Disclaimer: I make extensive reference to three articles in the March 5th Nature. While I have tried to write this for those who haven’t read the articles I highly recommend that you read them and draw your own conclusions.

The recent issue of Nature (5 March 2009) offers a very interesting “series” of articles. Whether through happy accident or editorial genius the items “Something Wiki this way comes (pg 13)”; “Being Bob Langer” (pg22-24) and the essay “We cannot live by skepticism alone” (pg 30-31 by Harry Collins) offer a dramatic read of the state of Science today. While I read these articles in order it was not till I was about half-way through the Essay that I began to make the connection. Admittedly, the Essay has required several reads as I found myself chasing my tail to try and understand what the author is saying.

Anyway…

The Essay is a brief introduction (to those of us unknowledgeable about the field) of the sociologist’s role in trying to understand Science. In brief Dr. Collins mentions three waves of Science Studies. The first wave culminated in “…the notion that the criterion of scientific validity was the ability to state the conditions under which a claim could be proven false (pg 30)….Additionally, the norms of the scientific community: science must be unbiased, disinterested, a free public good and subject to organized critical review” The second wave included the authors contribution that” …scientists could not always check a result by simply repeating it, because what counted as satisfactory repetition was not clear if a controversy ran deep”. This notion was then encapsulated in the term social constructivism. The sociologists defended this statement by arguing that they were not “trying to undermine science” but were “merely examining how the consensus about their interpretation was established” under the noble guise of trying to demonstrate that Science could not be omniscient and would, as the fact of being a human endeavor, have points where it would fail and fall short to make concrete explanations. The expected fall out from the conclusions of social constructivism was that individuals or groups with political agendas would now be able to seize upon the fact that there is room for doubt in the duplication and interpretation of findings due to the potential for results to be inconsistent in their exact findings. The author presents a great example of where the fears of Scientists’ work being defined by the precept of Social constructivism may have been recently born out. His example is the refusal of Thabo Mbeki (president of South Africa) to deny “…anti-retroviral drugs to HIV-positive pregnant mothers in South Africa….given that the safety and efficacy of the treatment could not be proven beyond doubt [emphasis added]”

So now in the third wave of science studies the author says that those conducting these examinations will have to “[break] away from now-routine and secure criticism, and instead taking the risks involved with the synthesis and generalization that build human culture”. The author explains (and I am going to oversimplify and generalize) that the new role of the sociologist is not just to show why some one such as President Mbeki maybe correct in his logic (i.e. no guarantee of safety) he was incorrect in understanding and interpreting the broader effects of his actions (this is a gross characterization on my part only for illustrative purposes. We don’t know the “real” motives for President Mbeki’s decision and likely that are debatable by sociologists and political scientists alike).

So how do we fix the problems of how Science has been explored, defined, redefined and interpreted by Social scientists? Well the author concludes his essay with a discussion of the role of defined expertise and that – combined with the previous example of medical uncertainty – is where the other two articles in Nature come into play.

The First article in the Journal is one about the creation of a Wiki that would allow for the aggregation of medical information about the efficacy of certain drugs and the conditions and responses that physicians use and experience with them. I am, frankly, shocked that this is now important. The time for this is certainly here and likely it is coming 50 years after it should have been started. A resource for physicians that is outside the Pharma control would be ideal. We already know that word-of-mouth is highly important for physicians when making decisions about “off-label” uses – so to I suspect it is important for routine on-label applications. This resource would certainly provide help the NGO’s and other organizations working to help situations such as those in South Africa and work to educate people and physicians on perhaps a realistic scope of risks and benefits.

Finally, the “expert class” is exemplified in the article that follows a day of Dr. Bob Langer. While I personally may not believe in the mega-lab one has to respect the work that Dr. Langer has supported over the years. His abilities to convey ideas and concepts to broad audiences, while providing the depth of subject knowledge to help move fields in new directions are truly laudable. Dr. Langer would likely be pulled into this class of experts who can help balance the understanding of the findings that would be published in this new Wiki database with the real world aspects of how to “sell” this information to a variety of consumers – i.e. how to examine the risk-reward aspects of choices. At least at the high level that would make people feel confident in the fact that these decisions are being treated seriously, respectfully and thoughtfully by someone skilled in the art of question and answer interpretation.

So, my take away was that this was a great series of articles that have certainly enlightened me to some of the issues related to the debates about Science and perhaps given me some new tools to think about how I would like to study the role science in the future.

Cheers