An article at the New York Times’ Well blog on the retraction of the 1998 Lancet paper that was instrumental in sprouting the anti-vaccine movement is a prime example of a new, internet-enhanced relationship among scientists, media, and the public.
As alluded to in the blog, it used to be that internal scientific squabbles and tossing-around-of-wacky-ideas were never in the public eye. Scientific papers were discussed within the scientific community, and only after consensus emerged about a new idea did that idea enter the public realm; this process generally took years.
But the internet coming into popular use changed all that, in several stages. First, years before the internet was widely used by average citizens, scientists were already online in the 1980s, collaborating and having discussions via email and news groups (now known as chat groups). This allowed ideas to flow more freely and widely to a larger scientific audience, generally to the benefit of science.
Then, beginning in the late 1990′s, journals finally began producing online editions instead of being in print only. At the same time, use of the internet skyrocketed among the public. So suddenly, anyone could do a search and look at paper abstracts online (full articles still require expensive subscriptions) whereas before this, a person had to make the effort to go to a scientific library to locate a specific journal article in the stacks, which had to first be identified through obscure search engines generally only available to academics.
Naturally journals and institutions producing research have always tried to garner publicity, so they have always produced press releases that got some science in the news. But only recently has it become much easier for interested non-scientists such as journalists or bloggers to regularly follow discussions that used to stay in the scientific community.
Unfortunately, many scientists still believe they are living in a world in which science is controlled by the scientists until they make it available for public consumption, even while numerous recent “controversies” have belied that belief. While there have always been wacky scientists who promote ideas that are unsupported by the overwhelming scientific evidence, they used to be collectively relegated to the scientific fringe and generally ignored, their occasionally published rants unknown to the general public.
Now, the availability of the internet has caused the problem that these fringe scientists collect a devoted following among the scientifically illiterate, and their discredited ideas go viral on the internet, sucking in people who want easy answers that science cannot always provide. Why does a particular anti-science idea gain traction? In the case of climate-change denialism, there are obvious short-term economic motivations by powerful interests. In the case of vaccines, there seems to be an intersection of many regular people wanting answers for a condition that does not yet have any clear answers, and an anti-medical establishment/corporate anger and paranoia that is easy to fuel given the grain or two of truth in the idea that pharmaceutical companies do not always have the general public’s best interest as their number one priority.
(Ironically, the anti-vaccine furor has also been so easy to stoke because vaccines have all but eliminated many deadly and debilitating diseases from our society, and thus people do not truly grasp anymore the magnitude of the benefits they provide; they simply take those benefits for granted, believing that the vaccines must not be necessary (see many “homeopathic” web sites for examples). Simply reminding someone of the lives that used to be destroyed by infectious diseases is not enough for denialists, because they have no personal connection to that particular tragedy; their personal connection is to a condition for which they would probably gladly embrace a vaccine, if we had one.)
One more example of a large denialist community is among the HIV/AIDS connection deniers. They have been in the scientific news as well because of an unfortunate sequence of events in which anti-HIV papers were published in the journal Medical Hypotheses, and then retracted. This has sparked a heated discussion (see comment thread in the above article) about the role of peer review and scientific consensus in the application of scientific ideas. What is only being touched on in these discussions is how interactions among scientists are now, for better or for worse, in the public view, and what the consequences should or should not be for the scientific progress.
It is good that the Well blog has begun a discussion on the implications of fringe (non)scientific ideas going viral in the public, but that still leaves the question of whether or how scientists should address these in how they conduct themselves. It is this scientist’s opinion that scientific business-as-usual must change if we want to keep control of a narrative that we are actually the ones trained to deliver. It is simply not working in the world of the internet to tell the public, “The scientific mainstream knows best, so listen to us,” because in the growing trend of anti-elitist populism, this will not be accepted; in any case the statement is undermined by the growing awareness that a scientist is a human being just like everyone else, with his own ambition and agenda that can color scientific conclusions. Science simply must change to accommodate this new reality, and this will be the subject of a future essay.