Philip Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…Times have changed, many people have spoken up, but on what issues is there still this problem? Where are the biggest biases now? Well, absolutely, there are questions being asked and concerning situations arising with the relationship between science and what you might call commerce, really, and industry. Particularly, for example, in drug development in pharmaceutical companies, there have been instances where it seems like the science has been, either knowingly or unconsciously, distorted by the commercial interests involved. It’s very clear that certainly pharmaceutical companies themselves tend to underreport any work that seems to conflict with the message they want to put out if they’re developing a drug. There’s underreporting of negative effects or of null effects. I think that the conflict between scientific research and the commercial interests relating to it is one area where there are real problems to be solved and questions to be asked. I think that there’s also now an increasing problem simply within the structures of academia itself. This is the thing that perhaps worries me most about the way science is being steered or pushed these days. There are these tremendous pressures, absolutely unrealistic pressures on scientists — particularly young scientists starting their careers — to publish as much as they can. I commonly hear the complaint from young scientists that they have no time to think anymore. You’ve just got to do. You’ve just got to put work out there. It has led, in recent times, to some quite high-profile cases of scientific misconduct where, basically, data has just been invented to create a publishable piece of work. I think that even when that’s not quite so obviously fraudulent, there are strong pressures on scientists to find the results that they are hoping to find. There’s a strong pressure for cognitive biases to creep in. This is something that ought to be eminently fixable because there is no reason science has to be this way, that there have to be these tremendous pressures on scientists to constantly be producing results, constantly be chasing after what sometimes seems like the diminishing pools of funding. There must be better ways of doing things than this, but we haven’t yet found them. I think that’s really one of the things that the scientific community, as a whole, has to address. How can we reverse these unrealistic pressures to produce in science? When it comes to policy, do you think current scientists are too safety conscious?…

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