Science Friday - Trust In Science, California Power Outages, Regrowing Cartilage. Oct 11, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: October 11, 2019

Despite widely reported attacks on science, the vast majority of Americans continue to trust scientists, according to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center. Many listeners of Science Friday might take it as a given that we should trust science, but is that trust well-founded? Naomi Oreskes, history of science professor at Harvard University, argues that we should. In her new book, Why Trust Science?, she explains how science works and what makes it trustworthy. (Hint: it’s not the scientific method.) Pacific Gas & Electric has generated confusion—not to mention outrage—with its power grid shutdowns. The situation continues for a second day in 34 California counties. On social media and phone calls to KQED’s Forum radio program, people throughout PG&E’s service area have asked how and why the investor-owned utility took this step. KQED reporters have some answers to some of the questions that have come in. Why Is PG&E Turning the Power Off? Is This PG&E’s Fault? Bottom line, PG&E doesn’t want to risk having its power lines start another fire, so it is pre-emptively turning the power off during this week’s dry, windy weather. The company made the decision based on information from its wildfire center, where meteorologists keep watch on fire conditions. PG&E’s power lines have sparked many catastrophic wildfires in California, including last year’s Camp Fire in Butte County that caused 85 deaths, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in 100 years. PG&E lines started more than a dozen fires in 2017. Less than a month ago, the company agreed to pay billion in a settlement with victims of the recent fires. The shutoffs are part of its wildfire mitigation plan, mandated by the state and agreed to by the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s top power regulator. — Kevin Stark Who Made This Decision? When Did They Make It? If past practice tells us anything, PG&E has been making and remaking this decision, with the help of its meteorological team, over several days. The utility says it considers weather, fuel and other conditions and observations, as well as the need for notice by state and local parties, when it decides to implement shutoffs. As we’ve seen over the last few days, the planned outage times can change with shifting conditions. The fact is, there’s nothing new about turning off power lines when conditions get risky: San Diego Gas and Electric, with the permission of the CPUC, has mitigated fire risk this way since 2012. What is new are the guidelines PG&E filed just a year ago for its public safety power shutoff procedures. For the last couple of years, the CPUC has required investor-owned utilities to describe their processes for arriving at decisions like the one affecting nearly three dozen California counties right now. PG&E shut off power two times last year; the last time PG&E called a public safety power shutoff, for two days in June, it affected about 22,000 customers in the North Bay and the Sierra foothills, including Butte County and Paradise. — Molly Peterson Read more questions and answers on Science Friday. Cartilage is the connective tissue that provides padding between your joints. As we age, the wearing down of cartilage can lead to different types of arthritis. It’s been long believed that once humans lose cartilage, it can never grow back. Now, a team of researchers investigated this idea, and found that the cartilage in our ankles might be able to turnover more easily compared to our hips and knees. Their results were published in the journal Science Advances. Rheumatologist Virginia Byers Kraus, who was an author on the study, discusses how human cartilage might be able to regenerate and what this means for future treatments.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Should we trust science? A new book argues we should, but not for the reasons that you might think. Well, we'll talk about it, but first, the score is out, and it was a close one, 79 to 82. What's that? Well, that tally is the number of moons Jupiter has compared to Saturn, and Saturn is now officially the most mooniferous planet in the solar system. Astronomers spotted 20 new moons around the ring planet. My next guest is here to tell us why Saturn is such a moon magnet. Maggie Kerth Baker is senior science reporter for 538, usually out there in Minneapolis, St. Paul, but she's right here in New York with us.

Hi. Nice to see what you look like. Nice to see you. All right, there's a lot of new moons. How do they define them? Why are there so many? Well, you know, for those keeping track at home, this is 81 more than the Earth has. And I think one of the most interesting questions out of this is why does Saturn have so many and why do we have so few?

And that was a really cool article that Charlie Wood did over at Popular Science sort of focused on this. And it turns out that what the researchers are finding is that these moons that Saturn has, they didn't start out as part of Saturn. Like our moon is this result of a giant collision that sort of blew off part of the early Earth billions of years ago. Saturn is just sort of sucking in asteroids as they go by because its gravitational pool is so big and then like once they're there they're running into each other they're running into other space objects and so you get like these little bitty trails

of you know kind of almost like dust and bits some of them are bigger though some of them are big and some are as small as a kilometer across wow wow and some of them embedded in the rings of Saturn Some are in the rings, some are outside the rings. It's just kind of, it seems to be sort of random about where they go. Could they get more moons, do you think? They could.

That's one of the interesting findings in this paper is that the process of acquiring moons is actually easier than we thought it was. And so Saturn could get new ones. Wow. Your next story looks at the national rate of sexually transmitted diseases, according to the CDC, which tracks this stuff, the diseases are at an all-time high. Yeah, so more than 2.4 million Americans were diagnosed with syphilis, gonorrhoea, and last year. And that includes a 40% single-year increase in what's called congenital syphilis.

So that's passed from mother to baby during pregnancy. And that's a big deal because it can kill newborns. It can cause miscarriages. Survivors live with lifelong health problems. And even though there is this growing and, antibiotic resistance issue with STDs. The CDC is kind of saying, like, the biggest part of this is that people just aren't getting diagnosed and treated. And so they've drawn kind of a direct connection between these rising rates of STDs and the falling funding for STD clinics around the country.

So many have been closing, some people have been cutting hours, less places to get diagnosed, less places to get treated. And your report says there's an alarming number of newborn deaths. It's linked to this. Yeah, yeah. Like it's definitely connected to that. And women and children are kind of one of the really vulnerable populations associated with this, that the big increases have been in women as kind of crossed the board on this. You know, I'm not sure if this study mentions or talks about this,

but parenthetically, we've been hearing for years about the growing number of STDs in nursing homes. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely some studies I've seen. that have been like focused on specific life insurance company, or life insurance, health insurance companies. And they've sort of found that there are these sharp increases in older adults over 60. And that a big chunk of that kind of has to do with people who grew up before the safer sex era. And then, you know, you go down to the sunbelt and you're having your retirement parties. That age of Aquarius.

That age of Aquarius. It's still alive. Get tested. Use a condom. Exactly. Just because you're older doesn't mean you're not going to get it. That's one of the reasons. Right. Now, also, there's a new study out that looks at the link between diet and depression.

Tell us about that. Yeah. So there's this long history of connecting healthy eating, you know, things like less sugar, less processed foods, more fruits and vegetables, with lower rates of depression. What there's not been is really good evidence showing that to be causal. So, like, we know that people who eat healthy tend to be happier, but we don't know if they're happier because they ate healthy. And this new study is supposed to be kind of a big deal because it's sort of finding some of those links that these researchers took 76 young adults who had these junk food heavy diets. They gave half of them a series of healthy eating interventions, so social support, money for groceries, some pantry staples.

And the people who ate better reduce the depression symptoms. But there's a catch because they're always. Always I can. And the problem is that the researchers didn't have an active control group. So you had the people that got the treatment. You had the people that like nothing happened to during the entire time. And it turns out that the treatment, the attention from researchers, the being given money, that itself can reduce depression symptoms. So we don't know whether it was the placebo of someone paying attention to you or whether it was the diet changing.

If you give somebody some free cash, it turns out that like that actually sort of like makes your life a little better than you're not sad. Not well controlled. And finally you have a story about that paralyzed man that was able to walk using that exoskeleton. Yeah, so this guy, this French optician who fell 50 feet in a nightclub in 2015 and became paralyzed from the neck down. And then this year became the first paralyzed person to walk using wireless implants in his head to control a, a bionic exoskeleton, which is amazing. And there's been a lot of different techniques to try to restore movement to paralyze people. But what makes this thing different, there's a couple of things happening here.

First, the implants were significantly less invasive than anybody's used in the past. They weren't in the brain itself. They were kind of between the skull and the brain, which makes them easier to access if something goes wrong, easier to fix. And also, it's wireless. So, yeah, like, so what's going on basically is that these implants are sort of picking up signals. This guy spent a year training this algorithm to understand what the signals from his brain meant, and then the algorithm can translate it into movement.

That's great. That's a really hopeful stuff. Yeah. Thank you. Maggie Kerth Baker, senior science reporter for 538. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNNN. This is KERNNNN.

St. Louis Public Radio Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. This week we go to California where fire season has hit hard. Last night a large fire broke out north of Los Angeles, and earlier in the week blackouts hit counties throughout the state, not because the grid is overloaded, but because those hot, dry autumn winds, the Santa Ana's and the Diabloes,

were roaring across the state, creating dangerous fire conditions, should a live electric wire go down and, you know, ignite that. The brush below it. Electrical lines sparked last year's deadly campfire, campfire, which destroyed Paradise, California. You remember that. And the big utilities were taking precautions this year to prevent it from happening again.

But residents were in an uproar as the blackouts affected their daily lives. Whether it's no Internet or no way to get to work or communicate, the hazards are potentially even greater for people with disabilities. abilities who depend on electricity to power medical equipment. And in the labs of U.C. Berkeley, scientists were loading their freezers onto trucks in hopes of saving their samples that needed to stay in the refrigerator. Reporting on all of this is Lauren Summer, climate correspondent at KQED in San Francisco. Welcome back, Lauren. Hi, Ira. So give us the basics. Why is it necessary to switch off the power for so many people? Well, we know for our

a lot of the extreme fires that California has seen in recent years, they've been caused by down power lines. We know they can start fires. But this is a very blunt tool that the utilities are using right now, right? I mean, millions of people in California that are without power. So there's just been a real debate in this state about how to deal with our fire problem, right? I mean, it's a huge inconvenience. You're losing economic output, right? You're inconveniencing people. There are vulnerable populations that are hit by power outages. And yet you have this extreme fire problem. problem where people die and you lose billions of dollars worth of infrastructure. So it's sort of a catch-22 here. You have to decide which is the lesser of two evils, turning off the power and problems that might happen when you do turn the power off. Exactly. There's some really uncomfortable math here to do, right? Because people can die if you are medically, you're on a medical device that needs power, right? But people can also die in a fire. And I think what we'll really see happen is, you know, there's a question of how much power needs to go off and under what conditions,

going to receive a lot of scrutiny because this was a huge area that lost power. But, you know, we have this fire problem that's incredibly challenging to fix that will require a lot of other things besides turning off power. You did a story about how this has disrupted research at UC Berkeley. I touched on it briefly. Give us some of the details. Yeah, so UC Berkeley lost its power supply from the utility here in Northern California. They do have a small power plant on campus that can supply some buildings and some buildings have generators, but it's not everyone that gets the power. So earlier this week, a lot of scientists and researchers were freaking out, understandably. I spoke to one who studies butterflies, these painted lady butterflies.

He packed up 500 caterpillars and took them home. They're in his living room right now. He's just sitting there with his caterpillars to save them. But the stakes are extremely high for scientists that need to have frozen specimens. There's a lot of scientists with freezers that are at negative 80C because that's the stakes. That's how you can have this long-term preservation of cell lines and bacteria. And so they actually packed up about 17 of these freezers and sent them across San Francisco Bay to UCSF where they could be kind of safeguarded. But there was a lot of stress at that university this week.

I'll bet. So is this the normal, something that California is going to have to live with? Yeah, I think that's what everybody's really talking about right now because we can expect to see these power outages again. We get these really extreme winds in the fall. The air is extremely dry. I mean, you've got a recipe for disaster. But a lot of people are focusing on other solutions. You know, maybe there's microgrids, right?

These little kind of electric grids where you've got the solar panels and other power sources and they can kind of act like their own little power islands. That's one thing people are interested in. Another is, can we make communities safer that are built in these areas that are extremely high risk for fires? You know, we've got old houses with wood roofs. We've got dangerous vegetation. We need to spend money on that, too. All right.

Lawrence Summer Climate Correspondent at KQED in San Francisco. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. You're welcome. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're talking about cartilage. Yeah, didn't you get up this morning and say, oh, my cartilage is my aches, my knees, my hips, whatever? We're going to talk about the tissues between your knees and your ankles, and could humans be able to regrow your cartilage? Boy, I would like that to happen.

We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with it. I'm Ira Flato. this is Science Friday. If you're of a certain age or if you have arthritis, you worry about your cartilage wearing out, right? But you've probably heard that you can't regrow your cartilage. When it wears out, it's gone. And that can lead to different types of arthritis or worsening arthritis. And, well, listen to this. A team of researchers wanted to investigate this idea about, well, can you regrow this stuff. They used molecular clocks to figure out the age of the cartilage in our bodies

from our hips to our knees to our ankles, and they found that the cartilage in your ankle was younger, younger than the cartilage in your hips. And their results were published this week in the journal Science advances. So what does this turnover rate tell us about cartilage repair? My next guest is an author on that study. Dr. Virginia Byers-Crowse is a professor of medicine, orthopedics, and pathology. at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ira. Isn't cartilage a living tissue, right?

Why is it so difficult for us to regrow it then? It absolutely is living. It's full of cells, but what's unusual about cartilage is it doesn't have any blood supply and it doesn't have any nerve tissue. So that's why it can be degenerating for long periods of time without there being that many signals in terms of something's going wrong. How does it survive without any? any blood supply? Why wouldn't it just rot in your body like a foreign object?

Well, this is why exercise is so important for the joint nutrition, because it gets its nutrients from the fluid inside the joint, which moves in and out of the cartilage, brings the nutrients in and out to the cells with each dynamic motion. So are you saying that even if we have arthritis and when we're aching, we should still continue to do exercise? Yes, as much as possible. And when people are really severely affected, we send them to the pool where they only weigh one-eighth in the pool what they weigh on land, which is even better than on the moon, and that way they can move their joints through ranges of motion without that deleterious load. That's very interesting. Let's talk about cartilage aging. How does it age over time?

So over time, all your tissues accumulate chemical modifications. And in cartilage, that is particularly true because a lot of these cartilages are very long, long lasting. And what we found to our surprise, as you mentioned, was that the proteins in the ankle appeared to be much younger in older people than their knee cartilage or their hip cartilage, which told us that the ankle is in a high state of continuous repair, like a house that's being refurbished continuously. And the knees are somewhere intermediate, but the hips have very low repair capacity. So are the ankles then making new cartilage or are they just keeping the old stuff healthier? So they're doing both, they're getting rid of the old and they're replacing it with new.

So they're constantly turning it over and keeping it fresh. Do we know how that happens? And could we then do that for the rest of the joints in our bodies? Well, we racked our brains about this and we finally hit upon a beautiful paper in 2016, some work that looked at three different animals that could regenerate their limbs. even though the animals were widely separated in evolutionary time by millions of years, they posited that those factors that were controlling limb regeneration that were shared across the three of them might be the master regulators of limb regeneration.

And so they found a list of 108 micro RNA that they think are the master regulators of that process. So we looked into those factors, and we found that those, several of the ones that we test, which were some of their highest and most abundant ones, were highest in the ankle, were intermediate in the knee, and were low in the hip, and correlated very well with the protein age

and the amount of those chemical modifications that had accumulated. So could you move around that microRNA to different places? Exactly. That's what's so exciting, is that we now have a list of 108 regenerative microRNA that could be injected into the joint to boost the natural repair response, because we're already making those for ourselves. Let me give out our number, 844-8255,

if you'd like to talk about cartilage and arthritis and things. 844-724-8255. One of the treatments you hear about for cartilage damage is stem cells. Can we use stem cells to regrow cartilage? So a lot of work is being done very diligently to try to look at that. And in fact, the current state of knowledge suggests that stem cells are in the surface of cartilage more than anywhere else. And that's where we found the most robust regenerative capacity. So we compared the top, the middle, and the deep parts of cartilage.

So one thought is that it's the stem cell production of microRNA that might in part be the factor that is actually regenerating the tissue. Is there anything that you can eat? because you always hear on television, on the Internet, wherever, people selling you stuff that will regenerate or save your cartilage. Is there any truth to that? Well, you know, a number of dietary factors probably do impact the health of the joint. So a good nutritious diet, you know, vitamins, but most of all, optimal weight. So it's eating not too much. That is probably the most important factor.

And also getting that exercise, as you say, so that you can regenerate the cartilage. Absolutely. The ideal animal model to study human cartilage and joints I've learned from reading your research is the guinea pig. The guinea pig is so similar to humans, possibly because they also, like us, they tend to like to eat a lot, and they also can be sedentary. and they develop a form of knee osteoarthritis that looks extremely similar to what humans get just naturally, and guinea pigs get it naturally. So one great next step is to take these microRNA and test in that animal to see if one could actually slow or completely prevent the osteoarthritis that they naturally develop over the first year of their lives.

Are those tests underway yet? So we're hopeful to be getting more funding to try to pursue those. There has been one, study that was just recently published in a mouse model, injury model, which is another cause of osteoarthritis. And it looks like one of the microRNA that just so happened to be on the list of regenerative microRNA, it seemed to have some beneficial effects at blocking osteoarthritis. So we think that that strategy has got some great potential. Is there any inheritance or genetics to what kinds of cartilage you inherit, whether it's going to last longer than another? So that's a fascinating question. It also seems to tie into what

we've just been talking about. The most widely accepted and validated genetic mutation that's related to osteoarthritis is a growth factor called GDF5. And even a 10% reduction in the amount of that growth factor over a lifetime seems to increase people's susceptibility to getting to osteoarthritis. So we do think that the repair capacity, innate repair capacity, is very much related to people's susceptibility. Is it possible to transfer, you know, the younger cartilage in your ankles to other parts of your body that might need it more? Well, whenever you make a hole in cartilage, you'll always then have the conundrum of having

to try to fix it. So it sure would be nicer to be able to, you know, find some synthetic solution or, you know, make, for instance, the microRNA that are injectable so that you wouldn't have to create a second wound to, you know, cause an additional problem. Yeah, that would be the better solution. And we'll watch out for later news with this. I want to wish you luck and thank you very much for taking time to talk with us. Thank you, Ira. Virginia Byers-Krauss is Professor of Medicine and Orthopedics and Pathology at Duke University

that's there in Durham, North Carolina. Despite recent attacks on science, most Americans do trust scientists and that this trust is growing actually. In a recent peer research center survey, 86% said they had a fair amount or a great deal of confidence that scientists act in the best interest of the public. That's more trust than in politicians, the military, and we the media. Like this caller told us on our Voxpop app. When it comes to scientists, they have my 100% trust. I feel like their careers and the ethics of their careers, keep them away from any bias or any kind of leniency they might have towards a political party.

But when it comes to politicized issues, that trust can break down. A Gallup survey found over a third of Americans believe humans were created in the last 10,000 years. Climate change is another issue where not everyone trusts the scientists. I don't trust scientists or talk show hosts that promote anthropologists. climate change. If the anthropological contribution of CO2 is 10 parts per million, which was recently the case,

that makes our contribution to the atmospheric structure 1-100,000th of the atmosphere. That's not going to do anything. So I don't trust any of you a clown. You people can't do simple math. So do we really trust scientists? How many of us do? How many of us done? And more importantly, should we? My next guest, Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history of science at Harvard University and the author of the new book, Why Trust Science? Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Were you familiar with those kinds of quotes?

Of course. Yes, absolutely. And have you heard them often, I'm sure. Indeed. So let's talk about what led you to write this book? Well, I wrote this book really as a kind of sequel to my previous book, Merchants of Doubt. When Eric Conway and I were writing that book, which examined the organized attempts to undermine and discredit science related to a set of environmental issues culminating in climate change, we wanted to understand why intelligent, educated people would reject hard-won scientific findings. And what we found in that story was that these people were deeply motivated by political ideology, particularly the ideology of, let's say, fair economics, what we called

free market fundamentalism. But in writing that book, we pretty much took it for granted. It was pretty much an assumption that the science behind these environmental issues was trustworthy, that if it had been published in peer-reviewed journals, if it was the result of decades of work by credible people, that we didn't see any particular reason to question it. But after the book came out and I started doing a lot of public lectures, I started to realize that not everyone shared that pre-supposition, just as one of the people you just had on the air a minute ago. And moreover, I gave a public talk one time in which a member of the audience got up after I was finished speaking.

And I had outlined in great detail the history of climate science and how the scientists had come to these conclusions, what sort of data they had. And he said, well, that's all very well and good, but why should we trust the science? And I thought, you know, it's a fair question. And so I took the question on board, and this new book is the result. Let's talk about some of the reasons that people do distrust scientists. On our program, we've been on the year almost 30 years now, and we've asked this question many times. And it could be politics or religion. And I remember having one listener come on and say, you know, I just don't trust anything my government tells me.

And that's where the science comes from. Right. Well, of course, not all science comes from the government. That's a popular misconception. But the important thing that we learned when we were writing merchants of doubt is that a great deal of distrust of science is what sociologists call implicatory denial. That is to say, we deny things that when we don't like their implications. So as the examples you just gave show and the numbers you quoted from the polling, we find that when asked about science generally, most Americans do trust science. And as you pointed out, trusted actually much more than government or, dare I say journalists.

But when you get into specific scientific findings that people think or feel contradicts deeply held values, whether they're religious values, political values, ideological commitments, that's when we begin to see trouble. And that's why we have these certain areas like climate change, evolutionary biology, in some cases vaccination safety, where we see significant rejection of scientific findings. But of course, that's not just an individual thing. It's also happening because there are organized activities designed to make people question science. And that, of course, was what we had documented in Merchance of Doubt.

So that's what I'm trying to address in this new book to say, well, hold on a minute. Let's talk about what science is and also what it isn't and why there is a basis for trusting it, even if you might not always like the implications. All right. We're talking with Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard, and the author of the new book, Why Trust Science? Oh, yeah. Of course, we're talking about it on Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

All right, let's talk about something that you make plain in your book is what the popular notion about what science is and how it's done and what you say it is. Well, part of the thing that I wanted to explain in this book is what is science really? Because I think if we demystify it, it also makes it, you know, less intimidating or something that would be less likely to generate hostility or resentment. And so in the book, I look at this question of what is it that scientists actually do? And many of us have the view that scientists follow the scientific method. If we took high school science, that's probably what we were taught. But if you actually look at the history of science, if you look at the philosophy of science, what you find is that there really is no single scientific method that scientists do a variety of different things, that it varies over time. It also varies across different disciplines. And so what I argue in the book is that what makes science reliable is not the use of a specific particular method, but the set of methods using for vetting claims, for filtering claims, and for judging whether or not those claims are adequately supported by evidence.

If you'd like to phone us, our number is 844-824-255-844-Sai Talk, or you can tweet us at SciFri. We're talking with Naomi Erascus, author of the new book Why Trust Science. And you're explaining that science, the way we teach it in school, is just not the way scientists really do it. I remember a quote from Richard Feynman talking about, and people asked him what science was. He said it's very simple. You come up with an idea, then you go out and find the data to back you up. Well, and that might be what Richard Feynman did, and that's fine, because that is one way you can do science. And for some people and for some sciences, that works really well.

But it's not how all science works. So what he's describing is what sometimes referred to as the hypothetical deductive model. This is what many people think the scientific method is. You have an idea, a hypothesis, a theory. you deduce consequences and then you go out into the world to see if those consequences are correct. But there's two problems with that model of science.

One is that it's not what many scientists do. Many scientists follow inductive methods where they collect data first and then try to figure out what the data are telling them and they don't necessarily have a hypothesis to begin with. We also find that a lot of scientists are involved in modeling in which the relationship between theory and data is much more interactive or iterative.

So maybe you start with a data set, you build a model out of that model, you develop theoretical ideas, then you use the model to test those ideas. And it's a much more of a chicken and egg sort of process where neither the data nor the theory are exactly controlling. We're going to come back and talk lots more with Naomi Oreskes, our number 844-724-8255 talking about the science. What do you want to know about how scientists do what they do? We'll come back and talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about trust in science.

My guest is Naomi Oreskes, professor of history of science at Harvard University and the author of the new book, Why Trust Science? Let me just ask you your own question. Why do we trust science, Naomi? My answer isn't why do we. It's why we should. Why we should? Yeah. So the answer is it's about the way in which scientists vet claims. So you gave the example of Feynman who said, I have an idea and then I go out and I find evidence for it. Well, that may have worked very well for Richard Feynman, but that's actually a kind of dogmatic way to think about it, that I only look for evidence that supports my idea. And the reality is that what Feynman described is really, in a way, only the first step.

Once you have the evidence that you think supports your theory, you have to submit it to criticism. And the criticism that scientists go through is very, very tough. It's sometimes pretty nasty, in fact. So you have to go to workshops. You have to show your data. You have to let other scientists ask questions. And then if there are holes in your theory or you don't have enough data, you have to collect more data, or you have to adjust the theory. Eventually, if you feel like it's good enough, then you submit it to peer review.

And then you go through another round of what's essentially a kind of interrogation. And so my argument is that this is really the reason why scientific claims are reliable, not because one particular person has an idea, but because a whole community of scientists is involved in vetting those ideas, in filtering them, and rejecting the ideas that are not sufficiently supported by evidence. So then it's really what the majority of scientists think about something. If there is some sort of controversy, it's what most scientists have agreed on? Correct. That's exactly right. And that's why the notion of consensus is so important in science, even though some people don't like that idea.

But that is exactly what it is, that scientists eventually may come to a consensus. They don't always have a consensus, like we might not have a consensus on the issue of Alzheimer's that you just mentioned in the break. But if scientists eventually agree, if they say, yes, we do have enough data to say that this appears to be correct, then scientists agree, they have a consensus. That's what we call scientific knowledge. And in most cases in science, if the scientific community is healthy, people move on. People don't keep fighting about things that they consider it to be settled. But that's one of the reasons why sometimes new ideas.

years have a trouble breaking through. Well, that's right. And so I want to argue something that maybe is a little bit counterintuitive. I want to say that's a good thing, that if I have a new idea, I ought to have a lot of data to back it up. Scientists work really hard to figure out the answers to complicated questions. And we don't want to be throwing that work out just because of some fad or some idea that some person has. Maybe someone gets on a hobby horse. We want to subject the new claim to the same tough scrutiny that the older claims have been subjected to. So it takes real work. And often when a new idea comes around, it takes a while before that work can be done. But I want to say that's a good thing. That's why we should trust science, because scientists don't

just run with the latest fad. They don't just run with the latest fashion. They work really, really hard to figure out whether a claim is reliable. Does that mean that this is what's happening when scientists say that science is self-correcting? Yes, exactly. Although the phrase science is self-correcting always sort of troubled me because it makes it seem as if science is sort of a person who can correct their own errors.

So, I mean, science is just the agglomeration, the collaboration of all the different scientists who are working at any given time. So it's not that science as some abstract thing is self-correcting, but that people correct each other, that people look for mistakes, and errors or inadequacies, and they point them out, and they say, you know what, that doesn't

hold up. And if I'm on the receiving end of that criticism, then I have to get back to work. And so it's the process that leads to correction. So science as a whole, as a collaborative activity, is self-correcting. Let's go to the phones to San Francisco. Magi, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I believe very much in science, but I don't believe in it when it's sponsored by corporations and colleges that are paid to get certain results. And that has been our problem, obviously, with Exxon and all of these situations. And I'm surprised that you haven't brought it up yet, but it seems to be the elephant in the room. So I'd appreciate it if you'd address that.

Okay. Well, give it a shot. Of course, that's a great question. And actually, I've written a lot about conflict of interest. I've written about ExxonMobil and their attempts to discredit legitimate climate science. So because I had worked so much on those issues in some of my earlier work, and merchants of doubt is all about corporate and ideological rejection of science. Because I had focused on that so much in my earlier work, in this book I was actually trying to step back from that and think about the question in a more abstract and more philosophical way.

But you're absolutely right. To really understand our current situation, we need both end. And we are right to be skeptical of science if it's being funded by people who have a conflict of interest. And this is why in my other work I'm a very passionate advocate for full disclosure of funding, In 100% of all cases, I think it's never excusable for scientists not to be completely forthright about who is funding their work. And we saw that this week with the recent study that claimed to have demonstrated that maybe it's okay to eat tons of red meat. It turns out those scientists were affiliated with the food industry, but they didn't disclose that in their work. In case you just joined us, we're talking with Naili Oreskes, who is author of this new book, Why Trust Science?

how easy is it? And I have found from doing our program for all these years that if people have an idea about science, it's very hard to change their minds, even if you present them with the evidence for or against something. Well, this is a broader question than just science. As we know, it is hard to change people's minds about stuff, especially as we get older. It's relatively easy to get children to consider new things, pretty easy to get young people to consider new things pretty hard to get old folks to do it. But at the same time, it's not impossible.

If I thought it was impossible, I wouldn't be a professor and I wouldn't write books. So I think that if we explain things clearly, if we make an effort not to be judgmental, not to be arrogant and not to use too much jargon, we can, in fact, explain things and affect how people think. And that's what I've tried to do in this book. So the book, I hope, is relatively jargon-free. it's written in a way that I hope would be legible to anyone who has a college degree and not necessarily in science, just anyone who has a college degree in any field, in any area.

Let me get a tweet in from Susan who says in the response, do you trust science? She says, I do, but I feel compelled to say that the past hundred years are full of false science that was peddled as incontrovertible. And she says, for example, phrenology, also miracle drugs that end up being killers. people have reasons beyond politics and lack of education to distrust science. Yeah, that's a great question. And the whole second chapter of my book is dedicated to that. So in the second chapter, I take on specific examples of science where we would say, you know,

what we just heard, that the scientists got it wrong. And one of the things that's interesting is that if you actually look at these cases, what you almost always find is that there was no consensus. So, for example, the phrenology, I don't actually. write about phrenology in the book, but other people have written about it. And there was no consensus on phrenology. There was no consensus on eugenics. There was no consensus on some of the other things I write about in the book, like the limited energy theory. So this is why I think the category of consensus is so important. If we want to know whether or not a science is reliable,

one of the first steps we can take is simply to ask the question, is there a consensus here? And if it turns out there isn't, then I argue we should be skeptical, or at least reserve judgment. Let's go to the phones again with Charles in Petowski. I can't get the name of the state. So go ahead, Charles. Hi, how are you doing? Hi, how are you? I'm good.

My comment was that a lot of, you know, because of lack of education or improper education, there's numerous things, you know, like, you know, my pet peeve is homeschooling. But that's, you know, that's not, that's digressing from the top. A lot, you know, reason people don't understand, don't believe in science is because they don't understand the scientific process. And that's unfortunate. Yes, go ahead. You talk about that a lot, Naomi.

I do. And that's a great comment because I want to 100% agree with the second part of it, the conclusion. So I think that's right. I think that all of us tend to be skeptical of things we don't understand. And the reality is that science is often presented to us as a kind of black box, a fait accompli. And I think that if you open up the black box and you show people how this works and you show them that it's people. These are regular people doing this work. And yes, of course, they sometimes make mistakes.

And yes, of course, sometimes they're arrogant. And sometimes they become full of themselves or get ahead of themselves. those are all true. But the crux of my argument is that science has a mechanism for filtering that out. And that's the basis, I believe, for it being trustworthy. And so I'm hoping that if a person reads the book and they see laid out in what I hope are fairly clear terms, how science works and how science has this mechanism for identifying error and correcting it, that that may lead people to say, okay, that makes sense. And I get it that sometimes makes scientists make mistakes, but it doesn't mean that. that the whole enterprise is invalidated. And how do you deal with people who have trouble with changing ideas in science? You know, especially about nutrition, we're always getting, oh, the latest study says fat's bad. It's good. It's, you know, carbs or whatever.

Well, nutrition was one of the other reasons I read this book, because sometimes when people would say to me, well, why should I trust science? The next thing they would say is scientists are always changing their minds. And, you know, as a historian of science, I didn't actually observe. that to be the case. So I would ask people, I said, well, what are you thinking about? And they would very often say nutrition. So I think there's a couple of things we need to know about nutrition. One is that nutrition is an extremely difficult science. It's very hard to study nutrition well because people lie about what they eat. And you can't do double-blind clinical trials. So it's

very hard to get good data. And so this is why we have to rely on epidemiology, population studies, animal trials. But increasingly, we are, we actually are developing a very robust knowledge about nutrition. And it's actually not that complicated. I think the writer Michael Pollan got it right when he said in his recent book, eat food, mostly plants. So, but one reason people get confused, and I don't want to bite the hand that's feeding me right now, but frankly, it has to with the way journalists report news. And this week, the recent discussions about meat is a case and point, we have a very large body of data that tells us that for the vast majority of people, it is almost certainly healthier to eat a diet that is mostly plant-based. It doesn't mean

you have to be a vegan. It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the occasional cheeseburger, but overall, you will almost certainly be healthier if you mostly eat plants. But, you know, you could find a study that argues otherwise, and that's what happened this week. There was a study that argued otherwise. And it got huge press. It was covered by all the major newspapers, all the major television radio programs. I did an interview just a few days ago with CNN on exactly this point. So the media have really done the public a disservice, I think, by, you know, buying into this idea that we don't know what's going on, when in fact, we really do know what's going on.

I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Naomi Erickiscus, Professor history of science in Harvard, and her book is Why Trust Science? And, you know, do you think that we already talked about how the public really does trust scientists generally overall? Do you think that sort of waxes in wanes with generations, or is pretty constant? Well, what the data show is that in the last 40 or 50 years, there's been a general decline in trust in institutional authority in America, going back to the 1960s, but trust in science has declined less than trust in some other areas. So I think that's an interesting phenomenon, and I think it tells us that actually despite the attempts to discredit science by a lot of groups, a lot of individuals

and organizations, that actually science holds up pretty well. And I think my book helps to explain why that is. Have you ever seen a time like now when the government is trying to so distrust about science? Well, that, yes. That's. That's a good question point. So we've seen government attempting to sow distrust in climate science for a long time, really going back to the administration of George W. Bush. So what's happening now is not entirely new, I'm sorry to say, but it is definitely worse, the sort of extreme egregious rejection of facts by the President of the United States and many people around him, also many in people in Congress. this is extremely troubling and extremely dangerous because when we deny scientific facts, scientific evidence, people get hurt, people can die. And that's partly why, you know, I've been working on this book for a number of years and it's partly why I was motivated to try to get it out now because I do think this issue is particularly acute at the present moment. I want to get a quick Twitter comment. Mike asks, you mentioned the first step of checking consensus. How do we find out if there is a consensus or not?

Well, that's a great question. And I think that scientists need to do more work. So this is partly my message to the scientific community. Scientists need to do more work to better explain to the American people areas where there is consensus and areas where there isn't. And I think that some areas of science, people have tried to do this. So certainly in the area of medicine, the National Institutes of Health has a set of consensus conferences on medical issues, the intergovernmental panel on climate change. exists specifically to articulate the scientific consensus on matters related to climate change, and the U.S. National Research Council issues consensus reports, but I think that these groups

don't do enough to get that information out to ordinary people, and in particular to explain it in plain language. So the National Research Council consensus reports are really, really fine pieces of work, but they're hardly ever written in ways that ordinary people could understand. So I really would like to see the scientific community step up to the plate and do more work in that regard. So you're saying scientists themselves need to be better communicators as well as the organizations they work for? Well, yes, but usually consensus reports are written by organizations. They're not written by individuals.

They're put out by groups like the National Research Council. So I would say that I don't view it as the responsibility of individual scientists to do this work, but I do think a group like the National Research Council, which has the resources to do this and the authority could take on that role. I certainly have agreement with you about organizations speaking more like normal people do. I want to thank you very much, Naomi, for taking time to join us this hour. Thank you. It's been great speaking with you.

Naomi Oreskes is Professor of History of Science at Harvard University, and her book is Why Trust Science comes out October 22nd. You can read an excerpt from that book on our website at sciencefriety.com slash trust. One last thing before we go. we want to hear your voice on Science Friday. You heard today a shave from Chicago and Laura from Maryland talking on our Vox Pop app, and we'd like you to do that. We've been asking you to leave us comments on our VoxPop app, which you can download,

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