scientist who lets their data do the talking? Or should you take a more active role as a concerned citizen, and, if so, how could you give voice to your concerns?

In contemporary research culture, with ‘the impact agenda’ so important to research finance, scientists and the institution they represent need to be to be open to discussing all these questions. In the second Good Science Friday Forum, with 50 undergrads, postgrads, postdocs and academics, we did exactly that.

Led by Claudia Cannon and Stephen Webster, for a brief hour over lunchtime we were invited to ‘close the scrolls of information, let the laptop sleep, sit still and shut your eyes’ to listen to the voices of a podcaster, policymaker, pedagogue and, as you may have guessed, a poet.

‘a story you have to tell’

It was Nick Drake, the poet but also a dramatist and a screenwriter, who opened the meeting giving voice to his form of activism – storytelling. During an expedition to Svalbard his first reaction of a sense of wonder at its sublime beauty was transcended through his own reflections and conversations with scientists. He then saw the pollution in the water and the ice, and the effects of global warming such as variations in the thermohaline circulation. His ‘activist’ response was to write a book-length poem, The Farewell Glacier (Bloodaxe 2012). It is the voices of people who were there, in voices both humans and non-human and to write in the voices of time, the voices of the past, the present and the future.

Pete Knapp, a PhD student at Imperial in indoor air pollution is active in Imperial Climate Action. Like Nick, Pete communicates with stories. His turning point to activism occurred as he overflew endless palm forests on his way to see a much-depleted rainforest in Borneo. On joining Scientists for Extinction Rebellion Pete started a podcast called ‘Tipping Points’ to share the stories of why some scientists became environmental activists. He extended this to those in other professions and to those under 25 who have yet to fix on a career.

‘not written in stone but in time’

Becky Mawhood, Head of the Climate and Environment Hub, UK Parliament, highlighted some other ways to get your voice heard. Our laws, after all, are not fixed but can change with convincing evidence. Scientists, citizens and activists can influence and shape policy by representing their research through bodies such as The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, the Common and Lords Libraries and Select Committees which scrutinise Government policy.  Becky’s team and a Knowledge Exchange unit support the exchange of information and expertise between researchers and the UK Parliament.

Tilly Collins is a Senior Teaching Fellow in Imperials’ Centre for Environmental Policy. It is now on its 45th MSc cohort. Tilly’s environmental activism is voiced through her teaching of people about sustainability. These people, spread across the world, can make an impact, ‘nudging’ others such that environmental benefits, such as not eating meat, become globally normalised.

‘we are in this together’

It was clear from the audience reaction that they wanted themselves to go beyond the passive. Each person was striving to find their own voice but all felt some constraints in their desire to do more. Several referenced the ‘invisible ivory tower’ and how that challenged them to be able to tell their story. The behind-the-scenes environmental activist professor did not want to get arrested and ‘embarrass their husband. The undergraduate wanted to be supported by a wider Imperial culture, as did the academic who experienced a tension at Imperial between what he thought and what he could say due to perceived funding issues. Some needed ‘safe spaces’ such as publishing on Instagram to showcase their research to connect globally with like-minded people.

‘now open your eyes’

As the brief hour closed and we prepared to return to our desks and labs the last words were for the panellists. The need to engage all, ‘friend or foe’ in telling the story of your research was emphasised and the power of influencing policy was reiterated. Perhaps a good overall summary was inspired by Tilly’s years of teaching. Whichever voice you choose, be true to the science, true to your research, and, most importantly, be true to yourself.

The meeting closed with Nick Drake reading his poem ‘The Voice of the Future’. You can hear his poem being powerfully performed in the attached link.  Please, take two minutes out of your ‘busy’ and ‘colourful lives’ to listen to these and other voices.

A thesaurus of doubt

As we shall discuss at the conference, doubt is a many-faceted aspect of science. To get a sense of the importance of doubt within the manifold of science, one would have to explore many disciplines, from metaphysics to logic to sociology to politics.

Special thanks are therefore due to MSc Science Communication alumnus Philip Howard, who has compiled for us a selection of thoughts on doubt and science. Quite rightly, considering his Imperial degree, Philip here is particularly concerned with the question of how doubt can best be handled in relation to the communication of science in public arenas.

Doubt is a fundamental element of science

  • Doubt is an essential part of the process of science. In the philosophy of science, from Sir Francis Bacon to Goethe to Sir Karl Popper, doubt in one’s hypotheses structures investigations, with their possible falsification perhaps just the next experiment away. For Popper, the route to good science is self-criticism.
  • It is a matter of metaphysics that science – because of its empirical grounding – cannot reach certain knowledge. The physicist Richard Feynman, in his 1955 ‘The Value of Science’ Caltech lecture, said ‘When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty – some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain.’

Doubt is an engine of creativity

  • Jennifer Michael Hecht in her 2004 ‘Doubt: a history’ celebrates doubt, in an evolving religious context, as an engine of creativity and an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty. Her book is long, but highly recommended as an example of ‘synthetic’ non-fiction writing.
  • Why in science might we want to ‘protect’ doubt, and cherish it as a stimulus to thought? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said ‘there is no permanence in doubt; it incites the mind to closer inquiry and experiment, from which, if rightly managed, certainty proceeds, and in this alone can man find thorough satisfaction’. Goethe suggests then that it is the ‘unsettledness’ of doubt, the way it needles you (‘incites the mind’), that is creative.
  • Doubt ensures constructive dialogues between researchers and research groups. The clarity of settled knowledge emerges from the fog of competing hypotheses such that existing theories, and their inherent uncertainties, are replaced by new theories albeit with their own unknowns and doubts. Are we proud of a conclusion, if it was not accompanied by new questions and new doubts.
  • By the end of the Victorian era some thought physics to be complete. But Lord Kelvin’s famous ‘two clouds’ lecture, given at the Royal Institution in 1900, highlighted two problems of classical physics. These doubts were resolved by the new quantum and relativistic physics of Planck and Einstein.
  • Doubt is contemplative, but it also is practical. By unsettling us, it ensures that the complacencies of the great and the good can be challenged. Rutherford’s reference in 1933 to the industrial scale production of atomic energy as ‘Moonshine’ drove a doubting Leo Szilard to register a patent in 1934 for a viable chain reaction. Another example: Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, maintained that muriatic acid must contain oxygen. It took a young Humphry Davy, in 1810, to take the bold step to doubt the great man, and prove that muriatic acid, now called hydrochloric acid, contained no oxygen.

Doubt is more than just error bars, and eludes quantification

  • The communication of science to wider groups of people challenges how doubt is presented.
  • Emile Roux, an associate of Louis Pasteur and renowned scientist in his own right, said ‘Science appears calm and triumphant when it is completed; but science in the process of being done is only contradiction and torment, hope and disappointment.’
  • Covid showed to the public science in the moment and how doubt is part of ‘science in the process’. Error bars were not enough to express the uncertainties and doubts in the science and could hardly calm the multiple social and political forces that interacted with scientifically-based predictions.
  • In contrast, and as a taster of ‘Science Communication Studies’, see Brian Wynne’s paper on Cumbrian Hill farmers after the Chernobyl accident led to high levels of radioactive material in sheep.  The difficulty scientists had in acknowledging their own doubt and uncertainties, as they tried to undertand a situation far different from laboratory work and simple modesl led to them losing the trust of the hill farmers.
  • We scientists, rather prone to suggesting that the public don’t understand that science is uncertain, might on second thoughts admit that most people are used to handling uncertainty and doubt as a fact of life. Might ‘the general public’ be more at ease with scientific doubt than scientists imagine ?

Reasonable versus Unreasonable Doubt

  • Henri Poincaré, the great French physicist and mathematician, said ‘To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.’ And this is a basis for a thought-provoking article by David Allison, Gregory Pavela and Ivan Oransky.
  • How can we prevent the ‘illegitimate co-option of doubt’ being used to undermine good science. According to Allison, Pavela and Oransky these are the occasions when ‘doubt is [used to create] disingenuous expressions of skepticism, motivated by financial or other nonscientific interests, which are allowed to pervert scientific interests.’
  • But, on the other hand, we need to be careful as ‘The same tools used to discredit disingenuous expressions of doubt can be used against those who express well-supported doubt. Those with particular political views may declare some doubt to be unreasonable, even if it is actually quite reasonable.’
  • In presenting climate change science how should we communicate the uncertainty in climate science without that doubt undermining the ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ science.

The ‘stupid’ do not doubt

  • Bertrand Russell said, ‘The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.’
  • How should we present science, the implications of science and our doubts and uncertainties, without undermining the legitimate authority of the science itself, and our own long-held expertise?
  • In pushing back on those who try to exploit a scientific doubt to challenge the beyond reasonable doubt science, there is a danger. We need to avoid, as described by Allison, Pavela and Oransky, using counterproductive rhetoric to describe doubters as ‘“deniers,” “shills,” “fringe” persons, and the like”.
  • ‘There truly are people—some of them in positions of authority—who are promoting disingenuous and unreasonable expressions of doubt. However, if we slip and rely on non-scientific rhetorical devices to argue against them, then we invite others to use these rhetorical devices to dismiss cases in which scientific doubt is reasonable and even essential.
  • Are Allison et al right, when they say at the end of their article, ‘As scientists and scholars, we need to rise above [politics and rhetoric], stick to the science, and never give up the virtue of doubt’.

When dogma trumps doubt

  • The consequences of people who are convinced they are right, with no doubt as to the ‘truth’ of their absolute knowledge, can have varied and profound consequences, especially when scientific dogma allies itself with vested interests and political dogma.
  • Sometimes, scientists put doubt aside. Didier Raoult, a physician and a microbiologist, gained global fame for promoting hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19 despite no evidence for its effectiveness and the subsequent opposition from experts around the world. On the other hand Charles Darwin, no stranger to doubt, was exceptionally stubborn on behalf of his theory of natural selection, and his belief that modern humans are a single species.
  • A brilliant example of science communication, on the theme of dogma trumping doubt, comes in the episode ‘Knowledge or Certainty’ of Jacob Bronowski’s acclaimed 1973 Ascent of Man TV series. In it he says, ‘Science is a very human form of knowledge’ and scientists must always believe that they are ‘fallible and that they ‘may be mistaken’. The episode ends with Bronowski standing in a boggy pond outside Auschwitz. To Bronowksi, the consequences of a lack of doubt and the dominance of dogma and ignorance were all too plain to see and feel in the mud formed by the ashes of four million people. It is a theme echoed by the historian Sir Isiah Berlin, who saw, on occasion, a continuum between the simplifications of the Enlightenment, and totalitarianism.

‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.’

  • HAL 9000 in Space Odyssey 2001 also went on to say – ‘No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, fool-proof and incapable of error.’
  • Could AI systems express doubt and, if so, could they then be more useful or more dangerous?
  • Although much is written on AI and uncertainty there is very little on whether AI can ‘self-doubt’? Uncertainty in AI is about how AI deals with uncertain inputs or how humans assess the certainty of the output.
  • There seems to be very little researched or written on whether AI systems can express doubt about their own output. If AI cannot doubt then does it become, as for Russell’s ‘cocksure’, stupid?
  • Psychologist Steve Fleming at UCL argues that the ability to doubt separates humans from AI. The ‘metacognition’ of humans allows us to ‘think about our own thinking’ and ‘recognise when we might be wrong’.

Compiled by Philip Howard 26 August 2023 | Editor: Stephen Webster