Abstract
Early on, Stuart Ritchie paraphrases Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony, declaring that he ‘comes to praise science, not to bury it’. Unlike the scheming Anthony of history and literature, though, Ritchie is not cloaking ulterior motives, but making quite a sincere statement of purpose from someone intimately acquainted with the worrying flaws underpinning the edifice of modern science.
This might seem a contrarian stance in the first pandemic of the Internet era, when there is a growing public interest in research. But while scientific endeavour might have been elevated to the forefront of public consciousness for now, this same awareness has exposed precisely the problems that the book explores. The high-profile retractions of papers in the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine over drugs like hydroxychloroquine for COVID serve as potent illustrations that questionable research can thrive even when the consequences are literally a matter of life and death.
Ritchie is a psychologist by training, and ideally placed to convey the extent of the problem. It is a central tenet of science that experimental results should be robust and repeatable; that if two teams perform the same experiment, then their findings should be broadly comparable. Alas, this is often not the case, and psychologists were among the first to note a ‘replication crisis’ where seemingly established results did not hold up after examination.
One especially intriguing case cited in the book’s preface is Daryl Bem’s claim that students have latent psychic ability. Bem’s 2011 paper caused something of a stir, as it seemed to provide strong evidence that undergraduates could inexplicably identify behind which virtual curtains pornographic content was hidden. Apart from creating a minor media furore over the speculation that some subconscious sexual drive effectively endowed college students with psychic powers, the paper also drew the sceptical attention of several researchers – including Ritchie himself.
Following replication, Ritchie and others found Bem’s results did not stand up to scrutiny. But in attempting to correct the scientific record, the journal featuring the erroneous article refused to countenance the more diligent correction, waving it away with the curt dismissal that they never published studies that repeated an experiment already performed, regardless of the subsequent results.
This is truly galling, and over the course of the book, Ritchie provides ample evidence that this is not a problem limited to psychology, but an issue affecting vast swatches of research to our collective detriment. Biomedical science, despite its central importance to our well-being, is especially prone to questionable results; by one estimate, only about 11% of cancer research is replicable. This is a truly shocking figure, but one that could come over as academic and toothless in the hands of a less capable writer. Thankfully, the author is adept at communicating the importance of the topic at hand and its relevance to lay readers.
Ritchie understands the importance of framing what might seem as abstract concepts around arresting examples. Sadly for the trustworthiness of published science, there are many unedifying events from which to draw. These failures of science, however, do provide cautionary and gripping tales, most notably when fraud is discussed. The rogues’ gallery outlined in the book includes infamous exemplars: Paolo Macchiarini, the surgeon who misled the world over the potential of regenerative medicine; Woo-Suk Hwang, the ‘Pride of Korea’, a poster-child for stem cell science who committed systematic fraud; and the notorious Andrew Wakefield, architect of the needless and deadly MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine panic.
Ritchie’s analysis of these cases is dispassionate and devastating, laying bare the harm caused without resorting to moralistic hand-wringing. Yet scientific fraud constitutes only a minority of dubious science, and accordingly Science Fictions looks to other reasons for why so much science is suspect.
There are chapter-length explorations of critical concepts like bias, showcasing the reality that science is an inherently human endeavour and that the prejudices of both experimenter and journal can skew results to something alien from reality. But perhaps the lion’s share of blame for non-replicable results stems from the ‘publish-or-perish’ paradigm that scientists are forced to operate under.
This ultimately leads to a perverse situation where ‘positive’ or novel results are unduly fetishised and rewarded with prestige and research funding. The chapter on this topic is perhaps the most polemical and most certainly among the most entertaining in the book. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I am acutely aware of the problems with replicability in science; a significant portion of my work concerns this very issue, some of which is cited in the text.
Thankfully, a reader does not require a background in meta-research to enjoy this well-written introduction to a serious problem, and Science Fictions serves as a superb introduction, framing a serious problem without resorting to alarmism.