I am on the board of directors for one of the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine’s fellowships, which awards a fellowship to an MD/PhD student each year.
The reason I agreed to be on this panel is not just to give money to a student doing good research, but because I wanted to see the future of science, which starts at the university level.
And the future of science is not in the research, it is in the scientist.
Each year we receive research proposals from each applicant that specify what they are working on. Most students have been working on their research topic for many years and have at least one publication detailing their work. We receive many proposals and select the top 5 proposals for personal presentation. And from the 5 presenters we choose a winner.
We’ve met long enough at this point for patterns to emerge among scholarship winners. The scholarship winner is not necessarily the one with the best research, the scholarship winner is the one who presents their research best.
This year the scholarship winner was the one we all agreed was the best. She presented her research professionally, clearly and confidently. Her work also held great promise for real-world application because it focused on understanding viral infections and the immune response.
Her presentation and work stood out to me because she was an excellent scientist. But another student stood out to me in her presentation because she was the opposite, she was a coward.
The Bantam Menace
The cowardly scientist is one who is afraid to take credit for his work. When discussing the research they conducted exclusively, they use “we” instead of “I.” A cowardly scientist is one who misrepresents his research. Instead of being confident and prepared about their results and explaining them to the room in a coherent and elegant way, the timid scientist rushes through his ill-prepared presentation and speaks quickly and stilted. If we can’t understand scientists’ research, regardless of its value, it doesn’t get funded. And it won’t go anywhere.
But perhaps the worst quality, the most dangerous quality of the cowardly scientist is the fear of their results. It is this fear that makes the cowardly scientist a threat.
A few months ago the head of the fellowship board and I met with previous winners to discuss the progress of their current research. A previous winner mentioned his work on the hippocampus in adult mice and how he discovered that the hippocampus can be asymmetric, which contradicts the established narrative in the literature that the hippocampus is symmetrical.
When I asked him when he would publish his findings, he said he would not. Research that could fundamentally change our understanding of emotion and memory, and lead to meaningful work and cures for disease, has been swept under the rug. And the reason was because this research was done by a cowardly scientist. He was afraid to publish this data because the data contradicted the work of his colleagues, and if he published contradictory data, he feared that he would be ostracized by the scientific community.
The above scenario is not rare, it happens in every scientific laboratory on the planet. The scientist’s dilemma of whether to publish or be liked is why science, once a great rushing river of information, has become a tepid pool of dead water data.
The dilemma of scientists to publish the truth or be one of the crowd is not unfounded and is one of the reasons why I left the scientific community and started my own laboratory. It is the reason why many scientists left their scientific environment to follow their own path. A notable example is Barbara McClintock and her discovery of transposons. Barbara McClintock, while researching the chromosomes in maize found something strange: genes are not fixed, but move or transpose and can be turned on and off. She was laughed out of the scientific community, met with outrage and outrage from her colleagues, and refused publication. However, she put her facts out there and was awarded the Nobel many years later when everyone admitted she was right.
If instead of worrying about their own egos, McClintocks peers had looked at her data, then we would be decades ahead of genetic research than we are now. And we would have published scientific work showing the negatives in addition to the positives. The problem is that published scientific research serves colleagues and journals more than the public.
Go sideways
The peer review process and scientific publication do nothing to weed out bad science and encourage good science. In fact, it does the opposite. An example: When I was studying stem cell biology, my professor had finally given up her research in stem cell biology, a highly competitive and aggressive field. She did a good job of understanding how stem cells could be used to treat glial scarring in the spinal cord, and she could have helped a lot of people in her work.
The reason it stopped was because of the corruption of the peer review process. She explained how every time she tried to publish her data, one of the journal’s “peers” would either reject her work because it conflicted with his work, or put the work on hold, steal the methods and results, and publish the himself this data. She explained that the theft or suppression of research was pervasive enough to cause her to give up science and focus solely on teaching.
I had experienced the above myself, although on a smaller level. I have been offered bribes to drop my research on hyaluronic acid, vitamin C and essential oils. Or my interviews discussing their negative effects have been deleted from the internet because the advertisers in those publications have skin care brands that my research called into question.
We see that science is less new and innovative and more of the same and I know it’s because of the fear of being alone in your attitude. Today, the cowardly scientist is the rule and the courageous scientist the exception. Like many other areas of our society, those who speak out are targeted for public ridicule or cancellation. And in the end, this censorship in the name of salvaging feelings or preserving the ego hurts progress. And in the name of progress we must demand that the real scientist stand up.
