LNAT Science – Test 3

Marvin Heiferman: On Seeing Science

The term scientist was coined by William Whewell–a British historian, philosopher of science, and colleague of Charles Darwin–in 1834.  Five years later, the first public use of the word photography was credited to another Whewell associate, Sir John Hershel, the photographic pioneer who also introduced the words negative and positive into the discourse of the new imaging medium.  And ever since then, science and photography have been inextricably intertwined, two observational disciplines that continually reimagine and redefine each other as our need to see and ways of looking evolve.

Photography has transformed science: from the earliest daguerreotypes of the moon to photos made by astronauts taking their first steps on the lunar surface, from the X-rays that startled the public in 1895 to diagnostic images taken by pill-sized ingestible cameras, from photographs made by researchers peering through microscopes and telescopes to the vast image data banks used to program facial and object recognition programs.  And, visa versa.  As the photographic historian Kelley Wilder noted: “Photography would not exist but for scientific investigation, and science would hardly have the form it has today without photography.”

Images are made to capture, study, catalog, and share information as scientific disciplines employ imaging technology to various ends.  And just as the sciences have been shaped by the making and reading of images, so has public’s perception of science, its practitioners, and impact.  As a result, no single history or straightforward narrative about the nature and practice of scientific imaging is easily constructed or retains its status for long.

Certain things do, however, remain constant.  Photography makes visible what is too close or far away, too big or small to be seen by the human eye, too slow or too fast to be perceived by the human brain.  “Scientific experience is molded by image-making and image reading,” as science historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison explained.  Throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, photography was embraced for, if occasionally challenged over its purported objectivity.  The continuous development of faster cameras, ever more precise lenses and light-capturing emulsions and sensors underscored the demand for accurate photographs to function as unbiased “working objects.”

Revealing and reliable images, it would turn out, could also be constructed from sound waves, heat readings, radiation, light waves too short or long for human perception, and electrical impulses.  Recent advances in digital and computational imaging have broadened the parameters of photography and science even further, providing new ways to visualize the structures and processes that shape the universe.  If, in the past, photographic images were believed best left untouched to insure their authority, today they are routinely modified or amplified—composited, colorized, and animated—in order to provide better data, rather than to distort.

Interestingly, images central to day-to-day work in the sciences sometimes lead multiple lives as they circulate in other cultural arenas.  They trigger radical shifts in the ways non-specialists understand their own bodies and each other, time and space, the world we know and worlds we can only imagine.  Science photographs range in scope and subject matter from the mundane to the awesome.  Given how much they reveal about what we cannot see for ourselves, they are not only informative, but deeply consequential and humbling.  Photographs of atomic bomb blasts, unborn fetuses, Earth seen from space, and glaciers melting away have all become as controversial as they are utilitarian, as philosophically and politically charged as they are iconic.

In the late 1950s, the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow argued that the sciences and humanities represented two distinct and seemingly unbridgeable cultures.   But more than half a century later, it can be argued that the gap has closed as photographic images made in and of the sciences circulate with greater frequency—as front page news, on social media, in advertisements and popular cultural entertainments, to promote technology, raise awareness of health and environmental issues, and impact public policy.  In the eyes of the public, and given the multitude of ways the sciences are widely and vividly pictured in visual culture, science has moved from the background to the foreground in the 21st century’s field of vision.

Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.

Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.

As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)

My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.

I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. 

(Article by Kimberley Nicholas edited from The Guardian)

Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.

Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.

As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)

My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.

I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. 

(Article by Kimberley Nicholas edited from The Guardian)

Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.

Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.

As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)

My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.

I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. 

(Article by Kimberley Nicholas edited from The Guardian)

Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.

Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.

As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)

My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.

I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. 

(Article by Kimberley Nicholas edited from The Guardian)

Scientists need to face both facts and feelings when dealing with the climate crisis

Over the course of my career, the climate crisis has changed from something only experts could see – reading clues trapped in frozen air bubbles or statistical patterns in long-term data sets – to something that everyone on Earth is living through. For me, it has gone from being something I study to a way that I see the world and experience my life. It’s one thing to publish a study on the hypothetical impact of increasing temperature on California’s people and ecosystems; it’s another to feel my stomach gripped by fear as my parents flee a catastrophic California wildfire cranked up by longer, hotter, drier summers.

Bearing witness to the demise or death of what we love has started to look an awful lot like the job description for an environmental scientist these days. Over dinner, my colleague Ola Olsson matter‑of‑factly summed up his career: “Half the wildlife in Africa has died on my watch.” He studied biodiversity because he loved animals and wanted to understand and protect them. Instead his career has turned into a decades-long funeral.

As a scientist, I was trained to be calm, rational, and objective, to focus on the facts, supporting my claims with evidence and showing my reasoning to colleagues to tear apart in peer review. I was trained to use my brain but not my heart; to report methods and statistics and findings but not how I felt about them. In graduate school, I was surrounded by brilliant, serious men who spoke in even, measured tones about the loss of California snowpack and crop yields; I tried to do the same.

I felt my credibility as a scientist was on the line, as was the respect of those who would sit on my future hiring committee and determine whether I would get a tenure- track job. I internalised the idea that scientists should be “policy-relevant and yet policy-neutral, never policy-prescriptive.” I was not supposed to have a preference, much less an emotional attachment, to one outcome or another, even on matters of life and death; that was for “policymakers” to decide. (This reticence goes against the wishes of 60% of Americans, as expressed in Pew Research polling, that scientists take an active role in policy debates about scientific issues.)

My dispassionate training has not prepared me for the increasingly frequent emotional crises of climate change. What do I tell the student who chokes up in my office when she reads that 90% of the seagrasses she’s trying to design policies to protect are slated to be killed by warming before she retires? In such cases, facts are cold comfort. The skill I’ve had to cultivate on my own is to find the appropriate bedside manner as a doctor to a feverish planet; to try to go beyond probabilities and scenarios, to acknowledge what is important and grieve for what is being lost.

Only in the most recent decade of my life have I realised that feelings, manifested as physical sensations in the body such as my stomach clenching or my heart lifting, have their own wisdom. I don’t have to react to these feelings in any dramatic way if I don’t want to; all I have to do is make eye contact, wave, and not run away. Like all feelings, sadness is valid; it need not dictate my actions singlehandedly, but it deserves acknowledgment.

I’ve realised that giving space to my feelings gives me more empathy with what others are going through as part of the shared human experience and helps me connect with them more deeply. It has taken me a long time to come to terms with my climate and ecological grief, but swimming through it is the only way forward. One role environmental scientists can play is to be “stewards of grief, to hold the hand of society as we enter the unknown space of the climate crisis,” as my friend Leehi Yona so beautifully wrote when the IPCC’s 1.5C report launched. 

(Article by Kimberley Nicholas edited from The Guardian)

The UK will never become a ‘science superpower’ if it’s cutting research budgets

Earlier this week, the government put science at the heart of its strategy for the UK’s place in the world. In its integrated review, it argued that cutting-edge science and strong leadership from the UK could make a huge difference for humanity. Researchers in the UK could benefit both the UK and the wider world by working to solve global problems such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and pandemics.

This is completely right – scientists in the UK absolutely can do this. And I’d like to be celebrating the fact that the government has set out this ambitious vision. Unfortunately, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.Countries around the world are investing much more in research and development (R&D) than the UK is. In the US, R&D investment is a major plank of the Biden stimulus plan. In Korea and Israel, they’re spending at twice the rate we are.

The government has committed to increasing R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But right now it’s not putting its money where its mouth is. If this target is met at all, it will be by the skin of our teeth in the final year. We must instead start right now, not in some distant time beyond the next general election.Six years away is far too long to wait while we watch others grow their investment. With the pace of change in science and technology, we need to attract and support the best researchers and companies right now. If there’s one thing I’d hoped the UK government had learned from the pandemic, it’s that acting later is far more costly than acting now. The benefits to the economy, to health and to the levelling-up agenda will not be felt until well into the 2030s on this timescale.

I run a global charitable foundation with a mission to help solve the world’s urgent health challenges. Does it matter where the science to do this happens? From one point of view, no – as long as it happens. A footloose academic or a tech CEO would almost certainly take that view and be happy to go to wherever the money is.

But the UK has been a good place to do science, and it should stay that way: for health, for wealth, for fixing regional inequalities. The science and tech industries are drivers of growth, while universities stimulate enterprise, urban regeneration and opportunity around the country.

So there are compelling arguments out of economic self-interest for this. But there are moral ones too, about our place in the world. We can and should take pride in being a global leader and in contributing to the world. The international development funding that we channel through UK universities is a great example, using UK scientific expertise to find solutions to everything from malaria to human trafficking. It is tragic to see these projects start to be cancelled after the aid cuts.

There’s so much to gain from turning the “science superpower” ambitions into reality. But we have no time to waste, and we can’t do it by cutting science budgets.

(Edited from the Guardian by Jeremy Farrar)

The UK will never become a ‘science superpower’ if it’s cutting research budgets

Earlier this week, the government put science at the heart of its strategy for the UK’s place in the world. In its integrated review, it argued that cutting-edge science and strong leadership from the UK could make a huge difference for humanity. Researchers in the UK could benefit both the UK and the wider world by working to solve global problems such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and pandemics.

This is completely right – scientists in the UK absolutely can do this. And I’d like to be celebrating the fact that the government has set out this ambitious vision. Unfortunately, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.Countries around the world are investing much more in research and development (R&D) than the UK is. In the US, R&D investment is a major plank of the Biden stimulus plan. In Korea and Israel, they’re spending at twice the rate we are.

The government has committed to increasing R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But right now it’s not putting its money where its mouth is. If this target is met at all, it will be by the skin of our teeth in the final year. We must instead start right now, not in some distant time beyond the next general election.Six years away is far too long to wait while we watch others grow their investment. With the pace of change in science and technology, we need to attract and support the best researchers and companies right now. If there’s one thing I’d hoped the UK government had learned from the pandemic, it’s that acting later is far more costly than acting now. The benefits to the economy, to health and to the levelling-up agenda will not be felt until well into the 2030s on this timescale.

I run a global charitable foundation with a mission to help solve the world’s urgent health challenges. Does it matter where the science to do this happens? From one point of view, no – as long as it happens. A footloose academic or a tech CEO would almost certainly take that view and be happy to go to wherever the money is.

But the UK has been a good place to do science, and it should stay that way: for health, for wealth, for fixing regional inequalities. The science and tech industries are drivers of growth, while universities stimulate enterprise, urban regeneration and opportunity around the country.

So there are compelling arguments out of economic self-interest for this. But there are moral ones too, about our place in the world. We can and should take pride in being a global leader and in contributing to the world. The international development funding that we channel through UK universities is a great example, using UK scientific expertise to find solutions to everything from malaria to human trafficking. It is tragic to see these projects start to be cancelled after the aid cuts.

There’s so much to gain from turning the “science superpower” ambitions into reality. But we have no time to waste, and we can’t do it by cutting science budgets.

(Edited from the Guardian by Jeremy Farrar)

The UK will never become a ‘science superpower’ if it’s cutting research budgets

Earlier this week, the government put science at the heart of its strategy for the UK’s place in the world. In its integrated review, it argued that cutting-edge science and strong leadership from the UK could make a huge difference for humanity. Researchers in the UK could benefit both the UK and the wider world by working to solve global problems such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and pandemics.

This is completely right – scientists in the UK absolutely can do this. And I’d like to be celebrating the fact that the government has set out this ambitious vision. Unfortunately, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.Countries around the world are investing much more in research and development (R&D) than the UK is. In the US, R&D investment is a major plank of the Biden stimulus plan. In Korea and Israel, they’re spending at twice the rate we are.

The government has committed to increasing R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But right now it’s not putting its money where its mouth is. If this target is met at all, it will be by the skin of our teeth in the final year. We must instead start right now, not in some distant time beyond the next general election.Six years away is far too long to wait while we watch others grow their investment. With the pace of change in science and technology, we need to attract and support the best researchers and companies right now. If there’s one thing I’d hoped the UK government had learned from the pandemic, it’s that acting later is far more costly than acting now. The benefits to the economy, to health and to the levelling-up agenda will not be felt until well into the 2030s on this timescale.

I run a global charitable foundation with a mission to help solve the world’s urgent health challenges. Does it matter where the science to do this happens? From one point of view, no – as long as it happens. A footloose academic or a tech CEO would almost certainly take that view and be happy to go to wherever the money is.

But the UK has been a good place to do science, and it should stay that way: for health, for wealth, for fixing regional inequalities. The science and tech industries are drivers of growth, while universities stimulate enterprise, urban regeneration and opportunity around the country.

So there are compelling arguments out of economic self-interest for this. But there are moral ones too, about our place in the world. We can and should take pride in being a global leader and in contributing to the world. The international development funding that we channel through UK universities is a great example, using UK scientific expertise to find solutions to everything from malaria to human trafficking. It is tragic to see these projects start to be cancelled after the aid cuts.

There’s so much to gain from turning the “science superpower” ambitions into reality. But we have no time to waste, and we can’t do it by cutting science budgets.

(Edited from the Guardian by Jeremy Farrar)

The UK will never become a ‘science superpower’ if it’s cutting research budgets

Earlier this week, the government put science at the heart of its strategy for the UK’s place in the world. In its integrated review, it argued that cutting-edge science and strong leadership from the UK could make a huge difference for humanity. Researchers in the UK could benefit both the UK and the wider world by working to solve global problems such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and pandemics.

This is completely right – scientists in the UK absolutely can do this. And I’d like to be celebrating the fact that the government has set out this ambitious vision. Unfortunately, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.Countries around the world are investing much more in research and development (R&D) than the UK is. In the US, R&D investment is a major plank of the Biden stimulus plan. In Korea and Israel, they’re spending at twice the rate we are.

The government has committed to increasing R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But right now it’s not putting its money where its mouth is. If this target is met at all, it will be by the skin of our teeth in the final year. We must instead start right now, not in some distant time beyond the next general election.Six years away is far too long to wait while we watch others grow their investment. With the pace of change in science and technology, we need to attract and support the best researchers and companies right now. If there’s one thing I’d hoped the UK government had learned from the pandemic, it’s that acting later is far more costly than acting now. The benefits to the economy, to health and to the levelling-up agenda will not be felt until well into the 2030s on this timescale.

I run a global charitable foundation with a mission to help solve the world’s urgent health challenges. Does it matter where the science to do this happens? From one point of view, no – as long as it happens. A footloose academic or a tech CEO would almost certainly take that view and be happy to go to wherever the money is.

But the UK has been a good place to do science, and it should stay that way: for health, for wealth, for fixing regional inequalities. The science and tech industries are drivers of growth, while universities stimulate enterprise, urban regeneration and opportunity around the country.

So there are compelling arguments out of economic self-interest for this. But there are moral ones too, about our place in the world. We can and should take pride in being a global leader and in contributing to the world. The international development funding that we channel through UK universities is a great example, using UK scientific expertise to find solutions to everything from malaria to human trafficking. It is tragic to see these projects start to be cancelled after the aid cuts.

There’s so much to gain from turning the “science superpower” ambitions into reality. But we have no time to waste, and we can’t do it by cutting science budgets.

(Edited from the Guardian by Jeremy Farrar)

The UK will never become a ‘science superpower’ if it’s cutting research budgets

Earlier this week, the government put science at the heart of its strategy for the UK’s place in the world. In its integrated review, it argued that cutting-edge science and strong leadership from the UK could make a huge difference for humanity. Researchers in the UK could benefit both the UK and the wider world by working to solve global problems such as climate change, antimicrobial resistance and pandemics.

This is completely right – scientists in the UK absolutely can do this. And I’d like to be celebrating the fact that the government has set out this ambitious vision. Unfortunately, the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality.Countries around the world are investing much more in research and development (R&D) than the UK is. In the US, R&D investment is a major plank of the Biden stimulus plan. In Korea and Israel, they’re spending at twice the rate we are.

The government has committed to increasing R&D spending to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. But right now it’s not putting its money where its mouth is. If this target is met at all, it will be by the skin of our teeth in the final year. We must instead start right now, not in some distant time beyond the next general election.Six years away is far too long to wait while we watch others grow their investment. With the pace of change in science and technology, we need to attract and support the best researchers and companies right now. If there’s one thing I’d hoped the UK government had learned from the pandemic, it’s that acting later is far more costly than acting now. The benefits to the economy, to health and to the levelling-up agenda will not be felt until well into the 2030s on this timescale.

I run a global charitable foundation with a mission to help solve the world’s urgent health challenges. Does it matter where the science to do this happens? From one point of view, no – as long as it happens. A footloose academic or a tech CEO would almost certainly take that view and be happy to go to wherever the money is.

But the UK has been a good place to do science, and it should stay that way: for health, for wealth, for fixing regional inequalities. The science and tech industries are drivers of growth, while universities stimulate enterprise, urban regeneration and opportunity around the country.

So there are compelling arguments out of economic self-interest for this. But there are moral ones too, about our place in the world. We can and should take pride in being a global leader and in contributing to the world. The international development funding that we channel through UK universities is a great example, using UK scientific expertise to find solutions to everything from malaria to human trafficking. It is tragic to see these projects start to be cancelled after the aid cuts.

There’s so much to gain from turning the “science superpower” ambitions into reality. But we have no time to waste, and we can’t do it by cutting science budgets.

(Edited from the Guardian by Jeremy Farrar)

We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review (Nikolai Slavov)

Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it. Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?

Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them. 

Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, if a journal claims to conduct peer review and provides no evidence of it, the claim is rarely dismissed.

How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.        

The evidence for the quality of peer review and editorial oversight is even weaker. How can we evaluate the rigor of peer review at a journal that provides no public evidence that peer review happens? We cannot. The only scientifically justified conclusion is that we must doubt the existence and quality of peer review for any journal that does not publish the editorial and peer-review discussions that support its publishing activity.

The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews. Some journals do this, but they are the exception. The majority of the leading journals provide no evidence whatsoever of their peer review—or the lack of it. Yet peer review is currently the most important function of journals, and I believe that peer-review has much to contribute to the scientific discourse.

I can understand strong arguments for and against signing peer reviews. These arguments form a complex discussion without a simple solution. This discussion must not spill over and complicate the simpler question of whether anonymized peer reviews should be published. I believe they must be published. I see no justification for any journal to hide the anonymized peer reviews.

We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review (Nikolai Slavov)

Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it. Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?

Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them. 

Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, if a journal claims to conduct peer review and provides no evidence of it, the claim is rarely dismissed.

How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.        

The evidence for the quality of peer review and editorial oversight is even weaker. How can we evaluate the rigor of peer review at a journal that provides no public evidence that peer review happens? We cannot. The only scientifically justified conclusion is that we must doubt the existence and quality of peer review for any journal that does not publish the editorial and peer-review discussions that support its publishing activity.

The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews. Some journals do this, but they are the exception. The majority of the leading journals provide no evidence whatsoever of their peer review—or the lack of it. Yet peer review is currently the most important function of journals, and I believe that peer-review has much to contribute to the scientific discourse.

I can understand strong arguments for and against signing peer reviews. These arguments form a complex discussion without a simple solution. This discussion must not spill over and complicate the simpler question of whether anonymized peer reviews should be published. I believe they must be published. I see no justification for any journal to hide the anonymized peer reviews.

We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review (Nikolai Slavov)

Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it. Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?

Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them. 

Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, if a journal claims to conduct peer review and provides no evidence of it, the claim is rarely dismissed.

How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.        

The evidence for the quality of peer review and editorial oversight is even weaker. How can we evaluate the rigor of peer review at a journal that provides no public evidence that peer review happens? We cannot. The only scientifically justified conclusion is that we must doubt the existence and quality of peer review for any journal that does not publish the editorial and peer-review discussions that support its publishing activity.

The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews. Some journals do this, but they are the exception. The majority of the leading journals provide no evidence whatsoever of their peer review—or the lack of it. Yet peer review is currently the most important function of journals, and I believe that peer-review has much to contribute to the scientific discourse.

I can understand strong arguments for and against signing peer reviews. These arguments form a complex discussion without a simple solution. This discussion must not spill over and complicate the simpler question of whether anonymized peer reviews should be published. I believe they must be published. I see no justification for any journal to hide the anonymized peer reviews.

We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review (Nikolai Slavov)

Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it. Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?

Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them. 

Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, if a journal claims to conduct peer review and provides no evidence of it, the claim is rarely dismissed.

How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.        

The evidence for the quality of peer review and editorial oversight is even weaker. How can we evaluate the rigor of peer review at a journal that provides no public evidence that peer review happens? We cannot. The only scientifically justified conclusion is that we must doubt the existence and quality of peer review for any journal that does not publish the editorial and peer-review discussions that support its publishing activity.

The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews. Some journals do this, but they are the exception. The majority of the leading journals provide no evidence whatsoever of their peer review—or the lack of it. Yet peer review is currently the most important function of journals, and I believe that peer-review has much to contribute to the scientific discourse.

I can understand strong arguments for and against signing peer reviews. These arguments form a complex discussion without a simple solution. This discussion must not spill over and complicate the simpler question of whether anonymized peer reviews should be published. I believe they must be published. I see no justification for any journal to hide the anonymized peer reviews.

We Must Demand Evidence of Peer Review (Nikolai Slavov)

Peer review varies in quality and thoroughness. Making it publicly available could improve it. Have you read a paper and thought: “How could peer reviews support the publication of such a paper?” I have. More than once. Other times, I have read fascinating papers outside of my field and wondered what the concerns of the experts who peer reviewed the study were. What important caveats am I missing?

Sometimes, I am lucky and find the answers to such questions: A few publications, including those from EMBO Press and eLife, publish the peer reviews alongside the papers. Reading such peer reviews has provided an additional dimension of appreciating and understanding the experiments and the findings, especially when I am not very familiar with the topic. But for most other journals I cannot access the peer reviews that supported a paper’s publication because most journals hide them. 

Scientific rigor demands that claims be substantiated by evidence. If I claim that gene A regulates gene B and provide no evidence, my claim will be dismissed. It must be dismissed. Yet, if a journal claims to conduct peer review and provides no evidence of it, the claim is rarely dismissed.

How do we know that a journal conducts peer review? For most journals, the evidence is limited to our anecdotal experiences with the manuscripts that we review ourselves or that we and our friends have submitted. For me this evidence is mixed. I know of manuscripts that have been thoughtfully reviewed and manuscripts that have undergone very expedited peer review or no peer review at all before appearing in the most prestigious journals. This anecdotal evidence is rather weak. If you ask me to substantiate it, I have to refer you to a friend who may or may not be willing to tell you that his or her paper was barely peer reviewed. It is a huge problem that the evidence for such a centrally important process is hidden from public view.        

The evidence for the quality of peer review and editorial oversight is even weaker. How can we evaluate the rigor of peer review at a journal that provides no public evidence that peer review happens? We cannot. The only scientifically justified conclusion is that we must doubt the existence and quality of peer review for any journal that does not publish the editorial and peer-review discussions that support its publishing activity.

The exit from this very sorry state is for journals to publish the anonymized peer reviews. Some journals do this, but they are the exception. The majority of the leading journals provide no evidence whatsoever of their peer review—or the lack of it. Yet peer review is currently the most important function of journals, and I believe that peer-review has much to contribute to the scientific discourse.

I can understand strong arguments for and against signing peer reviews. These arguments form a complex discussion without a simple solution. This discussion must not spill over and complicate the simpler question of whether anonymized peer reviews should be published. I believe they must be published. I see no justification for any journal to hide the anonymized peer reviews.