Behind the Curtain

One of the things in my PhD which has been the most eye opening is looking behind the curtain  and seeing how science actually works. Let me tell you, it's quite a bit different to how the scientific community like to present it. 

In school you are taught that a textbook tells you the truth and scientists come up with experiments, write conclusions and communicate them to the masses in statements that are irrefutable. When I got my head around that, I though it was great and that science was a pure pursuit of truth, free of prejudice. As time goes on you do A-levels and a degree and you're taught that just because its published doesn't mean its true. People make mistakes, experiments can miss out key factors. You are taught to scrutinise papers and see if the claims they make are valid. That's sensible too, everyone can't be right all the time. Through all this time the messages are consistent. Science is about finding the truth, constantly doing better, all ideas are valid if you can back it up with evidence. If you find something out, it'll be accepted because science has peer review and the community is open to change. Then, you become a PhD student and you realise that although the great scientific method is pretty good, when you look up close it's stained, chipped and not the perfect thing you thought it to be.

People are people. We look out for ourselves, we hold onto our views very tightly and don't like it when others challenge them. We have authority structures where the people at the top have more say than those at the bottom, we need money and some people will not always be moral bastions in their pursuit of it. 

Why am I stating this? Well, however much scientists pretend that scientific truth is all that matters. They're only people. And being only people they bring the flaws of the human race into science, meaning that science isn't always unscrupulously fair. A small number of scientists fabricate results. A small number rig peer review, the very process the scientific community heralds as so rigorous and so just and the cornerstone of research practice. However, the problems aren't just when people try to further themselves. It can be hard to challenge existing thinking, you can get knocked back for challenging the status quo. Sadly, it's very unlikely that Einstein's papers would see the light of day if he'd first written them in today's climate as potentially important ideas can be ignored if they stray too far from generally held opinion. Also, this unwillingness to hear contradictory ideas to the accepted has the potential stop mistakes (unintentional and deliberate) being highlighted, as a new paper may be turned down for obtaining a different result than an already published paper. There's also another reason why Einstein might not have been published if he presented relativity today. Status. Status matters. If you've not published in a field before, sometimes you can be looked on with suspicion. Science can suppress rather than support new voices. 

Beyond this some people actively find ways to make their research go further. Science is competitive, having lots of papers matters and so does the number of times your papers have been used in other work. So, what's an easy way to bump up the number of papers and the number uses of your work? Cut up a project into tiny sections, publish them separately and mention them in the next paper along to give your usage numbers a boost (this even has it's own name in science 'salami slicing'). Basically, this means scientists can make themselves look better, by artificially inflating their performance metrics. Can you blame people for doing this? I don't think so, science is pressurised. You need good paper numbers to get good grants and you need grants to work so, if you can, why not make 3 papers from 1 important result.?

What's the point in saying all this? Well, it's pretty unsettling to find all this out after you've jumped on the science is awesome bandwagon and are bound to a PhD project. A process you've thought was a great system of truth and equality isn't quite as good as it should be and it's better to find that out early. Also, for people outside of science it's important to know that when the media say, "Scientists have discovered..." what they really mean is, "Some people did a bunch of experiments and they claim that...". However much it pretends, science and the fabled scientific method isn't flawless. It's as flawed as the people who conduct it. To claim otherwise is just not true.