The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Roger Cohen and Amy Wax | The War on Science Interviews | Day 15

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

To celebrate the release on July 29th of The War on Science, we have recorded 20 podcast interviews with authors from the book. Starting on July 22nd, with Richard Dawkins, we will be releasing one interview per day. Interviewees in order, will be:Richard Dawkins July 23rdNiall Ferguson July 24thNicholas Christakis July 25thMaarten Boudry July 26thAbigail Thompson July 27thJohn Armstrong July 28thSally Satel – July 30Elizabeth Weiss – July 31Solveig Gold and Joshua Katz – August 1Frances Widdowson – August 2Carole Hooven – August 3Janice Fiamengo – August 4Geoff Horsman – August 5Alessandro Strumia – August 6Roger Cohen and Amy Wax – August 7Peter Boghossian – August 8Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Rousseau – August 9Alex Byrne and Moti Gorin – August 10Judith Suissa and Alice Sullivan – August 11Karleen Gribble – August 12Dorian Abbot – August 13The topics these authors discuss range over ideas including the ideological corruption of science, historical examples of the demise of academia, free speech in academia, social justice activism replacing scholarship in many disciplines, disruptions of science from mathematics to medicine, cancel culture, the harm caused by DEI bureaucracies at universities, distortions of biology, disingenous and dangerous distortions of the distinctions between gender and sex in medicine, and false premises impacting on gender affirming care for minors, to, finally, a set of principles universities should adopt to recover from the current internal culture war. The dialogues are blunt, and provocative, and point out the negative effects that the current war on science going on within universities is having on the progress of science and scholarship in the west. We are hoping that the essays penned by this remarkable group of scholars will help provoke discussion both within universities and the public at large about how to restore trust, excellence, merit, and most important sound science, free speech and free inquiry on university campuses. Many academics have buried their heads in the sand hoping this nonsense will go away. It hasn’t and we now need to become more vocal, and unified in combatting this modern attack on science and scholarship. The book was completed before the new external war on science being waged by the Trump administration began. Fighting this new effort to dismantle the scientific infrastructure of the country is important, and we don’t want to minimized that threat. But even if the new attacks can be successfully combatted in Congress, the Courts, and the ballot box, the longstanding internal issues we describe in the new book, and in the interviews we are releasing, will still need to be addressed to restore the rightful place of science and scholarship in the west. I am hoping that you will find the interviews enlightening and encourage you to look at the new book when it is released, and help become part of the effort to restore sound science and scholarship in academia. With no further ado, The War on Science interviews…As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. As many of you know, my new book, The War on Science, is appearing July 29th of this year in the United States and Canada. And to celebrate that, we've interviewed many of the authors of the 39 authors who have contributed to this volume, and we have 20 separate podcast interviews

that will be airing over the next 20 days, starting July 22nd, before and after the book first appears with many of the authors in the book on a host of different subjects. The authors we will have interviews with in order of appearance over the next 20 days are Richard Dawkins, Neil Ferguson, Nicholas Christakis, Martin Boudre, Abigail Thompson, John Armstrong, Sally Sattel, Solveig Gold, and Joshua Katz, Francis Woodison, Carol Hoven, Janice Fiamengo, Jeff Horsman, Alessendro, St. Sturumia, Roger Cohen and Amy Wax, Peter Bogosian, Lauren Schwartz and Arthur Russo,

Alex Byrne and Modi Gorin, Judith Sisa, and Alice Sullivan, Carleen Grible, and finally, Dorian Abbott. The topics that will be discussed will range over the need for free speech and open inquiry and science and the need to preserve scientific integrity, stressed by our first podcast interviewer Richard Dawkins and we'll once again go over historical examples of how academia has been hijacked by ideology in the past and the negative consequences that have come from that to issues of how specific disciplines, including mathematics,

have been distorted and how certain departments at universities now specifically claim that they are social activists, and a degree in their field is a degree in either critical social justice or social activism, not a degree in a specific area of scholarship, how ideology is permeated universities. We'll proceed also to discuss issues in medicine. Sally Settel will talk about how social justice has hijacked medicine. And also, when it comes to issues of gender-affirming care,

we have a variety of authors who are going to speak. about the issues there and how too often gender affirming care claims are made that are not based on empirical evidence. In fact, falsely discuss the literature in ways that are harmful to young people. We will talk to several people who, for one reason or another, have been canceled for saying things. Francis Whittleson at Mount Royal University in Canada and Carol Hoeven from Harvard, who eventually had to leave Harvard after saying on television that sex is binary in biology. We'll be talking to people who've looking at the impact of diversity, equity, inclusion in academia, and how it's restricting free inquiry, and also restricting in many ways scientific merit at those universities.

And finally, Dorian Abbott, the last contributor to our series, will be talking about three principles he believes are essential to separate science and politics and keep academia free from ideology and more for open questioning and progress and to make sure that science is based on empirical evidence and where we go where the evidence is, whether it's convenient or not, whether it's politically correct or not, and we're willing to debate all ideas that nothing is sacred, a central feature of what science should be about and what in some sense this podcast is about. So I hope you really enjoy the next 20 days and we've enjoyed bringing it to you.

So with no further ado, The War on Science, the interviews. Okay, Amy Waxon, Roger Cohen, I'm so happy to have you on here to talk, and I'm also so thrilled that you both agreed to contribute a fascinating piece for the new book, The War on Science. And it's really an important piece in my mind, one of great substance, and you complement each other and complement many other pieces. so it's pretty good for the book. But it's also great to be with you as people and talk to you.

And so thank you for taking the time out to come on. I really appreciate it. Of course. Our pleasure. And as you may not know, this is an Origins podcast, and I do like to find out how people got to where they got to to the beginning point of our discussion. So I want to spend some time with each of you.

I'll begin with Roger. Because I guess I know a little less about you. Amy has not been able to escape my notice or for years. But Roger, you began your background in Harvard Medical School. Where did you grow up? I grew up in the Boston area for the most part. Why did I guess that? I thought maybe between that and then Mount Sinai.

But okay. And with a three-year detour. three-year detour in the Netherlands and Europe. Oh, okay. But did you do your undergraduate work also at Harvard? Did you do in Boston as well? You were Harvard undergrad and then Harvard Medical School. Again, I guess that.

Okay. Your parents' doctors or no? My father was a doctor. Well, again, I kind of guessed. And they were happy that you went into the family business, I assume. It was expected. It was expected. It was expected for me too.

It was a condition of being declared viable. Yeah. My mother was disappointed for 20 years that I wasn't a doctor after I became a physicist. But my brother was supposed to. You actually span this both of you because my brother was supposed to be a lawyer and I was supposed to be a doctor because neither of my parents went to finish high school. And my brother became a professor of law, in fact, which increased the pressure on me more. But anyway, eventually, my mother got over. over it. But so you're, and your interest has been in cancer, Roger, right? I mean, in, in, in, in, in

therapies or as far as I can tell, you tend to work with people in your, uh, uh, regular doctor business rather than professor business with people who are, are, uh, who are late stage cancer and looking for new therapies. Is that true? Yes. So I take care of a lot of patients. Most of them have advanced cancer, and my academic interest has been for 30 years in cancer drug development. It's a very active area. It's a fascinating area. And there's been an explosion of new cancer therapies, and I'm proud of the extent to which I've contributed a little bit to the development of several of them. So it's a very important effort academically in the United States, this whole drug development business. certainly has been. I hope it will continue to be. We'll see. I'm more skeptical. But it's wonderful. And I think that that, I mean, that sets the frame for the piece we're going to talk about because your experience working in hard science, medicine, the kind of thing that's required to really get therapies that work in really difficult situations can be framed against a kind, a trend to do just the opposite in medicine, which is to base therapies on almost nothing but talk.

but we'll get there. But first I want to move to your writing partner and living partner, Amy Wax, who actually I first knew because of you being a law professor, and I'm ashamed to say, Amy, that I didn't discover that you're really a scientist at heart, even if you strayed. So, Amy, you, your mother was a teacher and your father worked with Schmattah, work in the garment industry in New York, is that right? Well, actually, was upstate New York. I grew up in Troy, New York, which is 10 miles north of Albany. Yes, I know it is.

My father made ladies underwear. He started out actually as a machinist. Then he became a cutter in my mother's house. family's business. And then he became one of the co-managers. And that's what he did for a living. And my mom, yes, was a teacher, mostly a mom, but then she got an ed degree and taught elementary school. Okay, I see. She worked for government later. But so her training was not in science or anything like that? No. No. She did end up working for the state government later on. But no, neither of my parents was trained in science. But they were, you know, knew a lot of RPI professors.

The Jewish community in Troy was very, very insular, very tight. And so they really pretty much all knew each other. And there were a lot of scientists in that community. But did they want you to be a doctor? Is that what, I mean, were they like my parents? Did they want you to become a professional and, and either a doctor or lawyer? In your case, both. What did they? They had strong expectations at the start. I think their expectations were shaped by the fact that I was a very good student and very good in science and math. And, you know, for a nice Jewish girl who's strong in those areas, the expected common pathway is to go to medical school. And once you mentioned that, as Yuval 11 once said to me, you can't take it back.

Yeah, it's true. And you studied real science, biochemistry at Yale. Correct. I taught at Yale for many years, and a few good colleagues who were biochemists. And then did go, did take the route to Harvard Medical School. I mean, yes, you excelled throughout your academic career and in all levels. And then was a practicing neurologist, is that right? Yes, I graduated from med school. I trained in neurology. I ended up doing a year in law school because I think I always felt like I wasn't a good fit for medicine temperamentally and in other ways and decided to try something different. And that turned out to be a good thing to do because at the end of a day, I think I was more suited to.

being a lawyer than a doctor. And that's the route that I ultimately took. I went to the Justice Department. Then I went to UVA as a law professor. And, you know, that's where I've been. I've been a law professor ever since. Okay. Well, I think you sort of answered it. I was wondering why you strayed from medicine to law. And it was just you felt it was a better fit to your argumentative nature or what? Yeah, my personality, my interests, my arguments, my argument. of nature, which I definitely have. So that I wasn't sort of a caretaking type of person, which I think fundamentally you need to be. If you're going to be a doctor, even if you're going to be an academic position.

So, you know, I just, I took a different path. And it's not that complicated. I mean, it's really about, you know, who you are. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, yeah, I think I realized later, when it was hard for me when they made the decision not to be a doctor but to be a scientist. My mother told me they were the same thing and I realized that's true for some scientists. They're not. Like Roger, but it's not. And when I finally realized that, it was difficult for me.

But then in retrospect, I realized how rotten a doctor I would have been. And so it's probably good for the world that I didn't do that anyway. But I'm interested, you know, I've known some people who've done both in different directions, starting a law going to medicine, medicine going, starting medicine go to law. But sometimes they, they use their medical training. I mean, you didn't choose to focus your legal expertise on, on medical issues, right? It was something completely different, right? Well, initially I did write a couple of pieces on technology assessment. I mean, there is kind of a thematic unity here. But I strayed into sort of broader social issues. I ended up teaching a course. in social welfare law and policy, inequality, and that got me into areas like labor markets,

group differences, the effects of social inequality and all that sort of thing. But I think all the way through, definitely my approach to everything has been shaped by my scientific training and my scientific evidence-based quantitative orientation. I mean, I am very much oriented in that direction. I always ask for any given proposition, you know, what are the facts behind it? What's the evidence for it? Is it true? And I'm sure that you're not surprised when I say that that is, those are not questions that are always or even frequently asked in the legal sphere or in social science or even

these days in a lot of scientific areas. Yes. And not only are they not often asked, but now one tense. be punished for asking them. And I know that you have been punished for asking them and talking about them. And I admire your bravery and being willing to speak out against popular consensus when there's no evidence for it. And I think, you know, for me as a scientist, people often accuse me of scientism because I basically think all knowledge comes from evidence and empirical evidence and nothing, none comes from, you know, from any, from internal, suddenly discovering

things from God. But I think, but the idea of basing all rational arguments on evidence, questioning, critical reasoning, I think of that as science, but of course it applies, it applies to all intellectual disciplines and in principle should apply even to public policy in the best of all possible worlds. And I think you're, you're, Both of your scientific bases are in that broad sense are one of the reasons why I think this piece is so important. Because I think it's the most concrete and poignant defense of science in the face of DEI that I've really seen. Not arguing it from a political perspective, but saying, hey, we have scientific standards. If we're going to use them in this case, in the case of medicine, then we should hold the same standards everywhere.

So I want to turn to, I want to dissect this piece in detail because I think it's, it's so important. And I want to read the beginning of your piece, which says the process for developing and approving new drugs and treatments for cancer is rigorous. Roger, clearly that comes from your background. As overseen by the federal food and drug administration, it involves multiple rounds of testing and systematic and precise analysis of patient outcomes, including comparisons of how patients fare with standard therapy. therapies. And I'll just skip through. The clinical process in medicine is meticulous and unforgiving. Nothing is taken for granted and all assumptions are designed to be falsifiable. Impressionistic observations and wishful thoughts and feelings don't count. The supporting data must be detailed, statistically valid, and demonstrably reliable. In this essays, the authors argue

that the gold standard for clinical trials should apply to all interventions and changes in health care fields that are planned, proposed, or implemented. In particular, the changes proposed for medicine in the name of so-called diversity, equity, inclusion should be subject to rigorous evaluation and scrutiny. And the particular, the injection of DEI principles into medicine warrants no less scrutiny than any other intervention in the healthcare field. What are the goals? What are the metrics? What are the liberals?

And I think your point is, well, I know your point is, that that gold standard is not being applied. The questions are rarely asked or analyzed in relation to DEI. The efforts of scatter shop and fall well below any scientifically defensible standard. That's the introduction. And I've read, you either want to you elaborate on that in general before we go into specifics? Well, I think a stimulus for the book was the received wisdom about diversity that I have experienced during trainings at my university. Yes. Implicit bias especially, but also others.

And watching online presentations from respected sources that include Wharton. the Leonard Davis Institute and others. And I was struck by the fact that these presentations for five consecutive years cite the same three papers repeatedly as received wisdom, gospel, despite well-established flaws and critiques, critiques that have been published based upon thoughtful peer review and attempts of replication. And despite that, they have garnered an extraordinary number of citations that

continue to this day with a new citation every other day. And so those three papers are ones that we focused on, but I was also struck by the formal and ongoing and relentless degradation of standards when it comes to admitting people to the profession as though it really doesn't matter. It's not that big deal being a doctor. It's actually pretty easy. Anybody can do it. Everybody has the same latent ability to become a physician if we would just facilitate their path. And so you put those two things together. Then we came up with the rubric of drug development as a way of visualizing what the flaws are in the current scheme. And that was the genesis of the book chapter. Okay. It's a perfect genesis. And I should say that it fits in well. One of the things

we want to do with the book is to have people from within, not criticized from without, but who are concerned from within, have distinguished scholars in a wide variety of field. with a wide variety of political persuasions to indicate science and reason is not political. It goes beyond that. And that it's easy to criticize the educational and research institutions from outside. But by getting significant people from inside, I hope we can influence other academics to speak out because the internal culture needs to be changed from within. There are various onslaughts going on externally right now.

with the current government, but that's a separate thing from getting, changing things from within. And this idea of scientific rigor is a really important aspect. And I like the idea of comparing to drug development. Now, let's talk about the, in some sense, the evidence. You begin with a document released by the community by the leadership of the main teaching hospital at Penn, where you are. And, and, um, And it's in the context of something called the Joint Commission. And that hospitals require and require certification from this Joint Commission. And the Joint Commission inspects hospitals for a variety of medical practices, but a new thing is to look at health equity.

And you argue that the Joint Commission, which influences therefore what academic hospitals do, has gone full woke. And I'm happy to read a quote from it if you want, but would you like me to read that quote or do you want to just talk about it? No, I can just talk about it. It's the ongoing tyranny of the accreditors. Yes. Who have imposed their own intellectual standards, not just on hospitals, but on secondary schools, colleges, etc., you know, introducing this entirely new dimension of woke theology. And I was just struck that it had made it to the medical center. Now, I don't know whether it has and will survive the current efforts to deconvolute

and dismantle DEI. But when I saw that and how proud the institution was to be an early adopter of this introduction to woke, I thought I should include it in the book because I thought it was something that ordinary people could understand. They understand accreditation. I think they understand standards of cleanliness, sanitation, doctor qualifications, deaths, mortality,

and other things that would distinguish a good institution from a bad one. And I thought that they would say to themselves, wow, I had no idea that this other dimension was now assigned to high level of importance when hospitals are judged to be good mediocre or bad. Yeah, and I think it's important to emphasize that this is part of a much broader phenomenon and problem. Roger referred to the tyranny of the accreditors. This has been an underappreciated dimension that in order to receive federal funds, schools of all varieties, universities, graduate schools, secondary schools even, have to be approved.

by these accrediting organizations, that job is farmed out by governments that are supporting educational institutions. And they have been captured. They have been, they are a monopoly, for one thing. And they are a monopoly of it has been captured by the far left, by a, I wouldn't call it an intellectual standard. I would call it a dogma, a woke ideology. And that, you know, what's supposed to be quality control has now become a way to push an agenda, a political agenda. So ideology trumping. And I think it's important throughout this, we've seen institutions co-opted. Often the leadership of institutions who want to virtue signal are willing to be co-opted. But you're right, if federal agencies or if even private groups can

affect institutions, it's extremely difficult for individuals, even individuals who disagree with what's going on to speak out if their institution backs a certain ideology. And especially if the leaders of those institutions are not willing to support rigorous inquiry or even free inquiry at all. And that's been... It may even be worse than that. Hospitals live in mortal fear of the joint because a failed inspection can lead to front-page headlines or even the closure of your institution. So hospitals will do whatever it takes to pass the test. And so the joint commission can do anything at once. It has a thoroughly cowed and captive audience. So whether or not the leadership agrees, they are practically helpless to speak.

out against this. I suppose they could have and said, no, thank you. And that's what I was struck by with the notice, is that this was not necessarily required. This was something new that was being introduced. But when crediting organizations introduce features like this, they quickly become standard and adopted. You see it also in the awarding of government grants for conducting clinical research where there are and have been diversity tithes that have been introduced for the past We'll get there. There's no way to get away from them. Yeah, yeah, we'll get there.

In fact, that's been a problem throughout the sciences lately. The, yeah, I guess even, even I guess in this case, we can give the administrators a little bit of leeway. Even a strong-minded administrator who's willing to stand up for science probably can't afford to if they're a hospital administrator and they're worried about the accreditation of their hospital. In the case, universities, too often it's not that strong. It's an administrator worrying about donors or the perception in the media that's willing to step out in front and virtue signal. In this case, it's really, I suppose, a matter of defense. But you point out that there's been very little evidence, of course, the standards are

difficult. The wholly inadequate evidence, which would never be tolerated in any other scientific field, is used to justify sweeping changes in every aspect of our profession. You're right. Validation, replication, control variable, and groups, critical analysis and reanalysis, the application of well-established statistical standards, digital, sorry, diligent vigilance against the elementary error of conflating correlation with causation are conspicuously missing from the literature that's driving these changes.

And I think this point you make is very important that this new field of health equity, two centuries of methodological and scientific progress in medicine have been jettisoned or best ignored in the name of enshrining the D.I. Woke Transformation. deciding to place a major and sometimes primary emphasis in medical admissions and training on social justice and diversity, equity, inclusion, rather than on candidates demonstrated and measured ability is nothing short of reckless. And I think that's a really important issue. I don't know if it's as extreme here. I talk about in the book, and I've written about the fact that Canada, where I happen to live now, Canmeds, which is this sort of,

organization that determines the medical education in Canada, specifically said in medical education, social justice should preempt medical knowledge when it comes to the education of doctors. A remarkable, I mean, it's an explicit statement in their recommendation that social justice ideals should be more important than medical knowledge when it comes to the training of doctors, which just shocked me. I don't know if it's at a... And of course, social justice is an open-ended concept. It's never precisely defined. It's really what the people in power and in control say it is, the priorities that they set up as primary.

And inevitably, those concepts are highly politicized. And they're trying to hide that fact. They are not objective. And I think the double AMC, the American Association of Medical Colleges and other accrediting organization with enormous power over medical schools, all of them, is on record in 2022 as saying that DEI is, in many respects, more important than the latest scientific discoveries. And that's something that I think the lay public needs to hear stated out loud, especially those members of the lay public with cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other intractable

ailments of being a human being. I think they would be stunned to learn. that the double AMC believes that. Yeah, I think, I mean, when it comes, sorry, go on. It's important to point out that there is a lot of deception and sneakiness involved here. Tremendous lack of candor. When you talk to ordinary people, they have no idea that this is going on. and the rhetoric that has surrounded, you know, some of the efforts to starve the beast of the universities, you know, all of this talk about how, oh, cancer medicine is going to stop, medical progress is going to stop. They never, ever mention the takeover of academic medicine and research and the scientific sector by DEI, how all of this must.

money is being shunted into these politicized priorities, how everything is being distorted and altered by social justice priorities. There is omerta. There is complete silence about that. And I think that is deceitful. Yeah. And I think, I mean, the reason medicine and why I'm happy concentrate on it is that, you know, people, we can talk about the takeover of academia by ideologies of one sort or another. But in one sense, one can say, well, who cares of an English professor or a philosopher is, you know, is woke or not or taken over by ideology? But most people would prefer their doctors to be trained.

I think if you ask most people, would you prefer your doctor to have medical knowledge or be be happily supportive of your, of your socioeconomic position? I think most people would say, I'd like a doctor that knows something about medicine. And so it's so stark to me. And you point this out. You say, currently, and in your piece, and we won't have time to obviously go through all of it, you point out that there's so much emphasis going on in the rhetoric to doctors being sympathetic and understanding of certain conditions, societal conditions, rather than

having knowledge. And you say, well, that's okay. But we should ask, does that help with medicine? I mean, you know, your point is that, hey, that aprior, instead of saying apriori, that's nonsense. What I love is you take the position. Well, look, let's look at that and ask if it has any positive medical implications. And I want to focus on that and the rest of your piece. You say, currently empirical support for the goal of embedded, quote, embedding health care equity

in all aspects of care, treatment, and service delivery is when properly examined practically non-existent. The main justifications for DEI and healthcare are rhetorical and based on politically popular, feel-good assertions that are far from proven, but that people in the medical field are very reluctant to challenge. And I think it's time probably to go into some of this. And to also point out, by the way, that to even question the scientific basis, of these claims, which are taken as written from God and unassailable, as literally heresy,

to just question whether there is an empirical basis of these things, is itself heresy, which is surprising and which is itself tragic. And I know that I'm assuming both of you have had pushback, but even questioning these dogmas is itself heresy. And I want to if you want to talk about that before we go in. into the dogmas. Yes, absolutely. I will, you know, let Roger talk about the pushback he's gotten.

He has definitely suffered for just even expressing any doubt at all about D.I. and medicine. I myself am being sanctioned and penalized by my university for my heterodox views. Heresy is the right word. Absolutely. But I think that's really important to point out. that this is all just taken as undeniably and unquestionably true. And that is why and valid without even defining endpoints.

Like, what are we trying to achieve here? How do we measure if there's any benefit of getting precise about it, getting quantitative about it? Some of these studies, which are bogus, purport to do that. But by and large, it just, it must be a good thing. It's got to be a good thing. And if you question it, you are not a good person. Yes. So I questioned a specific program that was stood up at Penn in 2008

to admit students from basically one ethnic group without MCATs with soft GPAs and a requirement that they spend two summers at Penn and then they can get into medical school. There were more than 200 such students since 2008, and all I did, I just asked some questions. May we know how they're doing? What are their pass rates on some of the more rigorous federal and guild licensing exams? Where do they practice? Could we do a zip code analysis?

Are they just ending up in the suburbs? Or are they going back to their communities, which is one of the stated objectives? Are they writing grants? Are they getting grants? Are they writing papers? Are they contributing to new knowledge? What I was told was before being deposed from one of my positions is that those are all very good questions. And I'm glad that you ask them.

But we don't have answers because we need more staff in order to do the research. More money. My reaction to that was, you're kidding. You have a lot of staff. You've been doing this since 2008. That's a long time ago. may we know some outcomes? Could we do some outcomes analysis that are rigorous on this group of people and compare them to their peers?

And if the analysis comes out the way you want it to, then we will justify the program and we'll say this is a good thing and let's keep doing it. If the answers are unpleasant, maybe the program needs to be revised. Well, you know, it's interesting you say that. I was just talking, and there's a number of articles, and I was just talking to someone working on gender. It's fascinating that you see repeated over and over again, even a more strident opposition to doing research, which is that Reacher shouldn't be done because it might disprove the hypothesis. And so one is actively, in the case of gender work, examples were given to me by people of, of exactly that being said, we must not support research in this area.

We must not get data. That would be a bad thing because it might, there's the possibility it might disprove what we're saying. It's kind of remarkable that people are even that up front, although in this case, they couch it more in the case of money. But let's now look at some. There's actually a kind of postmodern meta critique here that's coming into play, which is the very idea of.

and evidence and objectivity and doing studies to validate effects, that all is whiteness. Yes. I mean, that is in itself racist. So, you know, once you're going in that direction, you're really in trouble, I think. Yeah, once you give up science, then you can't do science. And yeah, absolutely. And you're right. And there are other areas where you're absolutely right, where it's specifically said,

even in mathematics, as we point out in some of the book, that getting the right answer is white supremacy. But in this case, the idea, there's a real postmodern view that, yes, knowledge is, you know, a power structure. And therefore, you know, you don't want to follow that traditional power structure of empirical evidence, et cetera, et cetera. but it surprised me that even beyond that, the statement is made explicit that we just don't want it because it might disagree. And that's even more shocking. But in this case, you go in detail, and I'm very happy to see this, to point out that some of the things that are,

and comes back to what Rogers said at the very beginning, three studies that have been sort of the basis of much of what's been going on. And you say the social, the so-called racial, concordance thesis, which posits positive effects from doctors and patients sharing a common group identity has also been extended slightly to other categories such as gay people, but not to whites or South Asians. But it's backed up by little or no solid evidence. So this feel-good notion, which everyone, you know, it sounds good that, you know, it's just that if people react better to people that look the same or that they're comfortable with. And, you know, at a priori, it doesn't

sound like a bad idea, but as you say, it reveals the current state of practice. No studies have been proposed or carried out in any attempt to disprove the hypothesis. So let's go through some of these things. You talk about the famous Oakland study. So you want to talk more about that? So it was designed to see whether black patients would accept preventative care recommendations at higher rates if they were made by a black physician. So they went into barbershops. It's a non-randomized trial, and they showed them pictures of doctors on a computer and different tests to see whether black men, it was black men exclusively, would be more willing to adhere to certain recommendations if they were made by a black physician.

The problem with the style of the study is many, including no control group, but the most glaring problem of all, which never comes through in the sound bites that are the digest of this study in the popular press, is that this was strictly a hypothetical exercise. The authors then went on to speculate and extravagantly extrapolate that this increased willingness to undergo preventative services would result in substantial health benefits over decades based upon a single point in time hypothetical intervention. And so the study, the study, is interesting. It's flawed because it has no control group. It's not necessarily a representative group. The patients who are in this experiment were healthier than the average black person in America.

But it's the logical leaps, the extrapolations. That's what made the headlines. That's what the sound bites are consist of. And that's what you see in every single DEI presentation, that this study proves that the racial concordance will confer dramatic health benefits on black Americans especially. And there really is no way to refute this study because it is now part of the popular imagination. Well, I mean, one way to, you know, come at it is to say, guess what? No health benefits were ever measured. No health benefits were ever documented. No health benefits were ever documented. I mean, that's sort of where you begin. It's all totally speculative.

And it's all, yes, as Roger says, just this wild extrapolation from the say-so of people who say, oh, yeah, I would do this thing if a black doctor told me to do it. Yeah, I think you refer somewhere to Wolfgang Pauley, who is famous in my field of physics for going up and taking the chalk out of the hands of a speaker if he felt they weren't doing science. Now he would, of course, been canceled. But he made a famous quote, which has been used in the context of string theory, where he said, it's not even wrong. And that's the key point. If you can't even show what's even wrong, then it's worse than being wrong when it comes from this point of view of science, if it's not falsifiable. Another study you talk about, I'm going to call it the Greenwood study, because that's the reference you give. You want to talk about that one, too?

Roger. The one about new or black babies? Yeah. So this is the newborn study, which yeah, is really now almost infamous because it has been published in 2020, formally debunked by a thoughtful, sober analysis published in the proceedings of the National Academy of sciences. And despite the fact that it has a fatal flaw, and the fatal flaw is that it did not control for very low birth weights, which is a key determinant of neonatal mortality. And so when you control for low birth weights, the magnitude of the concordance effect goes away. So we should maybe talk a little about exactly what that concordance effect was. The idea of the finding, the supposed finding was that when black babies are kids,

cared for by black doctors, they have better outcomes than when they're cared for by white doctors. The problem is that if babies are sick, low birth weight, otherwise in trouble, they are more likely to be cared for by white doctors for various reasons. And of course, they also are more likely to die and do poorly. But that's not because they're being cared for by white doctors. That's because they're sicker to start. Correct. And the study actually found that, White babies did better when they were cared for by white doctors. But that never made it into the final publication because the study lead author commented in margin notes that were obtained.

I'd rather not focus on this if we're telling the story from the perspective of saving black infants. This undermines the narrative. And so what you realize is that the Greenwood study is just that it is a narrative. It comes to a conclusion that was foregone and any attempts at falsifying it. to examine it critically are basically rejected. This study has been misinterpreted consistently. It's been turned into sound bites and headlines. It made it into the Supreme Court dissent in the Harvard case,

where it was grotesquely misquoted and cited incorrectly. There just seems to be no way to make this study disappear. It's interesting that when you talk, that's such a telling statement that the author said, we didn't want, basically didn't want to talk about it, because to undermine the narrative, which is just so antithetical to science. I will throw in a minor digression, but I think it's relevant that you see this worrisome nature.

In another area, there was a National Academy of Sciences paper that was withdrawn by the authors. This was psychologists who discovered that there was no evidence of police were being were being racist in the United States. And it was a study that came out, and the authors retracted the paper eventually from the proceedings in National Academy of Sciences. Not only was there an outcry about it because it went against the conventional wisdom,

but they said they did it because it was being misquoted by journalists and misunderstood, and therefore the narrative was not what they wanted. And at the time I said, if every result in cosmology in my own field that was misquoted by journalists was taken away, there'd be no results left. But the idea that a narrative should be more important than the data is really striking. But you point out that it's not just that these things are being misquoted.

They have achieved such hollowed status. 800 plus citations for the Asian study and 300 for the Greenwood study. So it's this example of studies being done that may not be good, but then people quote them and then the other people that quote the studies and it becomes a self-fulfilling kind of prophecy that steamroller that seems to just gain weight and power on its own. Yeah, the snowballing effect here is really something to behold. And, you know, if you cite a study that cites a study that cites a study, it just becomes received wisdom that cannot be questioned.

I see this a lot. I mean, in my own case, I have been claimed to have said X, and it's a complete distortion of what I said. But if enough journalists quote it, but they're always quoting some other journalists again. Yeah. Not ever the original remarks. Yeah. And I think that definitely happened in this field.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's unfortunate aspect of journalism, too, how rarely people actually read the article in question or more than a headline about the article in question, which is really even often the level of research that's been done, a headline about the article in question says something, therefore the article in question must say that. There's another whole other area that you also point out,

another influential study that's had impact, which shouldn't. And that's this McKinsey study. So you want to talk about that? So McKinsey looked at profits, you know, top quartile, bottom quartile of 1,500 companies and looked at their diversity and suggested that there was a positive correlation between diversity and profitability. This is a statement that is the lead into almost every single DEI presentation over the past five years at the university.

It was deeply flawed because the data analysis has not been and cannot be replicated, suggesting that the initial results were not robust or generalizable. And the authors never acknowledged the possibility that reverse causality may be the explanation of everything that they saw. Let's step back again and pretend we're Amy in and just remind people what the study said, which was that there was a link between racial and ethnic diversity and financial performance, right? Correct. That was that plane.

And McKinsey is a consultant group. It's a consulting firm, a very prestigious consulting firm. And they had been asked to look at the data on this, do some kind of study. And they found, quote unquote, found that in the companies that they examined the diversity of the workforce, Of course, how they define these things is kind of up for grabs and merits close examination correlates with greater success, higher earnings. They also had some parameters for that as well. But they may be confusing correlation with causation. It's quite possible that more profitable companies are more likely to implement diversity initiatives rather than diversity directly driving profitability.

And there are at least 80 articles that have been published subsequent to that, which are all over the place as far as diversity and profitability. Effectively, all that I'm really asking is that when the McKinsey study is cited as gospel, that somebody would parenthetically say something simple like there are alternative points of view. There are papers that have come to different conclusions. diversity is not consistently associated with profitability. Indeed, some of these papers show the reverse. And we decided that we would not clutter up your book with, you know, all 80 of these papers. And some of them are decent and some of them are not very good. The point is to just acknowledge that this viewpoint is just that.

It is a viewpoint. It hasn't been replicated. And even the people who reanalyze the McKinsey study data couldn't replicate the results of the original paper. Exactly. You give you publish a, you indicate a reference a paper by two economists that tried to try to specifically replicate the data and they and they failed. They found no link at all. And then I think it's interesting because I'm a big believer in empirical evidence and often people vote with their feet in this way. And I was, I was, I found another example you gave

very telling. If you actually look at two prominent mutual. funds that invest in diverse businesses, the performance of the funds has readily, grossly underperformed all the peer groups. So that's, that's an interesting, that is an interesting data point at least. You know, what you draw from that again is there's so many variables. I don't want to presume correlation and causation, but it is an interesting point that you think if it were, there was an obvious correlation that those mutual funds would do better. Well, one point that is a, that is utilized. in this area, this highly charged politicized area, is just to brazenly ignore counter evidence.

I mean, literally, if there are studies that contradict the desirable conclusion, they are just not reported. It's brazen, as I say, because you would think that any respectable person that's really interested in getting at the truth would feel compelled. to look at the whole field and all the results across the spectrum, but that absolutely doesn't happen. Yeah. And then you point out, okay, that's bad enough, but it doesn't really matter. Apparently, it doesn't, you'd think that scientific organizations, funders, would, in some sense, based their funding on scientific success and outcomes.

But you point out that groups like the NIH, it doesn't even matter whether these studies are replicable or in fact demonstrate anything. Once the funders have bought hookline and sinker the ideology and have decided to fund things no matter what, that's a problem. And you point out that the NIH first grant program is typical. The stated goal is to achieve more diversity in science with an emphasis on race and skin color. The strategic plan says to achieve institutional and research excellence,

NIH must foster and sustain an inclusive and equitable culture that embraces DEIA, both in the workplace and in the pursuit of biomedical and behavioral science. The true measure of success for cultural change is belonging, the feeling of knowing of being included. And then it says research shows with no references given that diverse teams working together and capitalizing on innovative ideas and distinctive perspectives outperforming homogeneity, teams. Scientists and trainees from diverse backgrounds and life experiences bring diverse perspectives, creativity, and an individual enterprise to address complex scientific problems. It sounds nice,

but once again, no data is given. And you point out that it's worse than this. That in a in a scientific study, that if you bring up the question of whether the basis of the study might be problematic, in this case in medicine, one that could affect people's lives, your ostracized or chastised. And the example you give is HPV, HPV related head and neck cancer. I found this striking and so abysmal. So why don't you talk about it? Well, it was intended to just illustrate the absurdity of some of the woke ideology that informs giving people grants. And so I put in two examples. One of them is this HPB study.

This is a disease that for better or for worse, disproportionately affects white middle class males. That is the group that it affects. Talking about head and neck cancer due to HBBB exposure. head neck cancer. It has to do with sexual practices that are preferred by different ethnic groups over other ethnic groups. And the DEI czars were not happy with the fact that this study was enrolling mostly white men because mostly white men get the disease. And so that wasn't good enough for them. And they said, you know, we're not going to give you a renewal on this grant if you don't have a more diverse representation. But the fact. is that black men just don't get this disease nearly as often as white men. And I pointed out the absurdity of making a similar requirement for sickle cell anemia, a disease that disproportionately affects blacks. Yes, certain Scots do develop sickle cell anemia, but it's a rarity. It's an anomaly. That's not the way that we do research. If we're interested in HPV,

We study the patients that get the disease, just as if we're interested in sickle cell anemia, we study the patients, in this case blacks, who get the disease. And so this is an absurd dimension of woke grant giving and grant evaluations. It's actually worse than absurd. It's dangerous, right? If you're interested in curing people, this is what worries me. As you point out, if you take dollars away from real scientific studies, for biological reasons, ultimately, you're actually hurting people and risking lives.

So saying you can't do a study that might come up with important medical benefits because it doesn't satisfy a certain political ideology, it's worse and absurd. It's dangerous and almost criminal, it seems to me. Yeah, so it's a zero-sum game with science. The federal treasury can print as much money as it wants, but supposedly there is a limited amount of money. And we can only spend it on certain things and we can't spend it on frivolities. And you're right. We try to make choices in giving out health care grants to getting the greatest benefit for the greatest number of people. And we don't want the grants to be strictly

performative because that doesn't help anybody. Yeah. And I mean, there's real life and death issues here. Again, I remember being on many people, when I taught at Yale, many PhD committees in physics and you were marginal students and I said, well, you know, it's okay if they pass because you're not going to put out a sign, you know, theoretical physicist for hire. You know, it's not like a doctor where life and death matters and, and these are life and death issues. And that's what I find so poignant here and so important. These are not abstract ideas. These are things that are going to affect people's health and livelihood. And then you point out something rather interesting that another, you know, again, if you're analyzing something, you might ask if

it works. That's a good question. Does it work? And you point out, even the people who are proponents have pointed out, there's no evidence that it works. And I, and you, you, you, quote, Dr. Cuncelo Wilkins from Vanderbilt, pointed out that, quote, the absence of progress on the impacts of racism and inequities in health care compared with the survey from nearly three point five years ago was striking. Both the extent of the disparities and perception of how patients are impacted is virtually unchanged. This is despite all the discussions we've had and the new programs and increased funding

for equity issues stating, you know, hey, you know what? It hasn't done anything. And you point out one possible explanation is that the diagnosis and prescriptions are wrong, that the structural system, make racism isn't there, that even, you know, that if one should look and say if a prognosis and a diagnostic doesn't work, maybe you should examine all the reasons it doesn't work. Right. Instead of just complaining.

So this was just a complaint and a lament and a rather thoughtless one at that. And that's why I said wrong diagnosis, wrong prescription should at least enter your mind as a possible explanation. But there is a complete unwillingness. And in fact, it's taboo to list social factors. as being perhaps as important, and sometimes even more important, than this amorphous structural racism. And so I was just struck by that quote because it was an acknowledgement of what is plainly obvious to everybody looking around, namely that things are not getting better. We're spending all of this money.

We're distorting the way that we admit medical students and train medical residents and give out government grants. We're not accomplishing anything. I think part of that is we don't even know what the goals are. We have no way of measuring them. We have no interest in measuring them. We're just going full steam ahead because it feels like the right thing to do. But here's an analysis by somebody at a university saying it's not working out quite the way we intended. Gee, I wonder why.

You know, again, there's a similar comparison I know when one talks about women in STEM. And what's remarkable is that there may be other factors because even after 30 years of basically affirmative action programs to hire women in STEM, in certain fields, the numbers have not changed much. That would suggest that there may be other factors that affect the choice of people to go into certain fields like physics. It's interesting that even when there's been concerted efforts to change things, things haven't changed very much. If you lose your job by even suggesting that a conversation should be held about this topic without advancing any of your own ideas. It's quite striking. Yeah, well, in the medical field, I mean, clearly there are disparities in health outcomes between different groups. And the focus of concern, of course, has been on blacks.

But there is, Roger alluded to it, a complete taboo against any of the, you. kind of focus on behavior, personal responsibility, social factors like family structure, you know, things like that. Behaviors actually, ironically, that individuals could exert greater control over, could change. And the dog mall points in the direction of flaws in the system, racism by doctors, by nurses, by health care workers, for which there is really zero. evidence. And that's the only explanation that's allowed. Of course, that is wokeism. That is, that is the ideology of wokeism. And as long as we focus on that and refuse to look at anything else,

it's not surprising that things aren't getting better. They're not improving because as we say in the article, you know, wrong diagnosis, wrong cure. So I would amplify that by saying social determinants of health, STO-H, and if I was a woke acolyte, I would say, no, no, no, Dr. Cohen. Social determinants of health is very important. We teach it to the medical students. Every single case presentation includes social determinants of health. To which I would simply respond, the list of social determinants of health is restricted by design and is ideological and incomplete. and as such, illuminating social determinants of health is never going to get you to the truth of what's really driving some of these disparate outcomes.

Interesting point. The fact that people focus on certain things. And again, very disingenuously, I must say, I can't help. And I've quoted it before. But my, well, I was a friend, but it's someone I known for a while, Francis Collins, who was the head of the NIH, made a big, point of saying the NIH is is systemically racist. But what's amazing when you, when you hear that, no one seems to ask the question, if you really believe that, Dr. Collins, and you've been the head of the NIH for over a decade, why haven't you resigned? If you're running a racist

organization, then, you know, if you really believed it, would you really still be there? And but, you know, but that kind of, because it sounds good, people just, you know, allow that kind of nonsense to be propagated. There's a lot of plustering about that. I think the other thing, and we don't talk about this much in the chapter, but I think it's out there and it's really, really important is that in this obsessive pursuit of diversity in the personnel in medicine, in the trainees, in what medicine looks like and who goes into medicine. and there really has been a deliberate dumbing down of the standards in medicine. That has to be the case because we still have very significant disparities by race, by group, in academic achievement. And they are per durable. They're replicated.

They're persistent. Despite enormous efforts and expenditures, they have not. really changed and not really gone away. But, you know, come hell or high water, we have to have a certain percentage of particular minorities in medicine, even though, I'm sorry to say, that is not supported by the data. Groups are not ready for prime time in proportion to their numbers. And so we're going to sacrifice quality in medicine. Of course, this, you know, it's forbidden to say that. I mean, you really get into terrible hot water by facing reality. Yeah.

What I would say in response to that is that they hide the ball. So now the scheme is that you can't know because we don't want to know whether there really are academic disparities between groups. So the tests are all past, fail. There are no numerical scores anymore. All of this information is hidden from view. because it might be unpleasant to look at it. It would make people feel bad. Absolutely.

And this notion, which is everywhere of equal outcomes, the notion that everything has to represent background demographics. I mean, it's not just in medicine. It's in everywhere, and I refer to it in the paper in Canada. Again, the most prestigious professorships have just been determined. they have to be given exactly in demographics. 53.6% have to go to women. You know, 19.2% have to go to this minority when in fact, really what it should depend upon is the applicant pool, is the people who are coming in and who's around. But this notion that

independent of everything else, the background demographics, has to be represented in science when it actually isn't represented in roofers or firefighters or basketball players or any in a lot of other fields, you know, this notion that there are many factors that affect individuals' choice and qualifications for a certain field. But anyway, that's a digression. I think to get to the conclusion of your work, you point out basically, even if, as often claimed physicians and patients trained in DEI feel more comfortable around diverse people, there's effectively no evidence that these feelings lead to better outcomes.

and it should be obvious at feeling better is not the same as making people be making people better and um uh sally setel who was written for this uh book has said the best way to be an anti-racist doctor is to be a good doctor and ultimately that's the key point is to be a good doctor and um and and and your point about dumbing down not just acceptance but the but the training of doctors. One last that you point out that I have to at least include is this notion of this implicit, what's it called the implicit bias test? Yeah, which has now become so endemic itself, a test that has been shown to be not what it intended to be in the first place, but nevertheless it's become ubiquitous in convincing people they have implicit biases that somehow affect

their work. It's astounding that they're still beating on that. drum because, and this is a staple of DEI training and the whole grift of, you know, DEI training that is a mega industry at this point, hopefully being shut down by, you know, our administration, but it dies hard, I'll tell you. And the evidence that implicit bias assessments correspond to any real world discrimination that matters, that makes a difference, is what, non-existent. I mean, all of that science has been totally debunked. And it should die. By rights, it deserves to, to expire. And Nellie's been debunked, pointing out it's been debunked by some of the people who develop the test.

Exactly. Right. Repudiated by them. Repudiated by them. Stop doing this. That's not what the test was designed for. And besides, retest doesn't work. It's not measuring what you think it's measuring. Well, let me give you the last word by reading your last words. Two of your final concluding paragraphs, I think are important. Fifteen years in and with increasing recognition of its pernicious effects on institutions and scientific excellence, the time has come to recognize that ideologically driven DEI initiatives have no place in institutions of higher learning, especially in medical science,

unless they are validated by hard evidence and data. It's not a claimant that they're bad, but it's a statement they need to be validated by data like every other aspect of medicine needs to be. And I think that's the point. There's no political perspective or ideological perspective until it's shown to be science who shouldn't be taught as science.

But I think you don't end with just a complaint. You talk about what you can do. And I want to read your last paragraph, your last paragraph. There are some simple, specific steps that could be taken. The weak studies underpinning many sweeping diversity initiatives need to be sunsetted, starting with the Oakland adults and Florida New Bern studies. Neither article is worthy of respect even under the basic standards of social science. In science, mediocre and flawed papers get replaced by better papers. Older treatment paradigms in medicine are regularly abandoned in favor of better treatments. Drugs are

retired or have their FDA approval rescinded. There's nothing wrong with this. Quite the contrary, it is essential to medical quality and progress. Without new data and disruptive thinking, we would still be bloodletting. These insights should be applied to DEI and as soon as possible. Physician heal thyself. And is what I'd say. That last one is mine. But I think it's such an important statement that all you're asking for is better science. And I really appreciate both the article and you're both coming on to talk about it. It's been illuminating and powerful. And I respect you both for speaking out. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. Our pleasure. Thank you for inviting us to write the piece.

Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world. I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify. You can also leave us private feedback on our website if you'd like to see any parts of the podcast improved. Finally, if you'd like to access ad-free and bonus content, become a paid subscriber at originsproject.org. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project

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