- Science is under assault on social media, on our airwaves and sometimes even around our dinner tables.

Today's guest discusses the role science can and should play in an era of profound challenges like climate change, pandemic disease, and profound changes in technology's relationship with humanity.

He's Holden Thorp this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(light music) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with the Pell Center at Salve.

- This week we're joined by Holden Thorp, an accomplished educator and research scientist.

He's now the editor in chief of "Science" and its family of publications as well as being a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

He joins us today from Orlando.

Holden, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you, it's great to be with you.

- You know, in the green room, before we started taping, Wayne and I were talking about what science has meant in the last couple of years.

On the one hand, we've had the benefit of vaccines which are the fruit of science, which have literally saved millions of lives around the world, but there's still a concerted and concentrated effort of disinformation.

A football player for the Buffalo Bills was grievously hurt on the field at a game on Monday night a few days before we taped this, and immediately social media was filled with stories that it was somehow the vaccine was to blame.

So I realize that this is a big question right out of the gate, but what is the relationship now between science as a field and a discipline and American society more generally?

- Well, it's a big question, but it's one I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about and one that's very important to us at "Science" because we care very much about how the public uses scientific information.

And you bring up an excellent example from Monday night, and I think one of the things that a lot of scientists struggle with is understanding that we've been building up to this point for a long time.

You know, there was a time when science was respected by everyone and where scientific information was treated in the way that most scientists would hope it would be as something that everybody should take seriously.

But two things have happened in parallel that have brought us to this point.

On the one hand, on the one side, you know, there's kind of a political movement that says, well, we want you all to generate scientific information, but then we want to be the ones to decide what to do with it.

And if it conflicts with our ideology or our religion, then you know, we reserve the right to doubt it.

And then on the other side, you have the scientists who really don't understand that this has been happening, because think if everybody understood science as as well as we do and understood how beautiful it was, then they would agree with us about all of this and that's not really the debate.

The debate is where does science stand in the hierarchy of decision making?

And science has allowed this to play out.

And there's a Pew study that just came out that shows that respect for scientists is still high.

It's as high as the military, which is, you know, like 80% of Republicans and Democrats respect scientists as much as they respect any other group.

But where the difference is, is that Democrats want scientists to be involved in setting policies that come from science and Republicans want scientists to generate facts so that then they can set the policies and that's really where this comes.

So if you have the scientific facts that say the vaccine is safe and everybody needs to to get it, then you have one group that says, "Okay, good, that sounds good, scientists."

And then you have another group that says, "Okay, thanks for telling us that.

"But we have these other things that we're balancing "and we've decided, you know, you're not the priority."

And that's really where this comes from.

- You know, I'm reminded of when I was a student, an undergraduate student, a professor said to me at some point, "You know, if you're interested in certainty, "study theology, science is not certainty."

What is science?

- Yeah, so science isn't this book of facts that falls out of the sky.

Science is a process, a process that is carried out by human beings who are fallible, who have every characteristic that humans have doing anything else.

That's what makes my job interesting.

(all chuckling) If scientists were infallible, then there wouldn't really be a role for me.

So that's the first thing.

But the second thing is that science has built into it processes that allow us to converge on the truth.

You know, a lot of people who try to undermine science say, "Oh, well they're just engaged in group think "and they only just believe what they like."

Well, the truth is, the best way to get a publication in "Science" is to to show that something that we all believed for a long time needs to be adjusted.

Science values disproving our long-held beliefs.

But we have very strict processes for how that happens, which is not going on social media or writing an opinion piece for the "Wall Street Journal" or going on a podcast and just expressing yourself.

It involves doing experiments, submitting those findings to a journal, having them scrutinized by your peers and then ultimately, when it's published by the entire scientific world, that's how we challenge scientific findings and that's something that we value greatly.

So the good news is that science is built to challenge long-held thinking, but we have very specific processes for doing it.

And people who try to undermine us like to go around those processes and that's what creates a lot of the confusion that you see.

- So Holden, I wanna get back to the two camps, as it were.

The one camp where people look at science and say, you know, we see what has been done with research, but it's up to us to interpret and do with that what we will.

And then the other camp which says, scientists have have spoken, have proved, and now lets make it policy.

How in a pluralistic society as large as the United States with so many people, so many political factions, regions, differences by region and city and state, can those two ever be reconciled?

What's the path forward with that?

- Yeah, so I think, first of all, is recognizing that these are the dynamics.

So a lot of scientists are mystified when the public, as you said at the beginning, everybody doesn't just go out and get vaccinated against COVID or everybody doesn't realize that the increase in temperature in the planet is potentially catastrophic and we need to take collective action to stop it.

So job one is for the scientists to get their own house in order about understanding what is playing out here.

And part of the problem there is we spend too much time teaching scientists equations and didactic material about the different areas of science and not enough time teaching them the history of science and the sociology of how this plays out.

And so scientists have allowed themselves to get played in getting to this point.

That's the first thing.

And then on the other side, trying to get the people who are prioritizing something else over science, whether it's their religion or their ideology or their views about the fundamentalism of the free market to state publicly that that's what they're doing.

Because the tactic is to say, "No, well, the science can't be trusted."

When what's really going on is "I know the science is okay, "but I care more about the fact "that I don't like government regulation "and the only way to deal with climate change "is to have government regulation, "and so therefore, I'm gonna say "that the science behind climate change is wrong."

There's a famous story where Jane Lubchenco who is currently in the Biden administration doing climate for the country, and Mario Molina and Sherry Rowland, who were both Nobel laureates, went to see Newt Gingrich in the 90s when he was the Speaker of the House to say we really need a bipartisan approach to climate change.

And he said, "Okay, you seem like very smart people.

"I understand what you're trying to tell me, "but I can't agree with Al Gore, "so you're gonna have to give me a way to help you that doesn't involve me getting on the same page as Al Gore."

Well, there isn't such a thing, okay?

But you gotta give Speaker Gingrich credit for at least saying this was his mindset.

And unfortunately, you know, scientists don't challenge the people who are doubting us in a way that gives us that kind of clarity and that's the clarity that we need.

- So let's get into "Science" the publication.

I've been a subscriber for many, many years and it's a wonderful publication.

We were talking before the show about how it really has sort of a dual mission.

One mission is to publish original research that's maybe half of the content or a little bit more in every issue and it comes out weekly, I would note, and the other mission, as it were, is news and insights and editorials, your editorials.

Can you break that down for us?

Why it's important to have both of those in one publication?

Because that makes it not unique, but certainly different than a lot of other scientific publications.

- Yeah, there are very few.

Really "Nature", which is our peer in the UK is the only one that's similar.

And you did a great job of describing it.

You could take the print issue of "Science" and rip it down the middle and you'd have two seemingly very different things in each hand.

You'd have a research journal on one hand and you'd have a magazine in the other, and, you know, we think this is very, very important that we do it this way.

As you point out, we have 30 outstanding journalists who are all over the world reporting on research findings, but also lots of things happening in policy in the scientific community.

And we want, for all the reasons that we were just talking about, we want scientists to be inquisitive about all of that stuff.

You know, we worry that people get the journal, the scientists and flip past all that and just go to the research.

So the more that we can do to get scientists to read the front part of the journal, which again, as you said, has commentary and news, to really think about how science fits into all the big questions facing the world, you know, is a very important function for us.

There's an unfortunate way of thinking that underlies a lot of what we've been talking about that scientists have that many of us think, "Oh, if we just do a good job "of putting our findings in the journals, "then everything else will take care of itself."

And I think we've got 100 years of history that shows us that that's not the case.

So we're fighting very hard to get more scientists to understand the implications of all this because, and there's something else that we do, which is we have a whole team of people that works to make sure that when other media outlets cover our research papers, that those are accurate and done as aggressively as possible.

Because the fact is, a few people, some people read research articles, but a lot of people read news stories about research articles.

So the biggest outreach that Science or the AAAS has is when other media cover our research.

And so we work very hard to make sure that's also done aggressively and accurately.

- Yeah, Holden, you mentioned climate change a couple of times here and the reports in the last several years from research scientists around the world and from the IPCC seem to grow more bleak with every report.

And I'm curious what your take is in terms of where are we?

Are we past the point of no return in terms of mitigating the worst of climate change?

Are we really looking at simply an adaptation strategy because the worst is coming?

- Well, there are definitely gonna be large impacts based on where we are already, but there are still important things that can and should be done if we could get the collective will to take action across the world.

And, you know, we publish a lot of papers about what would happen if we did this particular mitigation now or in 10 years or in 20 years?

And so far, we haven't reached a point where it isn't better to go ahead and start doing things to mitigate climate change.

Because as you see, you know, one day was we were gonna get to one degree sea increase and then 1.5 and two, we hope we never get to a two degree increase, but it's possible.

And so we want to bring that number down as much as we can, but we're just a long way from having the collective will to do that.

And as I said, it's really a struggle between people who think that collective action is useful and people who have an individualistic view that says that, you know, we we should never have forced individuals to make particular choices about the way they use energy.

And that's a political and philosophical struggle, not a scientific struggle, really.

The scientific part is clear.

We're gonna have major impacts, but they could be lessened if we take collective action.

And so these questions are about policy and politics and communication.

- You know, I wanna switch gears a little bit.

I teach one class a year and at the end of this past semester, as I was grading the last set of papers, a friend of mine sent me a link to an artificial intelligence chat bot.

And I put into that system the same prompt I had given my students.

And what I got back was terrifying because it was so natural, so authentically written, so persuasively human, that I had a hard time distinguishing between it and some of the stuff that my students had written.

Where does that technology stand and what does it mean for the future of humanity to put it in the broadest terms?

- Yeah, well, I teach a class that might be somewhat similar at George Washington University about all the things that we've been talking about.

And I think every professor did this.

(all chuckling) I did the same thing that you did.

And I mean, I think as a practical implication of this particular thing we're talking about, ChatGPT, I think it's called.

- That's exactly it, yeah.

- Well, that's just gonna challenge us to have assignments that are specific enough that the students are gonna have to do these things for themselves.

I put in my exam, which was closed book, and it gave me back a paper that would've been 100 but I put in my final paper, and fortunately that was about journal articles that the students had to find that were specific enough that ChatGPT couldn't answer the questions.

- [Jim] For now.

- But I think as far as artificial intelligence is concerned, generally, you know, we're seeing so many positives come from it.

Last year, our 2021 Breakthrough of the Year were advances in using artificial intelligence to predict the structure of proteins.

We now are living in a world where scientists don't have to have millions of dollars of equipment and long hours in the lab crystallizing proteins in order to figure out their structures.

They can get them predicted by artificial intelligence.

We have, you know, advances in game playing.

These are big AI papers that we get a lot of.

The latest one we just published on was Stratego.

It turns out Stratego is hard to do with a computer but, of course, the group, you know, these groups are working on these things.

So there are a lot of positives that are gonna come from AI and it's just gonna call on us to be more responsible and more engaged to make sure that we manage the negatives that are gonna come from AI.

But, you know, this is an area we get a lot of papers in, crosses all areas of science and we're mostly really excited about what AI can do to help us describe the world.

- So Holden, as with any other endeavor, scientific research occasionally is fraudulent.

And you had a story recently in "Science" involving a paleontologist who was quote, "Accused of fraud in dino killing asteroid paper."

And we don't need to get into that paper, but why is it important for AAAS and for "Science" to report on these cases and what can be done to address fraud?

I mean, fraud, as I said earlier, it's universal.

It's part of humanity, I guess.

- Yeah, well, like I said, scientists are human beings and they have every flaw that human beings have doing anything else.

So of course there are gonna be instances where people take shortcuts or worse in getting glory that can come from scientific advances.

But it's critically important for us to demonstrate that, as I said a little while ago, science is an honorably self-correcting process.

We correct ourselves and in the long run, we do it with good intentions, even though there may be bad intentions in the short term.

And that impacts both sides of our publication that we were talking about.

The news side covers, as you pointed out, instances of fraud.

And the research side has to go in and when we have problems with papers that we've published, be very forthright about correcting those.

And we're always in this back and forth.

Sometimes we have our news section because they're editorially independent from research commenting on problem papers that we have in the research side.

And I think the fact that we allow that to occur is a demonstration of the, you know, the self-correcting nature of science.

And so a lot of times people say, "Oh, if you have a correction "or a retraction on the research side, "don't you feel bad about that?"

Well, we have three to five a year and I wouldn't want it to be much higher than that but I also wouldn't want it to be a whole lot lower than that, because it's impossible to think that if we're trying to publish stuff that is pushing the frontiers of knowledge, that we're not gonna have mistakes along the way.

And so if we didn't have any retractions I would be worried that we weren't catching and correcting ourselves to the extent that we should.

- Yeah, Holden, I'm curious.

We've had other guests on the show talking about, not thinking of the journal "Science", but the field of science, science for hire and you know, companies that will tailor results to serve a specific outcome or even produce a body of research that could be admissible in court.

And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about how legitimate science can respond to defend the integrity of the field when there are people who are playing these games simply for profit?

- Yeah, well, it's certainly something to watch out for.

We have very carefully prescribed policies for disclosure when people have conflicts of interest.

And I think the ultimate solution to it is that fortunately with technology, we're seeing more and more of the underlying data being posted along with the paper.

Every year, it gets more and more sophisticated, the ways that we can document and make available all of the data that go behind a paper.

And that means that anybody who reads that paper, who has the expertise can take those data and do their own analysis.

And sometimes there are companies that wanna publish with us but they don't want to disclose as much as we require.

And we try to be very hard-nosed about that.

We're always finding new ways that we have to put in place to make sure that the underlying data are there.

But ultimately, you know, like anything, the more sunshine there is on what's going on, the better.

And thankfully, now with the way storage and everything has happened on the internet and accessibility, you know, we require extensive disclosure of underlying data, and if a company doesn't want to provide that, then we don't want their paper.

- So, Holden, we have a little less than two minutes left here, and this could be a whole separate show, but the 2022 Breakthrough of the Year was the James Webb Space Telescope and you wrote an editorial on that and AAAS has decided to call it just the JWST.

Can you get into that with the limited time we have left?

- [Jim] You got about a minute left now.

- Okay, well, Jim Webb did a lot of important things for for NASA, but he's someone from the past.

And in the past, a lot of things happened that were exclusionary, in this case towards LGBT folks.

And so naming the telescope after somebody from the past was maybe not the best idea.

You know, it could have been the Inspiration Space Telescope or the Discovery Space Telescope and we wouldn't have this problem.

So I think NASA should have just named a conference room for Jim Webb or something like that and we shouldn't even be having this discussion.

You can get into the fine details of whether Jim Webb did this or that, but the truth is his name unfortunately has become a symbol of exclusion.

And the space program is about inspiration in addition to science, and therefore it has to be held to a very high standard when it comes to this kind of thing.

- Holden Thorp, we are so grateful to you for your work and for joining us today.

He is Holden Thorp with the journal "Science" and its family of publications.

Thanks again for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square" you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

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