Needed: less science hype!

Science hype has become a serious problem. There is more and more hype in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. There is hype in the institutional press releases about that literature. There is hype in the news reports about the research—especially in those hype-y headlines. There is hype on social media. And, perhaps most worrisome, the hype exists in the marketing of the health products associated with the science. Throughout the knowledge-production process, exaggeration and overly optimistic language is injected into the public representations of research. It has become a hype pipeline, one that starts when researchers search for research funds. In a study involving anonymous interviews with senior academics from the United Kingdom, the participants admitted that the hyper-competitive funding environment led them to routinely lie and exaggerate in research grants about the potential impact of their work. As one of the researchers was quoted as saying, “If you can find me a single academic who hasn’t had to bullshit or bluff or lie or embellish in order to get grants, then I will find you an academic who is in trouble with head of department.” Timothy Caulfield is an author and professor at the University of Alberta’s faculty of law and school of public health. Photograph courtesy of Timothy Caulfield This kind of data is depressing, but it shouldn’t be surprising. The pressure to hype, hype, and hype is baked into the current publish-or-perish research ecosystem. For example, to attract the needed investment to an area—especially for large, expensive, and time-consuming interdisciplinary projects—the research needs to be framed as revolutionary, cutting-edge, and paradigm shifting, even though science is very rarely any of those things. Doing science is hard, messy, and slow. It rarely unfolds exactly as promised. And the results are almost always more modest than initially promised. No revolutions, but lots of iterative—but, it should be emphasized, still important—advances. I’ve seen this cycle unfold again and again. Over the past three decades I’ve been fortunate to work closely with the biomedical research community on many of the hottest “Big Science” topics, including stem cells, genomics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, and the microbiome. There has been lots of very interesting science and exciting niche (and tremendously expensive) applications, such as gene therapies for sickle cell disease and a few (a very few) new stem cell treatments for diseases like multiple sclerosis. But despite decades of research and the global investment of billions of dollars, I have yet to see a single “revolutionary” advance—that is, a broadly relevant technology that altered our health-care system or that had a drastic impact on population health—play out in the manner originally promised. Not only is this kind of hype disingenuous, but it can also do significant harm. It can, for example, misinform and skew research priorities and resources away from less exciting but more impactful population health strategies (exercise, diet, smoking cessation, etc.). It can create false expectations, and misinform the public and desperate patients about the actual state of the science. And the hype can be leveraged to market unproven and potentially harmful therapies and products, a process I’ve called scienceploitation. Perhaps the biggest concern, however, it that science hype has the potential to further erode how the public views biomedical research. Trust in science and scientific institutions is declining. A recent Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that only 57 per cent of Americans think science has had a “mostly positive effect on society,” down from 73 per cent in 2019. Now, more than ever, we need trustworthy science that is grounded in rigorous methods, and science communication that is balanced and accurate. Yes, science is exciting. New discoveries are often worthy of enthusiastic declarations. And all of us in the research community must do more to engage with the public to help foster critical thinking and heighten science literacy. But how we talk about science matters, especially in this era of health misinformation. So, to be clear, I’m not arguing against the funding of big and well-justified science projects. Indeed, funding rigorous biomedical research is more important now than ever. And advances like the mRNA vaccines—which saved millions of lives—and the rise of artificial intelligence demonstrate that world changing science does happen. We need more good science. But we also need good science communication. Timothy Caulfield is an author and professor at the University of Alberta’s faculty of law and school of public health. The Hill Times