After introducing reasons 1 &2 yesterday, lets discuss two more today. If you haven’t read yesterday’s post yet, and you have a few extra minutes check out reasons 1& 2 there…

3.      Scientists aren’t altruistic robots

Scientists aren’t selfless creatures who care only about doing good for humanity. Though these characteristics might apply to some individuals, scientists as a whole are like any other tribe of human beings. They have to be political to negotiate their way through the demands of the academic system and the funding agencies. A good pinch of narcissism helps as well, it makes it easier to survive rotating around the same research topic for decades, while giving up so much of your free time for often little reward – be it recognition or money. If you attack the scientist’s pet theory, you run the risk of attacking the scientist. If you ask the scientist a question the answer might be driven by more than the hard facts of the data.

4.      Science isn’t free

At least not completely. This doesn’t mean that biomedical scientists are the slaves of the pharmaceutical industry. But there’s a more subtle manipulation at play. Biomedical research costs a lot of money. The math is easy: the more money you pour into a research field, the more people want to study it.

There are different motivations for the pharmaceutical industry, government and private foundations to dedicate funds to certain research areas. One such motivating factor is the urgency of the topic. The concentrated funding effort into research on HIV/ AIDS has turned the disease from a death sentence into a manageable and maybe even curable condition. Unfortunately, other motivations for choosing where funds are headed are less humane. The pharmaceutical industry focuses on areas where money can be made. The funds that go into antibiotic research for example are so limited that we’re running blind-sided into an approaching catastrophe of antibiotic resistance.

Private foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are trying to rectify this situation by donating to causes that have little prospect of creating revenues, including infectious and rare diseases. It’s a thing to be grateful for, but this type of funding oligarchy induces another kind of bias.

The understudied areas in biomedical science are those were we lack the answers most urgently and the Corona pandemic might be a wake-up call to seek answers in a societal effort.

So, let’s get back to our original quest: what are the correct answers to those questions?

An honest answer from a scientist, to a question like ‘Does a facemask protect against the virus?’ might sound something like: ‘I have evaluated three studies and none of them has gathered sufficient data to answer your question. There are probably three other studies I don’t know about.’  OR ‘I don’t have time for this, I’m busy with a private feud with one of my coworkers in the laboratory who wants to be first author on my paper.’ OR ‘I can’t tell you, there’s no money in this field of research because no one has cared about it until three months ago.’

That’s not what you want to hear the scientist say, and it likely won’t be the answer in an interview.

But maybe not having simple answers to complex scientific questions (even the crisis questions) isn’t that bad, as long as we manage the expectations of what we can deduce from scientific data (a single study in ten patients usually does not hint to a new wonder drug) and as long as everyone applies their own common sense (don’t try the supposed wonder drug until it’s proven to be safe). 

The problem is that in science – and in life – things are rarely as easy as we’d like them to be.